Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
John and Paul would come round and we’d dance to Elvis in our kitchen.. at 14 I was too young to go to the Cavern
1980. Chapman was this week refused freedom at his 10th parole hearing.
Julia prefers not to talk about him. Even speaking of John’s death is still acutely painful for her.
It could also hurt that John’s legacy is everywhere but the former teacher explains she has found embracing it is better than running away.
“There is no escape,” she says. “And there is no point in pretending. It would hurt more to pretend I had nothing to do with him.”
What helps is the memory of those joyous early years before tragedy struck, the time when a teenage John first met Paul Mccartney and George Harrison and invited them to join his band The Quarrymen.
It is 60 years since they made their first record with Percy Phillips’ Sound Recording Services. It was a rendition of Buddy Holly’s That’ll Be The Day and an original, In Spite of All The Danger. Two years later they became The Beatles. The record features in The Percy Phillips Studio Collection, which Julia will help launch tomorrow at the Beatles Convention in Liverpool.
Julia has taken on a directorship at the Cavern Club, where The Beatles played in their early years, but admits she never got to see them play there.
“We weren’t allowed at the Cavern. I was 14, but looked like a 10-year-old, and the bus home only went to Penny Lane after 9.20pm. Woe betide you if you missed it because you had to walk a few miles.”
But in 1964 she and sister Jackie went to see The Beatles at the Finsbury Park Astoria in London. Julia says: “The curtain went up and it was instant mayhem, I hated it.
“They all rushed to the front and John is doing I Love You and he’s going, ‘Get the girls’. We were hauled on our stomachs back to the curtains. But I saw them in the kitchen often enough. And at home in our kitchen, where John was truly himself.
“That kitchen is where it all happened.” From the age of five, John had actually lived with his strict Aunt Mimi, his mother Julia’s sister.
His mum had split from his dad, merchant seaman Alfred Lennon, who rarely returned from sea and was living with Bobby Dykins with whom she had her two daughters Julia and Jackie.
John went to live with Mimi because, Julia says, she disapproved of her mother’s unmarried life with Bobby.
But John always visited and was close to his younger sisters. Julia, 71, almost snaps when asked if he was different from other lads. She wants to stress their normality. “He was no different from any older brother on the road,” she says.
Sitting in Liverpool’s Hard Day’s Night Hotel, her brother’s voice on loop, she recalls the day of the church fete in Woolton in 1957 where John is said to have met Paul Mccartney.
The Quarrymen were playing and Paul