![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakSomething that strikes you when you read your way through various Beatles-related biographical volumes is that in contrast to biopic habits, the fathers don't actually play much of a role. When it comes to the Fab Four, it's (nearly) all about the mothers. (Thus proving me wrong in an old, old post eons ago when I wrote about how Marilyn Monroe singing "My heart belongs to Daddy" is regarded as the epitome of sexiness but you'd never catch a male star declare his love for Mum because it would be regarded as freaky instead, btw.)
Even George, the only one who made it into adulthood with an intact family of both parents and various siblings, tends to bring up his mother Louise in anecdotes, not his father. As for Ringo, his father walked out of the family when the quondam Richard S. was still a toddler, leaving his mother Elsie to bring up her son with the help of her mother:
Mum didn't do too much for a while. She was in a bit of pain after my dad left, and she ended up doing any down-home job she could get to feed and clothe me. She did everything: she was a barmaid, she scrubbed steps, worked in a food shop. (...) We lived at first in a huge, palatial house with three bedrooms. It was too big and we couldn't afford it now my dad had stopped supporting my mother. We were working-class, and in Liverpool when your dad left you suddenly became lower working-class. So we moved to a smaller, two-bedroom place. (They were both rented - houses always were.) It had been condemned as derelict ten years before we moved in, but we lived in it for twenty years.
My grandmother was a big woman, Annie (I never called her Annie, of course), and my grandad was a little guy. He'd maybe have a drink or whatever and get into things, and she would roll her sleeves up, clench her fists, take up a boxing pose and say, 'Come on, Johnny! Don't talk to me like that - get over here, you little bastard.' A big girl, she was, scrubbing steps and all, surviving. She was also the voodoo queen of Liverpool. If I was ever ill, my mother would wrap me up in a blanket and take me down to my nan's, and she would fix me. She had two cures for everything: a bread poultice and a hot toddy - I loved those hot toddies! They were warm, and everyone would be fussing over me - the centre of attention. Being an only child, I was always pretty much the centre of attention anyway.
There were always lots of little fights going on. If you had a fight with a kid and you hurt him, the next day there'd be a huge guy waiting for you at the school gate, and he'd either punch you out, or shake you or really frighten you by grabbing you: 'Don't you touch our Frank again!' I was always on the losing end. In my head I really wanted a big brother who could beat up the bastards who used to beat me up. I didn't have a father or a big brother, but my mother had many a fight for me. If anybody bigger picked on me, she'd be down knocking on the door and would deal with them. She was very, very loving. I was an only child and quite ill, so I was the apple of her eye.
With John and Paul, of course, their mothers' deaths were a morbid element that cemented their relationship. (Were they fictional characters in a fictional story, I'd call the deaths of Mary McCartney and Julia Lennon classic fridging!) Paul's stepsister Ruth once summed them up as: "One Romulus to the other's Remus. Ladies and Gentlemen, The Nurk Twins, live without the aid of a net - ably backed up by their band The Oedipus Guilt Complex." Somewhat sarcastic but not entirely inaccurate. The ladies in question sound remarkable completely aside from their deaths and its impact on their sons, for the record. Since John's two mother figures, his aunt Mimi and his biological mother, Julia, are the more famous, I'll start with Mary McCartney, born Mary Mohin, who ran away from home at age fourteen and never went back. Not with a boy, no; she wanted to work. She became a nurse (and later a midwife) and married late (for the time), in her mid-thirties; at that point she was the nurse in charge of the maternity ward, and it had taken Jim McCartney, who comes across as the happy-go-lucky charmer with a love of music to Mary's quietly ambitious workoholic, quite a lot of persuasion to get her to marry him. (It being war with all the attendant panic and feverish now or never feelings probably helped.) Mary had her two sons, Paul and Michael, in quick succession (one and a half year of age difference), and then went back to work; she became a domiciliary midwife in 1947, when Michael was three. This meant she had to be on call on all hours, day and night, but it also meant the family got a flat from the city. Despite Mary's full time job, neither of her sons ever felt neglected.
Paul: My mum, as a nurse, rode a bike. I have a crystal-clear memory of one snow-laden night when I was young at 72 Western Avenue. The streets were thick with snow, it was about three in the morning, and she got up and went out on her bike with the little brown wicker basket on the front, into the dark, just with her little light, in her navy-blue uniform and hat, cycling off down the estate to deliver a baby somewhere. (...) If ever you grazed your knee or anything it was amazingly taken care of because she was a nurse. She was very kind, very loving. There was a lot of sitting on laps and cuddling. She was very cuddly. I think I was very close to her. My brother thinks he was a little closer, being littler. I would just be trying to be a bit more butch, being the older one. She liked to joke and had a good sense of humour and she was very warm. There was more warmth than I now realise there was in most families. I think she was pretty good-looking. To me she's just a mum and you don't look at a mum the same way as you look at film stars or something. She had slightly wavy hair in a bob, I suppose she would have described her hair as mousy. It wasn't jet black or red or blonde or anything, it was kind of an in-between colour. She had gentle eyes and wore rimless specta-cles. She was quite striking-looking. She had lovely handwriting and was quite nicely spoken for Liverpool and encouraged us to speak the Queen's English. (...) There's one moment that I've regretted all my life which is a strange little awkwardness for me. There was one time when she said 'ask' and she pronounced it posh. And I made fun of her and it slightly embarrassed her. Years later I've never forgiven myself. It's a terrible little thing. I wish I could go back and say, ‘I was only kidding, Mum.'
In 1948, Mary McCartney was diagnosed with cancer. She had intestinal pains which were blamed on her hectic work schedule (as a midwife, she was on call at all hours and thus had erratic sleeping and eating habits). She brushed off the pains, but was finally convinced to go the doctor. Jim was at work, so Dill (one of Jim's sisters) took Mary to the hospital to have an upper GI series done. Mary said she would walk home, but at the end of the tests she was given the diagnosis. She went to a phonebooth on the corner and called Jim at work, crying: "Jim, oh Jim, I have cancer!" He told her to stay put and left his work (a few blocks away) and ran to the hospital, where he found his wife curled up at the bottom of the booth in a corner, sobbing.
Their reaction to the diagnosis was to basically ignore it, and she recovered enough to live fairly healthily (and working - Jim was in cotton trade, but Mary was still the principal earner for the family) for the next eight or so years. And of course they never told their sons anything. But then, in 1956, Mary started getting sick again, so much so that she had to basically quit her regular job and usually retired to bed before noon each day. She still did housework and did her best to look after her boys, but it got so bad that she would sometimes literally cry out and double over in pain while walking, and then have to massage her breasts until the pain elapsed. While it was a terminal diagnosis of breast cancer, the doctor eventually recommended a double mastectomy to "buy some time." The boys (still fairly oblivious at this point) were at school and Mary had made Jim go to work, so Dill came to the house in the morning to take Mary in for the surgery. She was astounded to arrive and find the house especially spotless and her sister-in-law just finishing cleaning, putting out the boys' laundry, etc. Dill wondered why, and Mary replied, "Now everything is ready for the boys, in case I don't come back." It turned out to be true.
The mastectomy merely accelerated things, not the other way around, and Dill said Mary's appearance in the hospital was "ghastly." She was thin and pale, with dark circles under her eyes, and in constant pain. The entire family knew she was bad off, so Jim called Dill to "inspect" the boys, as he had dressed them up to go visit their mother. Dill and her family were in the room when Jim, Paul and Mike came in, but then they left to give Mary time with her boys. When she returned, she was astonished to find the boys climbing all over their mother, but Mary brushed off the pain that caused. Jim was standing by himself in a corner watching them, crying silently.
The description from Many Years from Now goes: I remember one horrible day me and my brother going to the hospital. They must have known she was dying. It turned out to be our last visit and it was terrible because there was blood on the sheets somewhere and seeing that, and your mother... And of course she was very brave, and would cry after we'd gone, though I think she cried on that visit. But we didn't really know what was happening. We were shielded from it all by our aunties and by our dad and everything.
This was 31 October 1956; she died a few hours after that visit. Mary had wanted her sons to follow her footsteps; she'd seen Paul as a doctor, or if not that as a teacher. Michael McCartney in an interview in 1965 was the first but not the last to point out that her death was when Paul's interest in music went from hobby into obsession.
Paul was far more affected by Mum's death than any of us imagined. His very character seemed to change and for a while he behaved like a hermit. He wasn't very nice to live with at this period, I remember. (...) He seemed interested only in his guitar, and his music. He would play that guitar in his bedroom, in the lavatory, even when he was taking a bath. It was never out of his hands except when he was at school or when he had to do his homework. Even in school, he and George Harrison used to seize the opportunity every break to sit and strum. (...) It was a terrible winter the year our Mum died. So bitterly cold. Paul and I would trudge home from school every day, our self-pity increasing the nearer we got to the house. For we knew there'd be no meal ready and no fire lit. This was after we'd spent some time with our aunts and uncles - we'll always be grateful to them. Aunt Joan, kindness itself, who knew better, at that time, than to show us any special sort of sympathy. But Uncle Joe was quiet - for him. Uncle Joe's normally a real knock-out - small in size but big in feelings and with a great sense of humour. And then a while with Auntie Jin (Jane) and Uncle Harry - they have a large house at Huyton and we went to them for our first Christmas without Mum. Auntie Jin is a small, perceptive woman and very motherly. I remember one day she caught the two of us moping around and looking very much down in the dumps - not a bit like the two happy young chappies we usually were. She hesitated for a second as though not certain whether she should say anything or not, before she told us: "Listen, loves, I know you've gone through a fantastic time and I know the way you're feeling, but you've got to try to think of other people. You've got to think of your father. I know this has been a great shock, but we all get great shocks and we have to get over them. Now you'll really have to pull yourselves together.This certainly helped to snap us out of our self-pity for a while."
Along came the summer of 1957 when newly pulled-together, chin-up but still guitar-obsessed Paul would meet John Lennon, decidedly not the type to get over anything. He did have a lot not to get over.
John once said he could write a Forsyte-Saga type of novel about his mother and her four sisters, and they do sound like a remarkable family. The oldest, Mimi, never wanted to have children of her own, and she didn't. This wasn't due to contraception; as it turned out decades later, she and her hsuband George never had sex. (More about Mimi in a moment.) Georgina, aka Nanny, was a career woman, a civil servant and (like Mary McCartney) didn't marry until she was 35. Harriet, aka Harrie, married an Egyptian student from Liverpool University, and went with him to Cairo. After his death she and her daughter Leila returned to England. This happened mid WWII, which meant that Harrie, as the widow of a foreign national, was classified as an alien and had to report to the police station every day. Elizabeth, aka Mater, the one who ended up in Edinburgh and whom John thought the money for his 21st birthday had come from, had a son but declared herself unable to raise him, so cousin Stanley was raised by her own mother and later in boarding school. And then there was Julia, "our Judy", as Leila in interviews described her. She was the second youngest, musical (she played the banjo), and, depending on whether someone from her own family or from the Lennons is doing the describing, either a "free spirit" or "an irresponsible woman". Leila's description of her is very vivid:
"Julia was pretty as a picture. Five foot two tall, two tiny feet on six-inch heels, with shoulder-length auburn hair. A little petite doll walking down the street. People used to turn back for another look at her. When some cheeky boy gave her a wolf whistle, she would say, "Hmmm, not bad yourself." It was all light-hearted fun. She had heaps of personality and a great gift for words which made her very, very witty. No one had a bad word to say about her. She was lovely to everyone . If you ever went to Julia's in a bad mood, she would have you rolling in stitches in no time. She was a thoroughly charming person. She could always capture anyone's heart."
The marriage with her boyfriend, one Alfred, at various points in his life called "Alf" and later "Freddie", Lennon came about as a dare, according to him. "One day she said to me, 'Let's go and get married.' I replied that if we were going to, then we had t do it properly. She said, 'I bet you won't.' So damned if I didn't, just for a joke. It was all a big laugh really, getting married."
Cue ominous music in the background. They got married, they had John, life was definitely not a big laugh anymore, they rapidly got sick of marriage. The ongoing war and Alf being at sea and never writing helped with that. Julia got pregnant again by a soldier, the family was scandalized, so was the returning Alf who nonetheless offered "to do the right thing", except that Julia didn't want him back and said so. (This was when Alf's brother Charles and the Lennon side of the family disawoved her, which is why they don't show up in any biographies except to give quotes on Alf's background. John never met them.) Julia's father, with whom she was still living at that point, insisted that the child would be given to the salvation army and the whole thing completely hushed up; biographers didn't find out until well into the 80s, which is when this particular half sister of John Lennon was found, of all the places, in Sweden. A depressed Julia then went to work as a waitress (not a Stanley family thing to do, they were middle class, after all), and fell in love with one John "Bobby" Dykins, with whom she moved in without marrying him, being technically still married to Alf Lennon. At which point accounts of what happened next differ. The version given to John, and the one in biographies until the 80s, was that Bobby Dykins "did not want to raise another man's child" and that was why Julia agreed to let her oldest sister Mimi raise her son. The version told by the daughters Julia subsequently had, Julia the younger and Jacqui, as well as by cousins Leila and Stan, is that John Dykins had no such objection, but that Mimi had decided Julia was no longer fit to be a mother, called in the Liverpool Social Service, who discovered that John didn't have a bedroom of his own in the tiny Dykins flat but lived with Julia and her boyfriend and intervened, and that this was how John ended up with Mimi and her husband George.
At which point Alf Lennon made a comeback in his son's life, showing up at Mimi's and claiming paternal rights for, as he said, a holiday at the seaside in Blackpool. Mimi agreed but told Julia, who went after Alf and five-years-old John to Blackpool, with the end result being one of those traumatic scenes that are fascinating for biographers but absolutely horrible to live through. The only description of it comes from Alf Lennon and was originally given to Hunter Davies for the 1968 Beatles biography:
Julia said she had come to take John away from me. She was looking for a new place, she said, and intended having John back with her. I told her I had got used to John during our little holiday and I was taking him to New Zealand with me. I asked her to come with us, so we could have another go at being a family. SHe wouldn't have any of it. All she wanted was the boy. 'Let's ask him,' I said. So I shout for John and he runs out, jumps on my knee and asks me if his mummy is coming back to stay. No, I say, he ahs to decide whether he wants to live with me or with her. Without a moment's hesitation, he says me. Julia asks him once more. Again he replies, 'Daddy.' She got a bit weepy then and turned to go. John suddenly jumped up and ran to her. I never saw or heard of him again until I discovered he was a pop star."
The result of this being one messed up kid who kept switching between pushing people away and being ultra-clingy for the rest of his life. Why Julia handed John back to Mimi after this also remains a matter of debate, as does just how often they saw each other until his teenage years. Depending on who tells the story and when, hardly at all or on a regular basis. What's definite is that after Uncle George's death, he rediscovered her, as he put it. But it was Mimi who was the "regular" mother figure, the one responsible for the actual raising and education. Opinions on Mimi are divided, from descriptions of her as the stern,tough-but-loving type, to descriptions as dominating, greedy and self absorbed. ("Mimi's three passions in life were her cats, John, and money", Cynthia Lennon said archly. "In about that order.". Not that Cynthia is an unbiased source, given her relationship with Mimi, which started out bad, given that Mimi saw her as a nephew-stealing vamp, and got worse after Mimi couldn't be bothered to get up and take her to the hospital when Cynthia's gave birth to Julian, prefering to stay in bed instead and let Cynthia deal with the birth pangs on her lonesome.) What's amazing is that despite being so firm on the not wanting any children subject, she immediately took to John basically from the moment he was born, and despite being so dissapproving of Julia's life style (soon with two more illegitimate children, and this time Julia had no intention of hiding anything and lived with Bobby Dykins and said children without ever getting divorced from the absent Alf and marrying anew), which led Mimi to call Julia's house "the house of sin" and her own "the house of correction", she kept up a good relationship with her sister. Julia dropped by most afternoons for tea; one such visit would be the last one of her life.
By that time, Mimi had to deal with all the downsides of raising a teenager in the 50s. She couldn't stand rock'n roll, was horrified to see John do worse and worse at school until he dropped out of Quarry Bank (he then lucked out because one of his teachers thought he had potential and recommended him to the Liverpool Art College, if Mimi was willing to pay for tuition, which she was), disliked basically all of John's friends as "common" and had the regular rows with him you'd expect. Not helped by the fact he was hanging out more and more at Julia's, who loved rock'n roll, still thought life was one big laugh as much as she had done when she'd married Alf Lennon on an impulse and thus didn't mind John dropping out of school, taught him banjo chords (which he used on a guitar until he met Paul and learned guitar chords from him) and in general was, according to John's childhood friend Pete Shotton, more a flirtatious best friend than an authority figure. All of John's friends seem to have been impressed; Paul, introduced that summer of 1957, comes across as having had something on a crush on her.
I always thought of Julia as being an exceptionally beautiful woman. She was very, very nice to us all. John just adored her, not simply because she was his mum but because she was such a high-spirited lady. (...) She was always teaching us new tunes. I remember two in particular, "Ramona" and "Wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine". Much later, during the Beatles years, I often tried to write songs with that same feeling to them. "Here, There and Everywhere" is one I wrote along those lines. Julia was lively and heaps of fun and way ahead of her time. (...) She loved to see us doing well and she wouldn't have really much cared how we did it. That was always one of my deepest regrets, her not being there to see the Beatles make it."
One reason why Mimi and Julia got along despite Mimi having to feel she was doing all the work and Julia was having all the fun when it came to mothering John might have been that Mimi at that point, at age 50, had something of a revolutionary experience and of all her sisters, Julia was the only one likely to understand it. After Mimi's husband George died, she had started to rent a room in her house, Mendips, to students. One such lodger was biochemistry student Michael Fishwick, 24. At which point Mimi discovered sex, because as it turned out, she and George had had a platonic marital relationship; she was still a virgin when she and her lodger started a secret affair. It got far enough that Mimi was making plans to emigrate to New Zealand with him, where they could start without anyone knowing them, or her having to be embarrassed in front of her other relations. After all, John was growing up and didn't seem to need her anymore. Why not have a life of her own?
And then Julia dropped by for her afternoon visit, met one of John's friends, Nigel, on her way back to the bus station, cracked a few jokes as she always did and was run over by a car driven by an off-duty policeman, and everything changed.
John: "I lost my mother twice. Once as a child of five and then again at seventeen. It made me very, very bitter inside. I had just begun to re-establish a relationship with her when she was killed. We'd caught up on so much in just a few short years. We could communicate. We got on. Deep down inside, I thought, 'Sod it! I have no real responsibilities to anyone now."
Julia Baird, who wasn't told by her father and the family that her mother was dead for weeks, describes the immediate aftermath this way:
The next day we were actually sent to school, Jackie and I, and when we got back from school my aunt that had been in Scotland was there in the house and Jackie and I were taken to Scotland. Of course they couldn't take John to Scotland; they probably would have done if he was a bit younger. So John stayed at home. He was 17, Jackie was 8 and I was 11 and we stayed in Scotland for six weeks. When we came back there'd been a lot of things that had gone on that we knew nothing about, that we only found out in bits and pieces later on.
Jackie and I were made wards of court because they'd realised that my mother and father weren't married, and in those days that gave him no rights over us at all. They had actually been discussing orphanages. I know that because we heard them. We came back and we went to live with Harrie, that's my mother's youngest sister; she was the youngest of the five sisters. The best thing about that was we acquired David as a brother and we've still got him. John was round the corner in Mimi's, about three quarters of a mile, five minutes walk. We used to get together; I used to meet John sometimes up on the cricket pitch, which was between the two houses, and we'd talk about Mummy.
John was very angry of course, as you would expect, and he and Paul spoke because Paul's mother had already died. One of the ironies was that when Paul came to the house, our house in Blomfield Road where they practised, my mother was so compassionate towards Paul because he'd lost his mother. She used to say: "That poor boy, he's lost his mother, that poor boy"'. So John and Paul had this enormous bonding I think. And I think they almost went out to wreck everything initially because where Paul may, or may not, have been more self contained about it, certainly John would have triggered off maybe a bigger outward response in Paul because John was outraged. I was and Jackie was and we've all suffered enormously from it.
That John, who reacted to everything by lashing out, picking up fights with strangers and venting his fury at the world in general, voiced a rage Paul had surpressed in himself after his own mother's death is an interesting theory when taken with another comment, this one by Bill Harry (Bill Harry = fellow art student and friend of John's who later became the editor of Merseybeat. Turns up frequently in Beatle lore until they leave Liverpool.): A lot of people lost their patience with John. So many young people in Liverpool had lost parents to the war, or disease, it was actually a fairly common experience. And hardly anyone responded as violently as John. None of us had gone into this big, self-pitying thing. The feeling was - just get on with it. But Paul seemed to have limitless patience for John.
In 1971, at the nadir point of Lennon/McCartney relationships (I'm often tempted to call that entire era "How do you sleep?") when he otherwise didn't let an opportunity pass for a negative comment on his former bandmate, John stopped mid-interview hostile tirade when asked "So, John. You and Paul were probably the greatest songwriting team in a generation. And you had this huge falling out. Were there always huge differences between you and Paul, or was there a time when you had a lot in common?" to reply, suddenly sans hostility: "Well, we all want our mummies - I don't think there's any of us that don't - and he lost his mother, so did I. That doesn't make womanizers of us, but we all want our mummies because I don't think any of us got enough of them. Anyway, that's neither here nor there - but Paul always wanted the home life, you see. He liked it with daddy and the brother, and obviously missed his mother.(...) And with Linda not only did he have a ready-made family, but she knows what he wants, obviously, and has given it to him. The complete family life."
(The follow-up on that contains one priceless bit of Lennon non-logic - "Int.: So you think with Linda he's found what he wanted? John: I guess so. I guess so. I just don't understand . . . I never knew what he wanted in a woman because I never knew what I wanted." - but that's another story.)
Mimi, who'd yelled "murderer!" at the policeman when he was acquitted in his trial, cancelled her New Zealand plans and her affair with Michael Fishwick and remained in Liverpool. Other than Julia, she'd only told their sister Nanny, and it took decades until came to light. That she gave up her last chance at being someone other than an aunt might have contributed to the bitter reaction once John calmed down a bit and fell in love with fellow art student Cynthia Powell. But she never told him. John's younger half sisters lost their father a few years later as well, bizarrely also via a car accident. John never really got over Julia; quoth Philip Norman, apropos his 2008 Lennon biography: "When I said to Yoko, “Did he often talk about Julia?” she said “Oh my God! You’ve no idea! He never stopped.” She was a very good listener, but she had to take in this stuff for years and the theme of Julia never really stopped."
Today, the number of people able to remember Julia Lennon and Mary McCartney is increasingly limited; there are only very few photographs, and no letters or notes by them that ever made it to the public. But they show up in song every day somewhere, due to their sons, in Julia and Let it Be:
(Video footage from Nowhere Boy, if you're wondering.)
Even George, the only one who made it into adulthood with an intact family of both parents and various siblings, tends to bring up his mother Louise in anecdotes, not his father. As for Ringo, his father walked out of the family when the quondam Richard S. was still a toddler, leaving his mother Elsie to bring up her son with the help of her mother:
Mum didn't do too much for a while. She was in a bit of pain after my dad left, and she ended up doing any down-home job she could get to feed and clothe me. She did everything: she was a barmaid, she scrubbed steps, worked in a food shop. (...) We lived at first in a huge, palatial house with three bedrooms. It was too big and we couldn't afford it now my dad had stopped supporting my mother. We were working-class, and in Liverpool when your dad left you suddenly became lower working-class. So we moved to a smaller, two-bedroom place. (They were both rented - houses always were.) It had been condemned as derelict ten years before we moved in, but we lived in it for twenty years.
My grandmother was a big woman, Annie (I never called her Annie, of course), and my grandad was a little guy. He'd maybe have a drink or whatever and get into things, and she would roll her sleeves up, clench her fists, take up a boxing pose and say, 'Come on, Johnny! Don't talk to me like that - get over here, you little bastard.' A big girl, she was, scrubbing steps and all, surviving. She was also the voodoo queen of Liverpool. If I was ever ill, my mother would wrap me up in a blanket and take me down to my nan's, and she would fix me. She had two cures for everything: a bread poultice and a hot toddy - I loved those hot toddies! They were warm, and everyone would be fussing over me - the centre of attention. Being an only child, I was always pretty much the centre of attention anyway.
There were always lots of little fights going on. If you had a fight with a kid and you hurt him, the next day there'd be a huge guy waiting for you at the school gate, and he'd either punch you out, or shake you or really frighten you by grabbing you: 'Don't you touch our Frank again!' I was always on the losing end. In my head I really wanted a big brother who could beat up the bastards who used to beat me up. I didn't have a father or a big brother, but my mother had many a fight for me. If anybody bigger picked on me, she'd be down knocking on the door and would deal with them. She was very, very loving. I was an only child and quite ill, so I was the apple of her eye.
With John and Paul, of course, their mothers' deaths were a morbid element that cemented their relationship. (Were they fictional characters in a fictional story, I'd call the deaths of Mary McCartney and Julia Lennon classic fridging!) Paul's stepsister Ruth once summed them up as: "One Romulus to the other's Remus. Ladies and Gentlemen, The Nurk Twins, live without the aid of a net - ably backed up by their band The Oedipus Guilt Complex." Somewhat sarcastic but not entirely inaccurate. The ladies in question sound remarkable completely aside from their deaths and its impact on their sons, for the record. Since John's two mother figures, his aunt Mimi and his biological mother, Julia, are the more famous, I'll start with Mary McCartney, born Mary Mohin, who ran away from home at age fourteen and never went back. Not with a boy, no; she wanted to work. She became a nurse (and later a midwife) and married late (for the time), in her mid-thirties; at that point she was the nurse in charge of the maternity ward, and it had taken Jim McCartney, who comes across as the happy-go-lucky charmer with a love of music to Mary's quietly ambitious workoholic, quite a lot of persuasion to get her to marry him. (It being war with all the attendant panic and feverish now or never feelings probably helped.) Mary had her two sons, Paul and Michael, in quick succession (one and a half year of age difference), and then went back to work; she became a domiciliary midwife in 1947, when Michael was three. This meant she had to be on call on all hours, day and night, but it also meant the family got a flat from the city. Despite Mary's full time job, neither of her sons ever felt neglected.
Paul: My mum, as a nurse, rode a bike. I have a crystal-clear memory of one snow-laden night when I was young at 72 Western Avenue. The streets were thick with snow, it was about three in the morning, and she got up and went out on her bike with the little brown wicker basket on the front, into the dark, just with her little light, in her navy-blue uniform and hat, cycling off down the estate to deliver a baby somewhere. (...) If ever you grazed your knee or anything it was amazingly taken care of because she was a nurse. She was very kind, very loving. There was a lot of sitting on laps and cuddling. She was very cuddly. I think I was very close to her. My brother thinks he was a little closer, being littler. I would just be trying to be a bit more butch, being the older one. She liked to joke and had a good sense of humour and she was very warm. There was more warmth than I now realise there was in most families. I think she was pretty good-looking. To me she's just a mum and you don't look at a mum the same way as you look at film stars or something. She had slightly wavy hair in a bob, I suppose she would have described her hair as mousy. It wasn't jet black or red or blonde or anything, it was kind of an in-between colour. She had gentle eyes and wore rimless specta-cles. She was quite striking-looking. She had lovely handwriting and was quite nicely spoken for Liverpool and encouraged us to speak the Queen's English. (...) There's one moment that I've regretted all my life which is a strange little awkwardness for me. There was one time when she said 'ask' and she pronounced it posh. And I made fun of her and it slightly embarrassed her. Years later I've never forgiven myself. It's a terrible little thing. I wish I could go back and say, ‘I was only kidding, Mum.'
In 1948, Mary McCartney was diagnosed with cancer. She had intestinal pains which were blamed on her hectic work schedule (as a midwife, she was on call at all hours and thus had erratic sleeping and eating habits). She brushed off the pains, but was finally convinced to go the doctor. Jim was at work, so Dill (one of Jim's sisters) took Mary to the hospital to have an upper GI series done. Mary said she would walk home, but at the end of the tests she was given the diagnosis. She went to a phonebooth on the corner and called Jim at work, crying: "Jim, oh Jim, I have cancer!" He told her to stay put and left his work (a few blocks away) and ran to the hospital, where he found his wife curled up at the bottom of the booth in a corner, sobbing.
Their reaction to the diagnosis was to basically ignore it, and she recovered enough to live fairly healthily (and working - Jim was in cotton trade, but Mary was still the principal earner for the family) for the next eight or so years. And of course they never told their sons anything. But then, in 1956, Mary started getting sick again, so much so that she had to basically quit her regular job and usually retired to bed before noon each day. She still did housework and did her best to look after her boys, but it got so bad that she would sometimes literally cry out and double over in pain while walking, and then have to massage her breasts until the pain elapsed. While it was a terminal diagnosis of breast cancer, the doctor eventually recommended a double mastectomy to "buy some time." The boys (still fairly oblivious at this point) were at school and Mary had made Jim go to work, so Dill came to the house in the morning to take Mary in for the surgery. She was astounded to arrive and find the house especially spotless and her sister-in-law just finishing cleaning, putting out the boys' laundry, etc. Dill wondered why, and Mary replied, "Now everything is ready for the boys, in case I don't come back." It turned out to be true.
The mastectomy merely accelerated things, not the other way around, and Dill said Mary's appearance in the hospital was "ghastly." She was thin and pale, with dark circles under her eyes, and in constant pain. The entire family knew she was bad off, so Jim called Dill to "inspect" the boys, as he had dressed them up to go visit their mother. Dill and her family were in the room when Jim, Paul and Mike came in, but then they left to give Mary time with her boys. When she returned, she was astonished to find the boys climbing all over their mother, but Mary brushed off the pain that caused. Jim was standing by himself in a corner watching them, crying silently.
The description from Many Years from Now goes: I remember one horrible day me and my brother going to the hospital. They must have known she was dying. It turned out to be our last visit and it was terrible because there was blood on the sheets somewhere and seeing that, and your mother... And of course she was very brave, and would cry after we'd gone, though I think she cried on that visit. But we didn't really know what was happening. We were shielded from it all by our aunties and by our dad and everything.
This was 31 October 1956; she died a few hours after that visit. Mary had wanted her sons to follow her footsteps; she'd seen Paul as a doctor, or if not that as a teacher. Michael McCartney in an interview in 1965 was the first but not the last to point out that her death was when Paul's interest in music went from hobby into obsession.
Paul was far more affected by Mum's death than any of us imagined. His very character seemed to change and for a while he behaved like a hermit. He wasn't very nice to live with at this period, I remember. (...) He seemed interested only in his guitar, and his music. He would play that guitar in his bedroom, in the lavatory, even when he was taking a bath. It was never out of his hands except when he was at school or when he had to do his homework. Even in school, he and George Harrison used to seize the opportunity every break to sit and strum. (...) It was a terrible winter the year our Mum died. So bitterly cold. Paul and I would trudge home from school every day, our self-pity increasing the nearer we got to the house. For we knew there'd be no meal ready and no fire lit. This was after we'd spent some time with our aunts and uncles - we'll always be grateful to them. Aunt Joan, kindness itself, who knew better, at that time, than to show us any special sort of sympathy. But Uncle Joe was quiet - for him. Uncle Joe's normally a real knock-out - small in size but big in feelings and with a great sense of humour. And then a while with Auntie Jin (Jane) and Uncle Harry - they have a large house at Huyton and we went to them for our first Christmas without Mum. Auntie Jin is a small, perceptive woman and very motherly. I remember one day she caught the two of us moping around and looking very much down in the dumps - not a bit like the two happy young chappies we usually were. She hesitated for a second as though not certain whether she should say anything or not, before she told us: "Listen, loves, I know you've gone through a fantastic time and I know the way you're feeling, but you've got to try to think of other people. You've got to think of your father. I know this has been a great shock, but we all get great shocks and we have to get over them. Now you'll really have to pull yourselves together.This certainly helped to snap us out of our self-pity for a while."
Along came the summer of 1957 when newly pulled-together, chin-up but still guitar-obsessed Paul would meet John Lennon, decidedly not the type to get over anything. He did have a lot not to get over.
John once said he could write a Forsyte-Saga type of novel about his mother and her four sisters, and they do sound like a remarkable family. The oldest, Mimi, never wanted to have children of her own, and she didn't. This wasn't due to contraception; as it turned out decades later, she and her hsuband George never had sex. (More about Mimi in a moment.) Georgina, aka Nanny, was a career woman, a civil servant and (like Mary McCartney) didn't marry until she was 35. Harriet, aka Harrie, married an Egyptian student from Liverpool University, and went with him to Cairo. After his death she and her daughter Leila returned to England. This happened mid WWII, which meant that Harrie, as the widow of a foreign national, was classified as an alien and had to report to the police station every day. Elizabeth, aka Mater, the one who ended up in Edinburgh and whom John thought the money for his 21st birthday had come from, had a son but declared herself unable to raise him, so cousin Stanley was raised by her own mother and later in boarding school. And then there was Julia, "our Judy", as Leila in interviews described her. She was the second youngest, musical (she played the banjo), and, depending on whether someone from her own family or from the Lennons is doing the describing, either a "free spirit" or "an irresponsible woman". Leila's description of her is very vivid:
"Julia was pretty as a picture. Five foot two tall, two tiny feet on six-inch heels, with shoulder-length auburn hair. A little petite doll walking down the street. People used to turn back for another look at her. When some cheeky boy gave her a wolf whistle, she would say, "Hmmm, not bad yourself." It was all light-hearted fun. She had heaps of personality and a great gift for words which made her very, very witty. No one had a bad word to say about her. She was lovely to everyone . If you ever went to Julia's in a bad mood, she would have you rolling in stitches in no time. She was a thoroughly charming person. She could always capture anyone's heart."
The marriage with her boyfriend, one Alfred, at various points in his life called "Alf" and later "Freddie", Lennon came about as a dare, according to him. "One day she said to me, 'Let's go and get married.' I replied that if we were going to, then we had t do it properly. She said, 'I bet you won't.' So damned if I didn't, just for a joke. It was all a big laugh really, getting married."
Cue ominous music in the background. They got married, they had John, life was definitely not a big laugh anymore, they rapidly got sick of marriage. The ongoing war and Alf being at sea and never writing helped with that. Julia got pregnant again by a soldier, the family was scandalized, so was the returning Alf who nonetheless offered "to do the right thing", except that Julia didn't want him back and said so. (This was when Alf's brother Charles and the Lennon side of the family disawoved her, which is why they don't show up in any biographies except to give quotes on Alf's background. John never met them.) Julia's father, with whom she was still living at that point, insisted that the child would be given to the salvation army and the whole thing completely hushed up; biographers didn't find out until well into the 80s, which is when this particular half sister of John Lennon was found, of all the places, in Sweden. A depressed Julia then went to work as a waitress (not a Stanley family thing to do, they were middle class, after all), and fell in love with one John "Bobby" Dykins, with whom she moved in without marrying him, being technically still married to Alf Lennon. At which point accounts of what happened next differ. The version given to John, and the one in biographies until the 80s, was that Bobby Dykins "did not want to raise another man's child" and that was why Julia agreed to let her oldest sister Mimi raise her son. The version told by the daughters Julia subsequently had, Julia the younger and Jacqui, as well as by cousins Leila and Stan, is that John Dykins had no such objection, but that Mimi had decided Julia was no longer fit to be a mother, called in the Liverpool Social Service, who discovered that John didn't have a bedroom of his own in the tiny Dykins flat but lived with Julia and her boyfriend and intervened, and that this was how John ended up with Mimi and her husband George.
At which point Alf Lennon made a comeback in his son's life, showing up at Mimi's and claiming paternal rights for, as he said, a holiday at the seaside in Blackpool. Mimi agreed but told Julia, who went after Alf and five-years-old John to Blackpool, with the end result being one of those traumatic scenes that are fascinating for biographers but absolutely horrible to live through. The only description of it comes from Alf Lennon and was originally given to Hunter Davies for the 1968 Beatles biography:
Julia said she had come to take John away from me. She was looking for a new place, she said, and intended having John back with her. I told her I had got used to John during our little holiday and I was taking him to New Zealand with me. I asked her to come with us, so we could have another go at being a family. SHe wouldn't have any of it. All she wanted was the boy. 'Let's ask him,' I said. So I shout for John and he runs out, jumps on my knee and asks me if his mummy is coming back to stay. No, I say, he ahs to decide whether he wants to live with me or with her. Without a moment's hesitation, he says me. Julia asks him once more. Again he replies, 'Daddy.' She got a bit weepy then and turned to go. John suddenly jumped up and ran to her. I never saw or heard of him again until I discovered he was a pop star."
The result of this being one messed up kid who kept switching between pushing people away and being ultra-clingy for the rest of his life. Why Julia handed John back to Mimi after this also remains a matter of debate, as does just how often they saw each other until his teenage years. Depending on who tells the story and when, hardly at all or on a regular basis. What's definite is that after Uncle George's death, he rediscovered her, as he put it. But it was Mimi who was the "regular" mother figure, the one responsible for the actual raising and education. Opinions on Mimi are divided, from descriptions of her as the stern,tough-but-loving type, to descriptions as dominating, greedy and self absorbed. ("Mimi's three passions in life were her cats, John, and money", Cynthia Lennon said archly. "In about that order.". Not that Cynthia is an unbiased source, given her relationship with Mimi, which started out bad, given that Mimi saw her as a nephew-stealing vamp, and got worse after Mimi couldn't be bothered to get up and take her to the hospital when Cynthia's gave birth to Julian, prefering to stay in bed instead and let Cynthia deal with the birth pangs on her lonesome.) What's amazing is that despite being so firm on the not wanting any children subject, she immediately took to John basically from the moment he was born, and despite being so dissapproving of Julia's life style (soon with two more illegitimate children, and this time Julia had no intention of hiding anything and lived with Bobby Dykins and said children without ever getting divorced from the absent Alf and marrying anew), which led Mimi to call Julia's house "the house of sin" and her own "the house of correction", she kept up a good relationship with her sister. Julia dropped by most afternoons for tea; one such visit would be the last one of her life.
By that time, Mimi had to deal with all the downsides of raising a teenager in the 50s. She couldn't stand rock'n roll, was horrified to see John do worse and worse at school until he dropped out of Quarry Bank (he then lucked out because one of his teachers thought he had potential and recommended him to the Liverpool Art College, if Mimi was willing to pay for tuition, which she was), disliked basically all of John's friends as "common" and had the regular rows with him you'd expect. Not helped by the fact he was hanging out more and more at Julia's, who loved rock'n roll, still thought life was one big laugh as much as she had done when she'd married Alf Lennon on an impulse and thus didn't mind John dropping out of school, taught him banjo chords (which he used on a guitar until he met Paul and learned guitar chords from him) and in general was, according to John's childhood friend Pete Shotton, more a flirtatious best friend than an authority figure. All of John's friends seem to have been impressed; Paul, introduced that summer of 1957, comes across as having had something on a crush on her.
I always thought of Julia as being an exceptionally beautiful woman. She was very, very nice to us all. John just adored her, not simply because she was his mum but because she was such a high-spirited lady. (...) She was always teaching us new tunes. I remember two in particular, "Ramona" and "Wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine". Much later, during the Beatles years, I often tried to write songs with that same feeling to them. "Here, There and Everywhere" is one I wrote along those lines. Julia was lively and heaps of fun and way ahead of her time. (...) She loved to see us doing well and she wouldn't have really much cared how we did it. That was always one of my deepest regrets, her not being there to see the Beatles make it."
One reason why Mimi and Julia got along despite Mimi having to feel she was doing all the work and Julia was having all the fun when it came to mothering John might have been that Mimi at that point, at age 50, had something of a revolutionary experience and of all her sisters, Julia was the only one likely to understand it. After Mimi's husband George died, she had started to rent a room in her house, Mendips, to students. One such lodger was biochemistry student Michael Fishwick, 24. At which point Mimi discovered sex, because as it turned out, she and George had had a platonic marital relationship; she was still a virgin when she and her lodger started a secret affair. It got far enough that Mimi was making plans to emigrate to New Zealand with him, where they could start without anyone knowing them, or her having to be embarrassed in front of her other relations. After all, John was growing up and didn't seem to need her anymore. Why not have a life of her own?
And then Julia dropped by for her afternoon visit, met one of John's friends, Nigel, on her way back to the bus station, cracked a few jokes as she always did and was run over by a car driven by an off-duty policeman, and everything changed.
John: "I lost my mother twice. Once as a child of five and then again at seventeen. It made me very, very bitter inside. I had just begun to re-establish a relationship with her when she was killed. We'd caught up on so much in just a few short years. We could communicate. We got on. Deep down inside, I thought, 'Sod it! I have no real responsibilities to anyone now."
Julia Baird, who wasn't told by her father and the family that her mother was dead for weeks, describes the immediate aftermath this way:
The next day we were actually sent to school, Jackie and I, and when we got back from school my aunt that had been in Scotland was there in the house and Jackie and I were taken to Scotland. Of course they couldn't take John to Scotland; they probably would have done if he was a bit younger. So John stayed at home. He was 17, Jackie was 8 and I was 11 and we stayed in Scotland for six weeks. When we came back there'd been a lot of things that had gone on that we knew nothing about, that we only found out in bits and pieces later on.
Jackie and I were made wards of court because they'd realised that my mother and father weren't married, and in those days that gave him no rights over us at all. They had actually been discussing orphanages. I know that because we heard them. We came back and we went to live with Harrie, that's my mother's youngest sister; she was the youngest of the five sisters. The best thing about that was we acquired David as a brother and we've still got him. John was round the corner in Mimi's, about three quarters of a mile, five minutes walk. We used to get together; I used to meet John sometimes up on the cricket pitch, which was between the two houses, and we'd talk about Mummy.
John was very angry of course, as you would expect, and he and Paul spoke because Paul's mother had already died. One of the ironies was that when Paul came to the house, our house in Blomfield Road where they practised, my mother was so compassionate towards Paul because he'd lost his mother. She used to say: "That poor boy, he's lost his mother, that poor boy"'. So John and Paul had this enormous bonding I think. And I think they almost went out to wreck everything initially because where Paul may, or may not, have been more self contained about it, certainly John would have triggered off maybe a bigger outward response in Paul because John was outraged. I was and Jackie was and we've all suffered enormously from it.
That John, who reacted to everything by lashing out, picking up fights with strangers and venting his fury at the world in general, voiced a rage Paul had surpressed in himself after his own mother's death is an interesting theory when taken with another comment, this one by Bill Harry (Bill Harry = fellow art student and friend of John's who later became the editor of Merseybeat. Turns up frequently in Beatle lore until they leave Liverpool.): A lot of people lost their patience with John. So many young people in Liverpool had lost parents to the war, or disease, it was actually a fairly common experience. And hardly anyone responded as violently as John. None of us had gone into this big, self-pitying thing. The feeling was - just get on with it. But Paul seemed to have limitless patience for John.
In 1971, at the nadir point of Lennon/McCartney relationships (I'm often tempted to call that entire era "How do you sleep?") when he otherwise didn't let an opportunity pass for a negative comment on his former bandmate, John stopped mid-interview hostile tirade when asked "So, John. You and Paul were probably the greatest songwriting team in a generation. And you had this huge falling out. Were there always huge differences between you and Paul, or was there a time when you had a lot in common?" to reply, suddenly sans hostility: "Well, we all want our mummies - I don't think there's any of us that don't - and he lost his mother, so did I. That doesn't make womanizers of us, but we all want our mummies because I don't think any of us got enough of them. Anyway, that's neither here nor there - but Paul always wanted the home life, you see. He liked it with daddy and the brother, and obviously missed his mother.(...) And with Linda not only did he have a ready-made family, but she knows what he wants, obviously, and has given it to him. The complete family life."
(The follow-up on that contains one priceless bit of Lennon non-logic - "Int.: So you think with Linda he's found what he wanted? John: I guess so. I guess so. I just don't understand . . . I never knew what he wanted in a woman because I never knew what I wanted." - but that's another story.)
Mimi, who'd yelled "murderer!" at the policeman when he was acquitted in his trial, cancelled her New Zealand plans and her affair with Michael Fishwick and remained in Liverpool. Other than Julia, she'd only told their sister Nanny, and it took decades until came to light. That she gave up her last chance at being someone other than an aunt might have contributed to the bitter reaction once John calmed down a bit and fell in love with fellow art student Cynthia Powell. But she never told him. John's younger half sisters lost their father a few years later as well, bizarrely also via a car accident. John never really got over Julia; quoth Philip Norman, apropos his 2008 Lennon biography: "When I said to Yoko, “Did he often talk about Julia?” she said “Oh my God! You’ve no idea! He never stopped.” She was a very good listener, but she had to take in this stuff for years and the theme of Julia never really stopped."
Today, the number of people able to remember Julia Lennon and Mary McCartney is increasingly limited; there are only very few photographs, and no letters or notes by them that ever made it to the public. But they show up in song every day somewhere, due to their sons, in Julia and Let it Be:
(Video footage from Nowhere Boy, if you're wondering.)
no subject
Date: 2010-10-14 01:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-14 05:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-14 06:34 am (UTC)Such interesting insight into a very personal experience. I was touched by the way Paul talked about his mother. Then, the tale of her illness and how much she suffered while trying to go on with everyday life,the last days with her sons seeing her in her hospital bed, was deeply sad.
This :Paul and I would trudge home from school every day, our self-pity increasing the nearer we got to the house. For we knew there'd be no meal ready and no fire lit. struck me as a utterly heartbreaking image.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-14 10:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-14 01:43 pm (UTC)Julia always came across as someone out of the ordinary whose death must have left a deep and terrible scar in John's heart and mind.
This little bit made me smile : in general was, according to John's childhood friend Pete Shotton, more a flirtatious best friend than an authority figure. All of John's friends seem to have been impressed; Paul, introduced that summer of 1957, comes across as having had something on a crush on her.
Being a friend and a mother to her own children is the most wonderful thing those children may experience IMO. In Julia's case , we can imagine that she brought a lot of fantasy in John's life and losing her must have been sensibilities -altering and earth-shattering.
The song Julia is beautiful and I love the moving way John sings it.
There is a painful resonance for me there ,too.I'm so sorry about your aunt.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-14 07:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-14 10:40 am (UTC)Sam Taylor-Wood is an excellent director, too; I understand it's her first fictional movie, and it has made me curious about her earlier work.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-15 02:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-15 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-15 06:26 am (UTC)I'm really glad you liked the film! And Lennon Naked isn't a must; Christopher Eccleston is great, but it's so tunnel-vision focused on John (at what was arguably the most obnoxious period of his life - seriously, I tend to shy away from late 60s, early 70s John (edited: except musically - I mean the interviews and the behaviour) in order to keep my fannish affection) and completely wastes Naoko Mori as Yoko (it's laudable that they didn't want to bash Yoko, but going in the other direction and making her a mysterious saint who apparantly has no past, no family of her own as opposed to real Yoko, and no purpose in life other than saving John Lennon from ennui and his own issues really isn't a good alternative - I think I had it when the script has Yoko saying, after her stillbirth, "I'm so sorry, John") that I would actually advise you to skip it.