Francis Kenny - Understanding John Lennon

Julia Baird (the eldest daughter of John ‘Bobby’ Albert Dykins and Julia Lennon, and half-sister of John Lennon) recollects how Mendips, the home where John spent most of his early life, came to Mimi and George in what can only be described as an unusual and unlawful way. 2The house, whose name came from the previous owner’s fondness of walking on the Mendip Hills, was separated from Mimi’s previous home at the rear by a fenced garden. The new house was located in a prestigious position on the prominent boulevard of Menlove Avenue. When Mimi noticed that the neighbours were moving out of Mendips, she quickly collected all her furniture in her back garden then proceeded to pile it over to her neighbour’s garden. Breaking into the empty but secured house, she claimed squatter’s rights – even though she and George had a perfectly good home just yards away. In Liverpool parlance, this was ‘hard-faced’. The owners of Mendips had intended to sell the house when the previous tenants left, now they were left trying to negotiate with ‘sitting tenants’. The outcome was that Mimi claimed possession as being nine-tenths of the law. She drove a hard bargain in the price she paid for the house. This was to be one of many examples of how what Mimi wanted, she eventually got … including John.

While Mimi’s ‘house moving’ was taking place, Freddie’s time was spent in the Merchant Navy, whose Liverpool-based transatlantic convoys were to supply the bulk of Britain’s war supplies. Freddie’s discharge book reveals that during four years at war, he had only three months’ leave at home. The major problem with Freddie and Julia’s marriage was that the words ‘Freddie’, ‘dependable’ and ‘sensible’ couldn’t be used in the same sentence. Freddie’s time away from Liverpool became a catalogue of misfortune, naivety and downright dullness.

In addition to attacking Liverpool’s docks and the war materials coming through its port, there were also grain silos, power stations and gas works for the Luftwaffe to target. It made Liverpool Hitler’s number one British target, outside of the capital. The effects of the war really started in earnest for the civilian population of Liverpool (and many other big cities) with the German Luftwaffe bombings in 1940. Twelve months after hostilities started, Liverpool, along with the nearby Bootle docks and Birkenhead shipyards across the river, were to suffer shocking devastation and terrible civilian casualties. A total of 3,875 people were killed during the Blitz, 7,144 seriously injured and huge swathes of the city destroyed. Out of 282,000 homes, 10,840 were completely destroyed along with considerably more damaged. This devastation resulted in tens of thousands of people being made homeless. On 9 October 1940, during one of the worst periods of air raids, Julia gave birth to a boy, later christened as John. He was born in the city’s Oxford Street Maternity Hospital. Mimi was to recall in vivid detail:

I was dodging in doorways [in] between running as fast as my legs would carry me … There was shrapnel falling and gunfire, and when there was a little lull: I ran into the hospital ward and there was this beautiful little baby. 3

Later, according to a relative of Mimi’s who lived nearby, ‘there were 56 people blown to pieces in an air raid shelter’, 4while Mimi had to grapple with a number of incendiary bombs that constantly dropped into her garden, tossing wet blankets on the bombs and then stamping them out. This version of events was intended to paint Mimi as a determined, brave and lovable surrogate mother. These certainly weren’t the first efforts to muddy the waters of the true role she was to play in John’s life. The account of the night’s bombing offers up Mimi as a cross between Wonder Woman and Mrs Doubtfire . It is ludicrous and untrue. There were no German bombing raids on Liverpool the night John was born. Although the city was bombed no fewer than 60 times that year between September and December, no raids occurred during the day or night that Mimi gives her account. It seems somewhat perverse that she should want to paint this scene of ‘heroic’ selflessness against a backdrop of real heroics, suffering and deprivation by those in the inner city.

During the air raids on Liverpool, the bombs fell mostly on the docks and industrial areas of the city. This is where the very people whom Mimi had come to look down on lived – the people who stoically bore the brunt of the raids. Mimi’s account of her role during the birth of John and the Liverpool air raid is one that she gave not once, but on a number of occasions. It was not just a case of a single recollection. If it was a straight-forward recollection, inasmuch as there were bombs falling when John was born, leaving out the misinformation of her ‘deadly dash’ five miles across bomb-strewn Liverpool, then this could be accepted. It was neither, though, and as David Bedford points out, ‘Mimi lived eleven years after John had died. And in that time, Mimi reinvented herself. With John gone, she could say anything she liked, without anyone to contradict her.’ 5Mimi set out to rewrite John’s history at Mendips. Her account of John’s life became a familiar pattern of fabrication and misleading statements. The story of his upbringing at her hands is riddled with inconsistencies.

Freddie’s service on the Empress of Canada , which started on 30 July, only ended on 1 November and he missed John’s birth by some three weeks. Initially, Julia and baby John had moved from Newcastle Road to the cottage owned by Mimi’s husband George. The problem with this move was that while Newcastle Road was ideally placed for transport and shops, the cottage was out in the sticks. It made for long spells of isolation. For Julia it made for greater pressure to get out and about, and out and about is what Julia did. When home, Freddie would accompany Julia to the local dance halls. He was not a dancer himself, but he would be content to watch her dancing with a string of different men. Aware of the pressures on his young wife, stuck at home with a baby, Freddie’s ‘instructions’ to Julia when he sailed away was to ‘go out and enjoy yourself’.

The following year in New York, he shipped out on a short voyage as the chief steward only to discover he was to be demoted to assistant steward. Instead of the short trip, he would be transporting arms and ammunition to the Far East. He consequently jumped ship, hid out in New York City and waited for a liner directly back to Liverpool. Days later he was arrested under suspicion of breaking into a cargo of whisky, locked in the ship’s brig and then jailed at Ellis Island. Released two weeks later, he waited another month before being allocated on the Sammex , which was bound for the Far East again. This time Freddie found himself set up by another crew member on a charge for stealing whisky and cigarettes from the ship’s hold. He was placed for another two weeks in a cell on Ellis Island and then for three months in an army prison camp in Malta. After 18 months away, Freddie made his way back home. What would be waiting there would surprise even him.

With little contact with her husband and even less money, Julia did not sit at home and mope. Insead she decided to ‘live a little’. Returning to Liverpool as part of a convoy in 1943, Freddie stayed at the cottage with Julia and John. One Saturday night this pleasant family scene was interrupted by the sound of knocking on the front door. When it opened, Freddie was surprised to discover a sailor in full uniform with a platinum blonde on his arm. They were both in high spirits, asking for Julia. The couple had come to take Julia out for a drink. Freddie was shattered and begged Julia not to go. His wife was having none of it. ‘I hardly ever go out’, was her response to Freddie’s pleas. Freddie slammed the front door and barred it against Julia leaving. For her part, Julia took her high heels off, climbed on the kitchen sink and out of the window, and proceeded to run down the road, shoes in hand, to catch up with the sailor and his blonde girlfriend.