Imagine This - Growing up with my brother John Lennon

My bookshelves are already groaning under the weight of many a Beatles book. Some excellent, some good, some indifferent and some; or at least one, downright bizarre.

The sheer volume of titles that I already own doesn’t prevent me from eagerly adding to the collection whenever an opportunity arises; especially when it costs me the princely sum of 49p.

An after work browse round HMV one day took me to the book section where the troubled store were clearly getting rid of unwanted stock.

I pride myself on being able to spot a Beatles related item no matter the clutter and sure enough a copy of Julia Baird’s ‘Imagine This – Growing up with my brother John Lennon’, caught my eye and whispered gently to me “buy me, Tom.”

It didn’t really but, hey, 49p wasn’t exactly going to break the bank so off I popped, with a few other items I have to confess, to the check-out.

Julia Baird for those that don’t know, and I suspect if you’ve managed to get this far then you probably do; and the book title does rather tend to give the game away, is the half-sister of a certain John Lennon.

I had read a few reviews of it and none were exactly overflowing with their enthusiasm for it and as a result it sat on the ever growing ‘to read’ pile for a little time.

It was eventually plucked from the pile and I found it a surprisingly fascinating, touching and often moving story.

It wasn’t packed with countless anecdotes of John’s childhood but it did shed some extra light onto John’s troubled upbringing.

John, for the uninitiated, spent much of his childhood being brought up by his Aunt Mimi. His mother, also named Julia, is in most accounts of John’s formative years portrayed as a somewhat feckless, irresponsible woman.

She married John’s father, Alf, almost on a whim. It was a marriage that her family did not approve of.

There was certainly something of the wanderlust about Alf, a merchant seaman and he was rarely in John’s life, although he did return from a prolonged absence with the aim of whisking John off for a new life in New Zealand.

By the time Alf returned to England with the aim of taking John to New Zealand with him Julia, although still married to Ald, had had an affair with another man with whom she had had a child who was subsequently given up for adoption. She was now living with another man, Bobby Dykins. Julia and Bobby would live together and common law husband and wife and would have two children together, Jackie and, the author of this book, Julia.

For a while John lived with his mother and Bobby but this was an arrangement not to the liking of Julia’s sister Mimi who it is suggested called social services declaring that John was being brought up in improper circumstances.

Cutting the story short, for fear of completely boring anyone who has struggled this far, John was sent to live with his Aunt Mimi.

Many accounts suggest that John for many years had virtually no contact with his mother but his half-sister’s book paints a different story. Her account has John paying his mother many a clandestine visit once he discovered, through his cousin Stanley, that she lived only a short distance away.

Julia’s book also addresses her mother’s reputation as being a feckless, unfit mother. Instead she creates the image of a zestful, attentive and loving mother; although one haunted by the child she was forced to give up for adoption, her at least partial estrangement from her son, and a possible later miscarriage.   

What isn’t in doubt is that John had re-established a relationship with his mother, and his two half siblings, when she was run over and killed by an off duty policeman.

That loss had a profound effect on John. It did too on his two half-sisters. Upon their mother’s death they were shunted off to Scotland without any explanation  and it was only several months after their mother’s death, and a return to Liverpool to live with an Aunt and her husband, that they found out that their mother had in fact died. Although young they were, in an act that seems impossibly cruel, denied the opportunity to attend their own mother’s funeral.

The longer the book goes on the less John features in it. His life and that of his sisters went off in totally different directions.

For many years there was no contact at all but according to Julia’s book, John got back in touch with his Liverpool family in the mid 1970s when he was living, where he would until his death, in New York.

Julia describes the difficulty she had though in speaking directly with her brother. Yoko, she tells us, would answer all her calls and only rarely would she be able to speak to John. Yoko it would seem was practically running John’s life for him and was ‘protecting’ him from his family.

Sadly Julia never got the chance to see her brother face to face again before his death and after his death her relationship with him was diminished even further with Yoko claiming that John barely knew or met his sisters.

They are certainly airbrushed out of many accounts of John’s life.

Did they have a close relationship with John or did they, as Yoko claimed, barely know each other?

Perhaps the first volume of Mark Lewisohn’s three part Beatles biography, due for release in October, might provide some of the answers.  

In the meantime this book is well worth a read.