An Interview With Julia Baird

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Paul talks extensively about the day that he met John and that he was a bit frightened of him and John had had a drink later, afterwards, and Paul thought, 'This is the big time I don't know if I can cope with this big time and this fella might fight even and I don't know if I can cope with that either'. But that was the beginning of their relationship so I suppose it was a very momentous day really, wasn't it?

And again the music was no different than we were hearing at 'Mendips' and at home. It was the same stuff - we'd heard it again and again. I suppose we were even at that stage a bit blasé about it.

What was your relationship like with John as a brother?

Well as a younger sister, there was John and then six and half years there's me, and then two years eight months after that there's my sister Jackie. So Jackie and I were - what? - three years apart roughly and John was six and a half years older than me, so nine years older than Jackie.

We had exactly the sort of relationship that you would expect of an older brother and two younger sisters. He had to look after us sometimes. He took us to the pictures; he took us out to the park and we pestered him enormously. He was good fun; he could swing you about like our father did. My father used to swing us under his legs so that you started off at the back and ended up at the front and John did the same. I remember my mother screaming: "No, no, no, you're not tall enough for that John, you're not tall enough", thinking that we'd bash our heads, but of course it was always exciting.

I don't ever remember a time when John wasn't in our lives as a brother. I don't remember. He used to draw for us. My mother drew for us and he was always bashing about on an instrument. We had a television so he watched that; we were one of the first to have one.

Your mother was killed by a car in 1958 -- how did her death change all your lives?

You're asking about when our mother died and I mean I'll just sort of go over the surface of that because its not for a website is it? Well, when my mother died John was actually in the house with us and he and my father were sitting watching television.

My mother had gone to visit Mimi, which was a sort of not unusual thing and I was outside riding on my bike when she left. She and my grandmother left together (my father's mother), and they went to get the bus and that was the last time that we saw her.

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. You don't recover from things like that, and that's not just because John was an icon. It's because we were three children who lost a mother, but with added complications in that day of our father not being married to our mother and all the rest of it.

How long was it before you found out that your parents had never married?

We didn't realise, it was a few years later that I realised that my mother had never been married to my father. We just never gave it a thought because we'd never met 'That Alf Lennon'. We never ever met him. We used to hear about him in exactly that tone 'That Alf Lennon'. I don't know where Freddie came from; I know he became Freddie, but he must have changed it at some time because to my mother and to my family he was always Alf, always, and to his brothers.

What was John's relationship like with your father, 'Bobby'?

My father was actually very good to John. He never wanted a stepfather, but he was very kind to John even after my mother died. My father moved house; he couldn't bear to even stay in the house where my mother had been. He left it immediately so when we came back from Scotland that house was done and dusted which was another dreadful thing for us.

John had a key in fact for my father's house and he and Paul used to go there to play records, to slow them down to get the words. My father gave him his first weekend holiday pocket money job. He gave John jobs and he gave me jobs as well. My sister didn't get to that age 'cause sadly he died when I was 19 and Jackie was 16.

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