his faults in Mimi’s eyes, Dykins was at least a hardworking man, and a provident one. He now had the prestigious job of headwaiter in the Adelphi Hotel’s sumptuous French restaurant. And, notwithstanding her misadventures with two children thus far, he had persuaded Julia to become a mother again. They were to have two daughters together; Julia, born in 1947, and Jacqueline Gertrude, born in 1949, although Alf Lennon’s continued failure to begin divorce proceedings would prevent them from ever becoming man and wife.
Mimi had initially discouraged Julia from seeing too much of John, fearing that she might upset the wholesome new habits instilled at Mendips. But as time passed, the frost gradually thawed. Dykins was never allowed to join the meek males on the family’s bottom rung, but his daughters were fully accepted by Mimi—and the other sisters—and John was allowed to spend unrestricted time with Julia.
It would have been difficult to do otherwise, since the sisters operated as a team, not merely supporting and confiding absolutely in each other, but helping run one another’s domestic affairs and look after one another’s families. As well as Mendips, therefore, John had the run of three alternative homes, all equally welcoming, happy, and secure. His Aunt Harrie lived only a short walk away at the Cottage, the old Smith dairy farmhouse where Julia and Alf Lennon had briefly settled during the war. His Aunt Mater lived ‘across the water’ at Rock Ferry, Cheshire, in a rambling house with a large garden. When Mater married Bert Sutherland and moved with him to his native Scotland, the house was taken over by her sister, Nanny.
The cousins with whom John played during these regular family get-togethers ranged from his Aunt Nanny’s and Harrie’s toddler sons, Michael and David, to Stanley, the only child of Mater’s marriage to Charles Parkes, who was seven years John’s senior. Stanley had been responsible for the sisters’ eccentric pet names, first mispronouncing Mary as ‘Mimi’, calling Anne ‘Nanny’ when she’d looked after him during the war, and dubbing his own mother ‘Mater’, in tune with her fastidious elegance, when he went away to boarding school and began learning Latin. John extended the habit by calling his Uncle George ‘Pater’. Alf Lennon’s most abiding memory from their ill-omened flight to Blackpool was of a small boy who spoke ‘like a gentleman’ and gravely inquired, ‘Shall I call you Pater, too?’
He was especially fond of his cousin Liela, the daughter of Aunt Harrie’s Egyptian first marriage, a stunningly pretty girl with a smile that can still light up a 40-year-old sepia snapshot. Liela was only three and a half years John’s senior, so she became his most regular playmate and accomplice inside the family. Liela remembers a sunny-natured, affectionate small boy who had no inhibitions about hugging and kissing her. ‘Think of all those songs about love that John wrote before he was even 21,’ she says. ‘How could he have done that if he hadn’t had a lot of love in his own life?’
He seemed to remember little of the war that had been waged over him, or of being passed around competing would-be parents like a parcel. Mimi volunteered little information, replying to his questions in only the briefest anodyne fashion. ‘[She] told me my parents had fallen out of love,’ he would recall. ‘She never said anything directly against my mother and father. I soon forgot my father. It was like he was dead.’ But Alf was very much alive and, to begin with at least, still a very real threat to Mimi’s guardianship. She had not officially adopted John, nor would she ever do so; Alf remained married to Julia and in a position of moral ascendancy as far as the law was concerned. At any moment, he could have walked through the front door and demanded that his son be returned to him.
This danger was soon neutralised, in large part thanks to the hapless Alf himself. After parting from John in Blackpool, he had drowned his sorrows at sea again, signing aboard the Royal Mail steamer Andes on her maiden voyage to Argentina. Buenos Aires had produced another of those apocalyptic misadventures that only seemed to happen to him. Picked up with some other British mariners in a routine police sweep, he found himself held in solitary confinement for two days. The explanation was that his captors had misread the page in his passport where his signature, ‘ALennon’ was immediately preceded by the name of his next of kin, given simply as ‘John’. He was therefore assumed to be ‘John Alennon’. A notorious murderer in Argentina at the time also bore that name, and the police had mistaken Alf for him. On regaining his freedom and returning to Britain, he resumed service, on the Dominion Monarch, but in posts of declining importance, first as Assistant Boots (shoe cleaner), then as Silverman (custodian of restaurant silverware).
By his own later account, he still cherished hopes of winning John back and carrying out their Blackpool scheme of emigrating to New Zealand. When the Dominion Monarch returned to Tilbury in December 1949, he resolved to catch a train from London to Liverpool and have it out with Julia again. On his way to Euston Station, however, he was diverted by some shipmates into a Soho pub crawl. This ended in the early hours of the following morning with a riotously drunken Alf smashing the display window of a West End shop and attempting to waltz with the mannikin inside. Hauled before an unsympathetic magistrate, he was sentenced to six months in Wormwood Scrubs.
Alf’s plight could not better have suited the purposes of his unofficial judges in Liverpool. According to his brother Charlie, Mimi wrote to him while he was in prison, threatening to tell John his father was a ‘jailbird’ if ever he tried to contact him again. The possession of a criminal record also effectively ended Alf’s career at sea. Defeated and dejected, he took a menial job as a dishwasher in a hotel kitchen and seemed to give up all thought of ever contacting John again.
Not only his father but the whole Lennon side of his family was now firmly airbrushed from John’s consciousness. For the rest of his life, he would have no idea what decent, brave and loyal people also bore his surname. His grandmother, the redoubtable Polly, had refused to leave her house throughout the war, even though Toxteth was in one of the worst-blitzed quarters of Liverpool. John had been wont to visit Copperfield Street only with his father or during his stay with his Uncle Sydney and Aunt Madge. After the parting from Alf, his visits there ceased. When Polly died in 1949, of stomach cancer, she had not seen him for something like three years. ‘That side of John’s family was never mentioned,’ his cousin Liela remembers. ‘As children, we didn’t even know it existed.’
Even when no aunts and cousins happened to be visiting, Mendips was always a lively and crowded place. To supplement George’s small income, Mimi took in a succession of boarders—‘paying guests’, as they were known in the 1950s—whom she provided with meals as well as bed-sitter accommodation in the bay-windowed front bedroom. These lodgers, exclusively male, were usually students at Liverpool University and tended to become part of the family, helping out in the garden, keeping George company at his local pub and joining in John’s games. The household also included three animals: a large black-and-white cat named Samuel Pepys, which always sat on George’s lap, a Persian cross named Titch, and an adoring mongrel bitch named Sally.
John adored cats as much as did Mimi and George. One snowy night when he was no more than seven or eight, he returned home carrying a bedraggled brown-and-white Persian kitten, which he said he had been unable to dissuade from following him. He begged to be allowed to keep the kitten, but Mimi said that, since it was obviously valuable, they must first advertise for its owner in the Liverpool Echo. No owner came forward, so the kitten stayed and was given the name Tim. ‘We had Tim for 20 years,’ Mimi recalled. ‘Wherever he was in the world, John was always wanting to know what Tim was up to.’
As well as its country cottages and Art Deco villas, Woolton had many curious old houses, nestling in woodland or behind forbidding stone walls, carved from Liverpool’s native sandstone and embellished with the turrets and gargoyles of fairy-tale castles. The most familiar to John, being only a short walk from Mendips, was a gloomy Gothic mansion bearing the anomalous name of Strawberry Field. No strawberries grew in its extensive grounds, and few were ever tasted in its interior, now a refuge for orphan girls run by the Salvation Army. The inmates attended various schools in the locality but wore their own distinctive uniform of blue-and-white striped dresses
