John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Mimi was deeply worried about John’s lack of progress at art college, and more than that: when taking his coat to be dry-cleaned, she had found a packet of Durex “rubber Johnnies” in one of the pockets, a precaution doubtless inspired by what had happened to Barbara Baker. Fishwick was the only person to whom she showed the packet, opening a tightly clenched hand to reveal it and asking, “What do I do about this?” His advice was not to make too big a thing of it—which she evidently took, for on this occasion, at least, he recalls, there was no fiery argument between aunt and nephew, no door-slamming exit by John to seek sanctuary at Julia’s.

  Sunday, July 15, brought Merseyside warm, sunny weather that showed the woods, golf greens, and trim hedges of Woolton at their lushest. John, on vacation from college, was around the house in the morning but, as Fishwick remembers, “drifted off later with some friends.” Mimi’s only visitor was Julia, who dropped in that afternoon for a cup of tea and a chat as she invariably did. It wasn’t until late evening—past nine thirty—that she left to catch her bus back to Allerton. The longest day of the year had been only three weeks earlier. Dusk was only just starting to fall.

  Julia’s bus stop was in Menlove Avenue, about two hundred yards from Mendips’s front gate, on the other side of the busy two-lane road, with no pedestrian crossing anywhere near—though a 30 mph speed limit was in force. Usually Mimi walked to the stop with her, but this evening she said she wouldn’t if Julia didn’t mind. “That’s all right, don’t worry,” was the cheerful reply. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Just then, Nigel Walley turned up at the front gate, looking for John. But John had not returned home all afternoon—and, in fact, was now over at Blomfield Road, waiting for his mother’s return. Julia explained this to Walloggs, adding in her flirtatious way, “Never mind. You can walk me to the bus-stop.”

  Mimi watched from the front door as they strolled off together, Nigel chuckling at some remark of Julia’s. They parted at the junction with Vale Road; Nigel turned right toward his home while Julia crossed Menlove Avenue’s southbound lane to the median strip. This marked the route of the old tramway, where John and his Outlaws used to play their urchin games, and was now grassed-over and planted with a hedge. Julia stepped through the hedge and was halfway across the northbound lane when a bulky Standard Vanguard sedan, registration number LKF 630, loomed out of the twilight. Nigel heard a screech of brakes and a thud, and turned to see Julia’s body thrown high into the air.

  The noise was loud enough to reach Mimi and Michael Fishwick in the kitchen at Mendips. “We looked at each other and didn’t say a word,” Fishwick remembers. “We both just ran like hell.” They found Julia lying in the road, with a stunned Nigel Walley kneeling beside her. Nigel would always be haunted by the memory of how strangely peaceful she looked, with a stray lock of her auburn hair fluttering in the summer breeze. The impact seemed to have left no mark, though Fishwick could see blood seeping through the reddish curls; she was still just barely alive. “[But] when I ran across the road and saw her,” Mimi remembered, “I knew there was no hope.”

  An ambulance arrived within minutes to take Julia to Sefton General Hospital. Mimi got into the ambulance, still wearing the slippers in which she’d rushed out of doors. Fishwick joined her at the hospital later, bringing her some shoes and her handbag. Her immediate concern was that he should telephone other family members with the news, so that one of them could break it to John. “She didn’t want John to find out just from a policeman turning up at the door.”

  Unfortunately, that was exactly how it happened: a Liverpool bobby in a Praetorian-crested helmet, knocking on the front door of 1 Blomfield Road and asking John in embarrassed officialese if he was Julia’s son. At this unspeakable moment, the only person with him was the member of his extended family he least cared about: Bobby “Twitchy” Dykins. “Twitchy took it worse than me,” John would recall. “Then he said ‘Who’s going to look after the kids?’ And I hated him. Bloody selfishness. We got a taxi over to Sefton General, where she was lying dead…I talked hysterically to the taxi-driver all the way, ranted on and on, the way you do. The taxi-driver just grunted now and again. I refused to go in and see her. But Twitchy did. He broke down.

  “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. We’d caught up so much, me and Julia, in just a few years. We could communicate. We got on. She was great. I thought ‘Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. That’s really fucked everything. I’ve no responsibilities to anyone now.’”

  Michael Fishwick met Mimi at the hospital, then took her to Blomfield Road, where John’s aunts Nanny and Harrie and their husbands had now arrived. Mimi collapsed into her sisters’ arms while Fishwick was given a large whiskey by one of the ever-sub-ordinate menfolk. When John finally left the house, it was not to return home but to seek out his old girlfriend, Barbara Baker, and tell her the news. As Barbara would recall, the two of them went into Reynolds Park and “stood there with our arms around each other, crying our eyes out.” Late that night, Mimi’s next-door neighbor, a Mrs. Bushnell, saw John playing his guitar in his usual place out in Mendips’s front porch—the only real form of comfort or healing he could find.

  Julia’s death was recorded by a brief announcement in the Liverpool Echo, which allowed Bobby Dykins to claim her as the spouse she’d never officially become:

  Dykins—July 15th—Julia, died as result of car accident, beloved wife of John Dykins, and dearly beloved mother of John Winston Lennon, Julia and Jacqueline Dykins, 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool 19.

  Julia’s funeral took place at Allerton Cemetery on the following Friday, July 20. There was a bitter argument between Twitchy and her sisters when it emerged that he had intended her to be buried in a pauper’s grave, subsidized by the city corporation. Instead, the four women clubbed together to pay the funerary expenses. Among the mourners were John’s cousin Liela, his childhood playmate and secret teenage crush. Now a medical student at Edinburgh University, she had been summoned by telegram from the Butlins Holiday Camp where she had a vacation job as a chalet maid. Liela remembered John lying with his head in her lap for most of that day, too numbed to speak or even move.

  The car that struck Julia had been driven by an off-duty policeman, twenty-four-year-old Eric Clague of 43 Ramillies Road, Liverpool 18. The matter therefore became the subject of an internal police inquiry by a team that included John’s friend Pete Shotton, currently on attachment to the CID (Criminal Investigation Department) from training college. The officer was only a learner driver and so should not have been out in a car by himself. Since the police of those days were rigorous in prosecuting their own, an accusation of causing death by dangerous driving seemed likely. But no criminal charge of any kind resulted. The whole matter was dealt with by the inquest, four weeks later—though, unusually, this was conducted before a jury, and its proceedings were closed to the press.

  Clague attested that he had not been driving carelessly and had been doing no more than 28 mph in the 30 mph zone. Nigel Walley, the only eyewitness, testified that Clague’s car seemed to have been traveling at abnormal speed and to have swerved out of control on the steep camber of the road as Julia suddenly stepped through the hedge. Though himself the son of a police superintendent, he sensed that the court regarded him as too young to be taken seriously. “The Coroner seemed to be bending over backwards to help this man who’d killed Julia,” Mimi remembered. “It emerged that he was driving too fast, but you could see it was a bit of a men’s club really.” When the young policeman was exonerated of blame, Mimi exploded in fury and threatened him with a walking stick. “I got so mad…That swine…If I could have got my hands on him, I would have killed him.”

  The findings were reported in a further brief Echo news item:

  DASHED INTO CAR

  Misadventure Verdict on Liverpool Woman

  A verdict of misadventure was returned by the jury at the Liverpool inquest today into Mrs Julia Lennon, aged 44, of 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool, who died after bein
g struck by a motor car while she was crossing Menlove Avenue on July 15.

  A witness, the Coroner (Mr J.A. Blackwood) told the jury, had said that Mrs Lennon had not appeared to look either way before she walked into the roadway. Then she saw the approaching car, made a dash to avoid it, but dashed into the car.

  Julia’s death left Bobby Dykins a broken man, ridden with guilt over his past drunken misuse of her and vowing tearfully never to touch alcohol again. Even after all these years, her sisters had never brought themselves to like or accept Dykins; their opinion of him now sank to rock bottom when—echoing his first panic-stricken cry to John—he announced he couldn’t cope with raising his two young daughters by Julia. The sisters’ mutual support group then swung into action to look after eleven-year-old Julia and nine-year-old Jackie, much as it had for John twelve years earlier. Since Mimi had more than enough on her plate this time around, it was decided that the girls should live with their Aunt Mater and Uncle Bert in Edinburgh.

  In an attempt to soften the blow, Julia and Jackie were told that their mother was merely ill in hospital, and then packed off to Edinburgh on a supposed holiday with Mater and Bert. Within a short time, however, Mater decided she had bitten off more than she could chew, and Julia and Jackie were brought back to Woolton to live with Harrie at the Cottage, having still not been told that Julia was dead. The deception somehow struggled on for weeks more, until Harrie’s husband, Norman, could bear it no longer and blurted out, “Your Mummy’s in Heaven.”

  Unable to stay on at 1 Blomfield Road without Julia, Dykins moved to a smaller house on the outskirts of Woolton, eventually acquiring a new woman friend and a dog. But he maintained contact with his daughters and kept Harrie well supplied with money for their keep. He also continued to feel a stepfatherly obligation toward John, giving him a key to the new house and encouraging him to use it whenever he pleased. When Dykins subsequently became relief manager at the Bear’s Paw restaurant, he got John a vacation job there and ensured that a lion’s share of the tips always went his way.

  However deficient the Echo’s inquest report, it at least gave Julia her proper surname. For her marriage to Alf Lennon had never been officially dissolved, any more than Mimi’s custody of John had been officially ratified. Her death in such shocking circumstances might have been expected to reconnect John with the long-absent father who nonetheless was still his legal guardian. But the family could not have got in touch with Alf even if it had wanted to.

  Since leaving the merchant navy, Alf had, in his own romantic parlance, become “a gentleman of the road,” the once-immaculate saloon steward now a semivagrant whose only employment was occasional menial jobs in hotel and restaurant kitchens. He was washing dishes at a restaurant called the Barn in Solihull, Warwickshire, when his brother Sydney sent him the Liverpool Echo cutting about Julia’s death. He did not return to Liverpool until just after the following Christmas, having spent the preceding weeks in a London Salvation Army hostel recovering from a broken leg. It was at the hostel that a Liverpool solicitor finally contacted him and told him that, as Julia’s legal next of kin, he was heir to the whole of her small estate. Alf duly returned north and presented himself at the solicitor’s office, but only to give up his right to Julia’s few possessions in favor of John. He made no attempt to see or communicate with John, however, and after a few days disappeared on his travels again. His reasoning was that, thanks to Mimi’s years of propaganda, John would regard him as nothing but “a jailbird.”

  For Mimi herself, the blow went beyond losing her sister and seeing John lose his mother. Now that John was approaching manhood, she had realized she must prepare for a time when he would longer need her. For the first time in her dutiful, self-sacrificing life, she could think of herself—and bring her relationship with Michael Fishwick into the open. Fishwick had been offered a three-year research post in New Zealand, where, as it happened, several of Mimi’s mother’s family had emigrated. Not long after George’s death, an uncle out there had died and left her a property worth £10,000. Mimi’s plan, confided to no one, had been to follow Fishwick and live with him in the house she had inherited. “If it hadn’t been for Julia’s death,” Fishwick says, “she’d have been gone by the end of fifty-eight.”

  Now there was nothing in the world that could have made her leave John. “I worried myself sick about [him] then,” she remembered. “What he would turn out to be…what would happen if it was me next.”

  Despite Mimi’s suspicions, police constable Eric Clague did not get off scot-free. He underwent a period of suspension from duty and, soon afterward, resigned from Liverpool Constabulary to begin a new career as a postman. By a horrible coincidence, one of the delivery routes he was later assigned included Forthlin Road, Allerton. Many times as John sat in the McCartneys’ living room, he would have heard their afternoon mail drop onto the front doormat, little suspecting that “Mister Postman” was his mother’s killer.

  JEALOUS GUY

  I was in a blind rage for two years.

  I was either drunk or fighting.

  Late-fifties Britain had none of the aids to coping with personal tragedy that we so depend on today. There were no family bereavement counselors to help John come to terms with his loss; no therapists, support groups, helplines, agony aunts, confessional television shows, or radio call-ins yet existed to tell him that the most private emotions are better made public and that broken hearts heal quicker if worn on one’s sleeve.

  In 1958, Britons throughout the whole social scale still observed the Victorian empire builders’ convention of the stiff upper lip. Tears were the prerogative of females only and, for the most part, shed in decent seclusion; males were expected to show no emotion whatever.

  The closest members of a stricken family rarely expressed their feelings to one another, let alone to strangers. Such reticence had always been strongest in the north, strongest of all in those northern parts where privet hedge grew and hallways were half-timbered. Thus the shock and pain and outrage of Julia’s death would stay bottled up in John until their release like a howling genie more than a decade into the future.

  Among Julia’s four sisters, there certainly was no weeping or wailing, only the most modest, muted signs of heartbreak. On the day after the tragedy, she had been due to go and see her sister Nanny at Rock Ferry. In anticipation of the visit, Nanny already had deck chairs set out in the back garden. She took a photograph of the unused chairs which she kept always beside her until her own death in 1997.

  Mimi herself was never seen to cry, although Nanny’s son, Michael Cadwallader, often saw silent tears well in her eyes. John would put his arms around her and say “Don’t worry, Mimi…I love you.” But such moments were never shared with outsiders. Three days after Julia’s death, Michael Fishwick had had to report back to his RAF station, missing the funeral and not returning until the end of the year. Close though he was to Mimi, she never mentioned the events of July 15 to him, nor did she and John ever discuss them in his presence. In her traumatized state, the secret affair could hardly continue and, by unspoken agreement, she and Fishwick returned to being just friends. His visits became more infrequent until finally he met a young woman his own age and married her in 1960, ensuring that henceforward there would be only one man in Mimi’s life.

  The boys who had known John since toddlerhood were all equally at a loss about what to say to him. Pete Shotton, to whose house a distraught Nigel Walley had run immediately after the accident, could manage only a muttered “Sorry about your mum, John,” when they met in Woolton the next day. As the last person to speak to Julia, Nigel himself would always harbor a lingering sense of guilt. He felt John blamed him for not saying the extra couple of words that might have stopped her crossing the road when she did.

  It was, in fact, a new and still largely untried friend who most empathized with John’s situation. For barely a year had passed since Paul McCartney had lost his own mother to breast cancer. “We had these personal tragedies
in common, which did create a bond of friendship and understanding between us,” he says. “We were able to talk about it to some degree [and] share thoughts that until then had remained private…. These shared confidences formed a strong basis for our continuing friendship and insight into each other’s’ characters….” They could even summon up a weak smile at their common predicament after bumping into an acquaintance of Paul’s mother Mary who also knew Julia, but had no idea that either had died. Having first blunderingly inquired of Paul how his mother was, the acquaintance turned to John and asked him the same question.

  Most of his fellow art students did not learn what had happened until the college reconvened for its autumn term, two months after Julia’s death. “Hey, John,” a tactless girl shouted to him on registration day, “I hear your mother got killed by a car.” Onlookers thought it must be some kind of sick joke until he nodded and muttered, “Yeah, that’s right.” The only person not mortified by the faux pas seemed to be John himself. “He didn’t choke on it,” a witness of the incident remembers. “He didn’t register anything. It was like someone had said ‘You had your hair cut yesterday.’”

  The only person let under his guard was Arthur Ballard, the prizefighter-turned-professor in whom he seemed to find some of the reassuringness of his beloved Uncle George. Ballard was always to remember climbing the main college staircase and finding a red-eyed John sprawled miserably on the big window ledge halfway up. “I think he cried on Arthur’s shoulder,” June Furlong, the life model, says.