Something deeper than music linked John and Paul. Their mothers had died when they were in adolescence: Paul’s when he was fourteen, John’s when he was seventeen.
When he first met John, Paul had already lost his mother, but John’s mother, Julia, was still alive. ‘His mother lived right near where I lived. I had lost my mum, that’s one thing, but for your mum to actually be living somewhere else and for you to be a teenage boy and not living with her is very sad. It’s horrible. I remember him not liking it at all.’
Paul recalled ‘a tinge of sadness’ in John at being apart from Julia. ‘She was a beautiful woman with long red hair. She was fun-loving and musical too; she taught him banjo chords, and any woman in those days who played a banjo was a special, artistic person … John and I were both in love with his mum. It knocked him for six when she died.’
It created a bond between them. Together, the two boys conspired to upend their grief, to turn the wound into a weapon. ‘Once or twice when someone said, “Is your mother gonna come?” we’d say, in a sad voice, “She died.” We actually used to put people through that. We could look at each other and know.’
There was something more peculiar that linked them, too. In 1997 Paul told his friend and biographer Barry Miles, ‘At night there was one moment when she would pass our bedroom door in underwear, which was the only time I would ever see that, and I used to get sexually aroused. I mean, it never went beyond that but I was quite proud of it, I thought, “That’s pretty good.” It’s not everyone’s mum that’s got the power to arouse.’
One afternoon John ventured into his mother’s bedroom. Julia was taking a nap in a black angora sweater, over a tight dark-green-and-yellow mottled shirt. He remembered it exactly. He lay on the bed next to her, and happened to touch one of her breasts. It was a moment he would replay over and over again in his memory for the rest of his life: ‘I was wondering if I should do anything else. It was a strange moment because at the time I had the hots, as they say, for a rather lower-class female who lived on the opposite side of the road. I always think I should have done it. Presumably, she would have allowed it.’
John’s friends remember Julia as vivacious and flirtatious. The first time Pete Shotton met her, he found himself ‘greeted with squeals of girlish laughter by a slim, attractive woman dancing through the doorway with a pair of old woollen knickers wrapped around her head’. John introduced him. ‘Oh, this is Pete, is it? John’s told me so much about you.’ Pete held out his hand, but she bypassed it. ‘Julia began stroking my hips. “Ooh, what lovely slim hips you have,” she giggled.’
Twenty-four years later, in 1979, sitting in his apartment in the Dakota Building, John recorded a cassette tape. At the start he announced, ‘Tape one in the ongoing life story of John Winston Ono Lennon.’ After rushing through a variety of topics – his grandparents’ house in Newcastle Road, Bob Dylan’s recent Christian album Long Train Coming (‘pathetic … just embarrassing’), his love of the sound of the bagpipes at the Edinburgh Military Tattoo when he was a child – he returned, once more, to that recurring memory of the afternoon he lay on his mother’s bed and touched her breast.
On The White Album,1 the song ‘Julia’ sounds less like an elegy than a love song, full of yearning for someone unobtainable:
Julia, sleeping sand, silent cloud, touch me
So I sing a song of love – Julia.
1 Officially titled The Beatles, it became popularly known as ‘The White Album’, or occasionally ‘The Double White’, but never ‘The Beatles’. For the rest of this book I will call it The White Album.