Family reflections on the Liverpool Lennons



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An Interview With Julia Baird

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(page 6 of 6)

Do you think he was intending to return to Britain to live or was he just coming home for a visit?

Well I don't know, I can't say that can I? I can't imagine that not having been in the country for nine years, I don't think it would have been a week's visit. It'd be like if you or I went to Australia and someone said you could stay for a week. You'd say I can't just come for a week. It's got to be a month at least hasn't it?

What's your favourite memory?

One of my fondest memories of John is when John was a child because he used to lie in bed and make mountains out of his knees and the blankets over them. We'd sit up and he'd collapse us all the time into a heap. I suppose it's because he's not here anymore so I tend to cling more to the childhood memories.

I don't think of John as a Beatle. I don't have those memories of John on stage. I can see them of course but they are certainly not in my favourite memories.

When I got contact lenses at 18, John got them at the same time. We got contact lenses together because we were both chronically short sighted. If you ever see clips of John without his glasses on in the early days he was always kind of looking down his nose. It was nothing to do with snobbery. It was the lights on the contact lenses and he had to give up on them. That makes me smile. I can remember that and smile because I remember trying to get used to them myself and he had that added thing, plus of course the upside down life that he had, that meant there was no regular putting in and out of lenses was there? So he just gave up in the end.

So my favourite memories tend to be with my mother and John and I can see them laughing together. My mother had a record called 'My Son John, To Me You Are So Wonderful' by some old crooner. She used to put it on after he'd gone and sit and listen to it. So they are my memories; they're very sort of home memories of John as a brother.

What was it like to have John as a Beatle? My sister and I, and a lot of the family, but my sister and I mainly because we are John's sisters, have had all of the flack without any of the benefits.

So if you are going to ask me, what did I think of John being a Beatle? I wish he had never picked up a guitar. I wish he had never been a Beatle. To me it was the destruction of many things - of family relationships, of John himself at the end of the day, and I'd rather have John back and us all be poverty-stricken.

When he was doing bed-ins, Bagisms all the rest of it, and we talked about that on the phone, we had unwarranted and unwanted attention from that. John himself was surrounded by ivory towers of cash, he could say who was to come near him and who wasn't. We couldn't - we were out there. I'm sorry he ever did it and I think he was too at the end of the day.

He's one of the greatest musicians of all time and left an incomparable legacy - in a way the world would be poorer without his contribution.

Well that's from your point of view, I can't see it like that. I'd rather have John. I'm being selfish here. You asked me what I thought and I'm not thinking from other people's point of view I'm thinking from mine. I know my sister feels the same; we wish John had never seen a guitar.