The Beatles (5 page)

Julia’s longing for conviviality was heightened by Liverpool’s bustling nightlife, which raged almost as fiercely as the war. The city jumped to the tempo of big bands along with the guys and dolls who followed them. At the center of this scene were the all-night dance halls, where the revelry never stopped. Soldiers and civilians, wary of an uncertain future, collected under the low-slung rafters, determined to let off some steam before the full impact of the war hit.

It was probably sometime in 1942 that Julia first ventured out dancing on her own, and thereafter she stepped out frequently, first alone, then later with two neighbors whose husbands were in the service. Freddie later claimed this peccadillo was his fault, the result of a remark in a letter he sent her. “
I said to her, there’s a war on
; go out and enjoy yourself, pet,” he recalled, never realizing the extent to which she’d take him up on it.

It was only a matter of time before Julia met another man, a Welsh soldier named Taffy Williams, who was stationed in a barracks at Mossley
Hill. They hit all the pubs and dance halls that catered specially to soldiers, and Julia would often bring back from these outings a rare, precious treat—a chunk of chocolate or a sugar pastry—which she’d present to John the next morning during breakfast.

The relationship remained innocent, or at least innocent enough to escape scrutiny. Julia continued to receive regular correspondence from Freddie, which she’d read aloud to John, along with a check that underwrote her modest living expenses. John hung on every frivolous word his father wrote, then repackaged them for his cousins in the form of frothy seafaring adventures. To John, Freddie was a mysterious, romantic figure, a father of great consequence, away doing a man’s work.

But, in truth, Freddie Lennon was a screwup. He constantly signed on the “wrong type” of ship, sailing as a glorified bartender or with crews that functioned as modern-day pirates. After a typical mishap in New York,
he set out on the
Sammex
in February 1944, bound for the Algerian port of Bône, where he was arrested and imprisoned for “broaching the cargo,” or more precisely, pilfering a bottle of contraband beer. Freddie subsequently disappeared for six months—undergoing adventures in the Dutch underground, from North Africa to Naples, he claimed—during which time his family assumed he’d deserted them.

Julia hardly needed convincing. She was living it up with Taffy Williams, and was pregnant with his child. Yet, however much she loved the soldier, she was unable—or simply unwilling—to marry him. For one thing, she was already married. And for another, there was John to worry about. Williams wasn’t prepared to take on a young boy along with Julia, and abandoning John was out of the question—at least for now.

Just when it seemed that things couldn’t get any worse, Freddie returned home, understandably despondent. For all of his superficiality, Freddie Lennon remained a proud man, proud enough to be wounded by an unfaithful wife. Julia treated her husband with disdain, regarding the awkward situation as if it were somehow Freddie’s fault. Her personality had always been jaunty and outgoing. Now it became harsh and brittle, her words unnecessarily cruel and venomous, her mood fluctuating between irrationality and deceit. “
She claimed that she was raped
by a soldier,” according to Freddie’s brother Charles, who attempted to mediate for the couple. Ready to defend her honor, the Lennon brothers actually confronted Taffy Williams, just before Christmas 1945, but his account of the facts stood up. It was clear that Julia had been his lover for more than half a year. There was no point in pretending any longer. Freddie accepted
that she was going to have another man’s baby and offered to stand by her side. But there was something broken about him now.

Broken—but not finished. Holding Freddie Lennon together was the welfare of his son, John. Responsibility was called for now, and responsibility was neither Freddie’s nor Julia’s strong suit. In fact, the Lennons had courted these very circumstances by putting their own selfish interests before those of their son. Freddie leaped into action by removing John to his brother Sydney’s house in the suburb of Maghull while Julia came to term. This may have been a practical, sober-minded decision, or it may have been designed to give him the opportunity to resolve his differences with Julia. It is impossible to say.

In any event, Freddie ran out of yardage. He offered to help raise the baby but was spurned. There was too much resentment, no trace of love left in Julia’s heart. Besides, “
she was told quite categorically
by the family that this child would have to be adopted,” recalled her niece. Julia’s long-suffering father, indignant, refused to allow her to remain in his house. As a result, Mimi helped move her to the Elmswood Nursing Home, in Mossley Hill, where, on June 19, 1945, a girl was born, named Victoria. “
She was a beautiful baby
,” recalled Julia’s sister Anne, “but we never knew who the father was.” The whole seamy affair was hushed up and was never discussed among the rest of the Stanley family. “We didn’t even know that she’d had [another] baby,” said Leila Harvey. Certainly, John wasn’t told anything about it, much less that he had a sister. (By all accounts, he never discovered her existence.) Without further delay, the baby was taken away from Julia and given to
a Norwegian Salvation Army captain
, who removed the newborn to Scandinavia, which was the last anyone ever heard of her.

Freed from this latest imposition, Julia spun back into the vibrant social scene, which, by Liverpool standards, had become livelier than ever. American soldiers, stationed at a sprawling base in nearby Burtonwood, brought their irrepressible exuberance to the mix. Julia had always been a good-time girl; now, as good times became harder to afford, she sought out a sugar daddy to secure her stake. It took no longer than a few weeks for Julia to land a new suitor.

Julia and Bobby Dykins had met a year earlier, while they were involved with different partners in an ongoing double date. Dykins, whose given name was John, had been seeing Julia’s neighbor Ann Stout, but
there was never any doubt as to where his affections lay. He “
would always wink at [Julia]
,” which “she enjoyed, laughing it off,” as one would a playful flirtation. They met again, soon after Julia left the nursing home, and with her no longer encumbered, things turned serious right out of the box.

A Liverpool native several years Julia’s senior, Dykins was a smooth, dapper Irish Catholic wine steward at the Adelphi Hotel, who was as dedicated to pursuing the high life as Julia was to living it. Bobby was “very good looking,” according to those who crossed his path. A dark-skinned, wiry man who held himself erect, he was nicknamed
Spiv
by the Stanley kids because he reminded them so much of Arthur English, the British music hall comedian, famous for his “little pencil moustache and porkpie hat.” John’s memory of him wasn’t as flattering, nicknaming Dykins “Twitchy” because of “
a nervous cough and… thinning, margarine-coated hair
.” Few men had better access to such tightly restricted luxuries: liquor, chocolate, silks, cigarettes. “
He was certainly earning good money
,” said Stanley Parkes, and he never failed to lavish it, along with charm, on his appreciative new woman. “He was worldly, he’d seen a lot of life… and he was always very open and cheerful.”

Not always: Julia’s family and friends remember a seismic temper that could erupt without warning. Dykins, they recalled, was moody, unpredictable, even violent when drunk and something did not please him. “
He had a very short fuse
. Julia knew when to get out of his way, but occasionally he would lash out and slap her.” John himself remembered a time when “
my mother came to see us
in a black coat with her face bleeding.” And there were other scattered recollections of abuse.

Still, Julia was committed to her new lover, and she and Bobby moved in together in an attempt to give their illicit affair an aura of respectability. This brought new complications to bear—especially on John. The appearance of yet another strange man in the house proved unsettling, to say nothing of the hostile flare-ups he witnessed between the adults, and he was shuttled from one sister to another while Julia devoted all her efforts to making the relationship work. This and other neglect took an early toll on John. “
It confused him
, and he often ran away,” Mimi told an interviewer, enumerating the times she opened the door to find her distraught nephew cowering there in tears, unable to speak. More than once Mimi marched John back to Julia’s, where she gave her younger sister a piece of her mind. Fuming angrily, she would shout, “
Oh, for heaven’s sake
, Judy,
behave yourself!
” Another time, Leila Harvey recalled “being in Mimi’s
morning room, with John behind her in the chair, and Judy being told, ‘
You are not fit
to have this child!’ ” Not only did the family “
disagree with the way she was living
her life,” but they considered Julia “frivolous and unreliable,” a woman who never took anything seriously, even when it came to mundane household chores. Relatives who visited might find her sweeping out the kitchen while wearing a pair of knickers on her head. And as for cooking, “she was absolutely crackpot,” mixing ingredients like a mad scientist. “
A little bit of tea
went in the stew,” recalled her niece. In fact, “a bit of everything went in [there].”

In June 1946 Freddie took an unexpected leave of absence from his job and returned to Liverpool to rescue John from the pressures that had been building up at home. There was no objection from Julia when he asked to visit his boy; Mimi, who was acting as
John’s unofficial guardian
, also obliged. Father and son set off on a reunion, ostensibly for a seaside holiday in Blackpool but, as Freddie later admitted, “
intending never to come back
.” After two weeks cruising the boardwalk, a plan materialized: they decided to emigrate to New Zealand. It seemed like the perfect place for a man like Freddie Lennon to start over, and above all, he would have John with him.

It has been said that John was delighted at the prospect of traveling with his father, although there is nothing, other than Freddie’s unreliable account, that expresses such a sentiment. But in all probability, John craved a man’s loving attention—to say nothing of a sailor, to say nothing of his
father
—and Freddie’s dreams were always suffused with layers of romantic fantasy. How could a boy resist? What seemed to make this episode so important for John was not the relocation or the adventure of going abroad, but that he had finally gotten his father’s attention. Having suffered through
five years of indifference
and neglect during which his parents pursued their own pleasures, that is what he wanted most.

Shortly before the long journey south, late in July 1946, Julia and Bobby Dykins appeared unexpectedly in Blackpool to take John back home to Liverpool. One can only imagine the scene this touched off. As Freddie later recounted it, an argument ensued, in which he offered to take Julia with them to New Zealand. “
She said no
. All she wanted was John.” Freddie could not persuade her to reconsider, much less abandon her son. Sensing a standoff, he suggested that John choose between them.

It was a horrible, thoughtless decision to ask a five-year-old boy to make. And while the incident seems improbable (John never recalled it as an adult), it has an affecting, if pitiful, resonance. According to Freddie’s
oft-reported version: “
He had to decide
whether to stay with me or go with her. He said me. Julia asked again, but John still said me. Julia went out of the door and was about to go up the street when John ran after her. That was the last I saw or heard of him till I was told he’d become a Beatle.”

Back in Liverpool, John Lennon soon found himself embroiled in another new melodrama, one even more traumatic and gut-wrenching than the last.

That summer, intending to give John the kind of love and stability he sorely needed, Julia organized a model of family life and enrolled him in a school near her home. But within weeks of their return, he was no longer living with her. The exact circumstances surrounding this development have been blurred by speculation and myth. There may have been some friction between Julia and Bobby Dykins that led to John’s removal; perhaps the intrusion of a young boy put too much strain on their relationship. Some relatives have suggested that Julia simply wasn’t up to the responsibility of full-time motherhood. Leila Harvey believed
a decision “was forced” on Julia
by Mimi and her tyrannical father as punishment for sinful behavior. “She wouldn’t have parted with John unless she was told,” Leila insisted.

None of this made any difference to John. He seemed to accept the idea that it was somehow his fault, that he was to blame for her incompetence. “
My mother… couldn’t cope
with me” was the way he later explained it. Whatever the reason, at some point that August, John was sent outright to Mimi’s, once and for all, where it was determined he would receive “
a proper upbringing
.”