Hi @a60sthingy I bet you thought I’d forgotten the last instalment of this series! But no, here it comes! (This one is a long one!)
John with his Aunt Mimi and Uncle George.
will you please bring me a water pistal with love from John, and do not forget a money box with a key, and a pair of gloves, and have you any books and would you try to get some dinkies please, also a pair of skates.
[John’s letter to Santa, 1945, aged 5 - from The Beatles Book, issue 25]
I’ve started each of these posts with photos of each Beatle with their parents, but here is John with his Aunt and Uncle, because in my opinion Mimi and George were John’s parents. There is more to being a parent than biology. There is a trend of vilifying John’s Aunt Mimi, or at least making her out as cold and unfeeling, but I don’t see her like that at all.
It’s a shame that John had such strong feelings of abandonment, thinking he was unwanted, because it seems to me that his family fought over him, and Mimi wanted him so very much.
“The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them. When I was a child I experienced Moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind. I was never really wanted. The only reason I am a star is because of my repression. Nothing would have driven me through all that if I was 'normal'.”
"I ran two miles. I couldn't stop thinking, 'It's a boy, it's a boy. He's the one I've waited for.'" [Mimi] held John in her arms twenty minutes after he was born. His second name, Julia said — in honour of Britain's inspirational prime minister, Winston Churchill — would be Winston. Just then a parachute-borne land mine fell directly outside the hospital. "But my sister stayed in bed," Mimi said, "and they put the baby under the bed. They wanted me to go into the basement, but I wouldn't. I ran all the way back to Newcastle Road to tell Father the news. 'Get under shelter,' the wardens were shouting. 'Oh, be quiet,' I told them. Father was there, and I said, 'It's a boy and he's beautiful, he's the best one of all.' Father looked up and said, 'Oh heck, he would be.'
[From Shout! by Philip Norman*]
(* The accuracy of this account has been questioned and there weren’t any reported air raids on Liverpool on the night John was born, but the sentiment of how Mimi wanted John as soon as he was born, I believe is true.)
Although Mimi had never wanted children herself, she confided in family members that she’d always wanted John.
John with his mother, Julia.
Much has been written about John’s family life and his parents with every relationship analysed to breaking point. John’s biological mother (as I’m sure you all know) was Julia Lennon and his father was Alfred Lennon. They met at the Trocadero club, a converted cinema on Camden Road, Liverpool. Alf saw her at the cinema but didn’t speak to her until they met later in Sefton Park, Liverpool. They dated for a long time (more than 10 years) but Julia’s family (governed by patriarch, John’s Grandfather, George Ernest Stanley) didn’t approve of Alf or her relationship with him. In defiance, she married him anyway on 3rd December 1938.
I don’t have much of a good opinion of Alf Lennon. It seems to me he wasn’t bothered about his son or being part of John’s life until John became rich and famous with the Beatles. I think as a child John was confused about a lot of things - one being who his parents were and why he didn’t live with them. I don’t think this was unexplained to John or kept for him for any other reason than to try and protect him, but John couldn’t understand that. There’s a story where John as a little boy asked Mimi why he didn’t call her mummy. Mimi said that Julia was his mummy and he couldn’t have two, could he? I like that Mimi didn’t try to replace Julia, she was still his mother and he always knew that, but I think Mimi raised John and Mimi loved him like he was her son. I don’t think John questioned it much as a young boy (you don’t when you’re a child) but when he got older and realised his living arrangement wasn’t exactly the norm, he didn’t know why and it wasn’t explained to him properly. That became a source of distress for him.
Alf joined the merchant navy and was frequently away from home. Julia discovered she was pregnant in January 1940 and John was born on 9th October 1940, while Alf was still at sea. Alf desserted the navy in 1943 and disappeared. Communication and payments to Julia abruptly ended, so although she was still married to him, Julia probably assumed the relationship was over.
She had an affair with a Welsh soldier called Taffy Williams (from around 1942) and fell pregnant in 1944. Taffy Williams didn’t want to live with Julia while she was married to another man and didn’t want his son living with them. Julia wouldn’t give up John. Julia was living at The Dairy Cottage at 120a Allerton Road, Woolton, which was owned by George Smith - Mimi’s suggestion as she wanted Julia and John near by and living at home with their father was not an option (they didn’t approve of Julia’s marriage or her lifestyle).
Alf returned while Julia was pregnant and offered to raise the baby as his own. Julia refused as I think she was fed up of the frequently absent Alf by then. John was sent to stay with his Uncle Stanley (Alf’s brother) while Julia had the baby, a girl which she named Victoria - the baby was put up for adoption. I was always under the impression John was unaware he had a sister from this time and that he died without ever knowing about her. However, on Wikipedia it says:
John Lennon was informed by his Aunt Harriet of her existence in 1964. John was so overcome by emotion, wanting to find his sister, that he placed an ad in the paper, and hired detectives to look for her. They searched Norway for Victoria, and came up empty handed, and John died never having found or met her.
- But there is no source or attribution for this. Does anyone know if it’s true? As it is, if John did hire detectives they weren’t very good, because his sister lived in Merseyside with her adoptive family, not very far from where he was. I have heard that the family were friends of Julia’s too, but I don’t know if that’s true either. Victoria was renamed Ingrid by her adoptive family.
About a year later, when John was 5, Julia started a relationship with John “Bobby” Dykins - nicknamed ‘Twitchy’ by John after a nervous tic/cough that he had. I don’t think John liked him very much and the feeling was mutual. He was said to be a drinker and could be violent. John would sometimes run away from home, arriving on Mimi’s doorstep in tears. At this time Mimi started pushing for Julia to allow John to live with her. Mimi was concerned that the small flat where Julia lived with Dykins wasn’t suitable for John and that he was forced to share a bed with Julia and Dykins. Social services got involved at Mimi’s initiation and eventually Julia agreed John could live with Mimi and George.
Then when John was 5, Alf arrives back on the scene. He takes John to Blackpool ostensibly for a holiday, but secretly he was emigrating to New Zealand and planning on taking John with him. When John’s family discover this, Julia and Dykins go to Blackpool to stop him, then depending on who’s version you believe they either ask John to chose who he wants to live with (first choosing Alf and then changing his mind and going with Julia) or more recently it’s been claimed Julia and Alf talked and decided John should live with Julia. Anyway, Julia took John home and not long after (if any time at all) he was living with George and Mimi permanently.
“He was a very handsome little boy, with silver-gold hair and big brown eyes. I don’t think he minds people looking at him now, because they used to do it when he was a child, on buses and places like that. He got so used to it that if they didn’t look at him he would go up to then and say, ‘I’m John Lennon, I am.’ [...]
“At first, when he was naughty, I sent him to his room, but he was always so quiet when I did this that one day I decided to see what he did up there. I crept up to the door and looked in... there he was, siting very comfortably in an easy chair reading a book. He was perfectly happy, and all the time I thought I’d been punishing him! He always loved reading, but only classics. I never saw him look at a comic or a novel. To this day, I don’t think he has ever read a novel.”
[Mimi, Beatle Book Issue 25]
John as a little boy seems to me to be happy and confident, only when he gets into his teens does that appear to change. Although John was encouraged and got his love of music from Julia, I think a lot of other aspects of his personality like his love of reading, his artistic and creative intelligence and his sense of leadership and sense of initiative (thinking for himself) came from Mimi and George.
The next significant event in his life I think was the sudden death of his Uncle George, Mimi’s husband, when John was 14. He was away from home at the time, visiting relatives in Scotland, when George passed away from a liver haemorrhage, aged 52 in 1955. John wasn’t informed of his death until he came back to Liverpool and it seems it was a cruel and awful shock to him.
“[When Uncle George] died, I didn't know how to be sad publicly - what you did or said - so I went upstairs. When my cousin arrived and she came upstairs as well, we both had hysterics. We just laughed and laughed. I felt very guilty afterward.”
I don’t think John knew how to deal with grief and the deaths of those close to him seemed to haunt his life. Although, I think his family we’re trying to protect John by not telling him about his uncle’s death, I think that was the wrong thing to do. It made the shock worse.
Then not very long afterwards, John lost his mother Julia too, something he never recovered from. Although Julia obviously didn’t choose to die, John still felt abandoned by her. He often said he lost his mother twice and it’s something which would preoccupy his thoughts for the rest of his life. He also spent the next couple of years following Julia’s death as a complete tearaway; missing his school/college and struggling with the work, getting into fights, drinking and generally misbehaving. I think the Beatles and music saved him and pulled him off a path he seemed to be heading down.
John stayed close to Mimi for the rest of his life. In 1964 she came to Australia and New Zealand with the Beatles so she could visit family that had moved there. When Beatlemania was at it’s height, John bought her a new home in Poole, Dorset (at the time she had Beatle fans camping on her doorstep! Like other Beatle parents, Mimi was actually quite accommodating to John’s fans and wrote to some of them for years). When John moved to America, he wanted Mimi to move there too, but Mimi refused. She didn’t want to leave her home. John would phone her from America at least once a week, the last time being only a few hours before he died.
Here’s a lovely interview with Mimi from 1981, a few months after John’s death, where she tells a couple of stories of him when he was little, about how she told him off for the bed-ins and other misbehaviour and how she told Yoko she’d never heard of her (ha). I think you can see where a lot of John’s humour and with came from, and she’s nothing like that cold old biddy that she’s often portrayed as.
Thank you for your question. Sorry it’s taken so long to complete - and I think this one is the longest yet!
