tearfully never to touch alcohol again. Even after all these years, her sisters had never brought themselves to like or accept Dykins; their opinion of him now sank to rock bottom when—echoing his first panic-stricken cry to John—he announced he couldn’t cope with raising his two young daughters by Julia. The sisters’ mutual support group then swung into action to look after 11-year-old Julia and 9-year-old Jackie, much as it had for John 12 years earlier. Since Mimi had more than enough on her plate this time around, it was decided that the girls should live with their Aunt Mater and Uncle Bert in Edinburgh.
In an attempt to soften the blow, Julia and Jackie were told that their mother was merely ill in hospital, and then packed off to Edinburgh on a supposed holiday with Mater and Bert. Within a short time, however, Mater decided she had bitten off more than she could chew, and Julia and Jackie were brought back to Woolton to live with Harrie at the Cottage, having still not been told that Julia was dead. The deception somehow struggled on for weeks more, until Harrie’s husband, Norman, could bear it no longer and blurted out, ‘Your Mummy’s in Heaven.’
Unable to stay on at 1 Blomfield Road without Julia, Dykins moved to a smaller house on the outskirts of Woolton, eventually acquiring a new woman friend and a dog. But he maintained contact with his daughters and kept Harrie well supplied with money for their keep. He also continued to feel a stepfatherly obligation towards John, giving him a key to the new house and encouraging him to use it whenever he pleased. When Dykins subsequently became relief manager at the Bear’s Paw restaurant, he got John a summer job there and ensured that a large share of the tips always went his way.
However deficient the Echo’s inquest report, it at least gave Julia her proper surname. For her marriage to Alf Lennon had never been officially dissolved, any more than Mimi’s custody of John had been officially ratified. Her death in such shocking circumstances might have been expected to reconnect John with the long-absent father who nonetheless was still his legal guardian. But the family could not have got in touch with Alf even if it had wanted to.
Since leaving the merchant navy, Alf had, in his own romantic parlance, become ‘a gentleman of the road’, the once-immaculate saloon steward now a semi-vagrant whose only employment was occasional menial jobs in hotel and restaurant kitchens. He was washing dishes at a restaurant called the Barn in Solihull when his brother Sydney sent him the Liverpool Echo cutting about Julia’s death. He did not return to Liverpool until just after the following Christmas, having spent the preceding weeks in a London Salvation Army hostel recovering from a broken leg. It was at the hostel that a Liverpool solicitor finally contacted him and told him that, as Julia’s legal next of kin, he was heir to the whole of her small estate. Alf duly returned north and presented himself at the solicitor’s office, but only to give up his right to Julia’s few possessions in favour of John. He made no attempt to see or communicate with John, however, and after a few days disappeared on his travels again. His reasoning was that, thanks to Mimi’s years of propaganda, John would regard him as nothing but ‘a jailbird’.
For Mimi herself, the blow went beyond losing her sister and seeing John lose his mother. Now that John was approaching manhood, she had realised she must prepare for a time when he would longer need her. For the first time in her dutiful, self-sacrificing life, she could think of herself—and bring her relationship with Michael Fishwick into the open. Fishwick had been offered a three-year research post in New Zealand, where, as it happened, several of Mimi’s mother’s family had emigrated. Not long after George’s death, an uncle out there had died and left her a property worth £10,000. Mimi’s plan, confided to no one, had been to follow Fishwick and live with him in the house she had inherited. ‘If it hadn’t been for Julia’s death,’ Fishwick says, ‘she’d have been gone by the end of ‘58.’
Now there was nothing in the world that could have made her leave John. ‘I worried myself sick about [him] then,’ she remembered. ‘What he would turn out to be…what would happen if it was me next.’
Despite Mimi’s suspicions, police constable Eric Clague did not get off scot-free. He underwent a period of suspension from duty and, soon afterwards, resigned from Liverpool Constabulary to begin a new career as a postman. By a horrible coincidence, one of the delivery routes he was later assigned included Forthlin Road, Allerton. Many times as John sat in the McCartneys’ living room, he would have heard their afternoon mail drop onto the front doormat, little suspecting that ‘Mister Postman’ was his mother’s killer.
I was in a blind rage for two years.
I was either drunk or fighting.
Late-fifties Britain had none of the aids to coping with personal tragedy that we so depend on today. There were no family bereavement counsellors to help John come to terms with his loss; no therapists, support groups, helplines, agony aunts, confessional television shows or radio call-ins yet existed to tell him that the most private emotions are better made public and that broken hearts heal quicker if worn on one’s sleeve.
In 1958, Britons throughout the whole social scale still observed the Victorian Empire-builders’ convention of the stiff upper lip. Tears were the prerogative of females only and, for the most part, shed in decent seclusion; males were expected to show no emotion whatever. The closest members of a stricken family rarely expressed their feelings to one another, let alone to strangers. Such reticence had always been strongest in the north, strongest of all in those northern parts where privet hedge grew and hallways were half-timbered. Thus the shock and pain and outrage of Julia’s death would stay bottled up in John until their release like a howling genie more than a decade into the future.
Among Julia’s four sisters, there certainly was no weeping or wailing, only the most modest, muted signs of heartbreak. On the day after the tragedy, she had been due to go and see her sister Nanny at Rock Ferry. In anticipation of the visit, Nanny already had deck chairs set out in the back garden. She took a photograph of the unused chairs, and kept it always beside her until her own death in 1997.
Mimi herself was never seen to cry, although Nanny’s son, Michael Cadwallader, often saw silent tears well in her eyes. John would put his arms around her and say ‘Don’t worry, Mimi…I love you.’ But such moments were never shared with outsiders. Three days after Julia’s death, Michael Fishwick had had to report back to his RAF station, missing the funeral and not returning until the end of the year. Close though he was to Mimi, she never mentioned the events of 15 July to him, nor did she and John ever discuss them in his presence. In her traumatised state, the secret affair could hardly continue and, by unspoken agreement, she and Fishwick returned to being just friends. His visits became more infrequent until finally he met a young woman his own age and married her in 1960, ensuring that henceforward there would be only one man in Mimi’s life.
The boys who had known John since toddlerhood were all equally at a loss about what to say to him. Pete Shotton, to whose house a distraught Nigel Walley had run immediately after the accident, could manage only a muttered ‘Sorry about your mum, John’ when they met in Woolton the next day. As the last person to speak to Julia, Nigel himself would always harbour a lingering sense of guilt. He felt John blamed him for not saying the extra couple of words that might have stopped her crossing the road when she did.
It was, in fact, a new and still largely untried friend who most empathised with John’s situation. For barely a year had passed since Paul McCartney had lost his own mother to breast cancer. ‘We had these personal tragedies in common, which did create a bond of friendship and understanding between us,’ he says. ‘We were able to talk about it to some degree [and] share thoughts that until then had remained private…These shared confidences formed a strong basis for our continuing friendship and insight into each other’s characters…’ They could even summon up a weak smile at their common predicament after bumping into an acquaintance of Paul’s mother Mary who also knew Julia, but had no idea that either had died. Having first blunderingly enquired of Paul how his mother was, the acquaintance turned to John and asked him the same question.
Most of his fellow