Julia’s shifty forty-one-year-old boyfriend Bobby Dykins – ‘a little waiter with a nervous cough and thinning margarine-coated hair’, in John’s words – had lost his driving licence, and his job. Driving drunk along Menlove Avenue at midnight, his erratic movements were clocked by a policeman, who signalled him to stop. But Dykins kept going, turning left when he should have turned right, then mounting the reservation. Asked to get out of the car, he fell to the ground and had to be helped to his feet. The policeman informed him he was under arrest, and made a note of his response: ‘You fucking fool, you can’t do this to me, I’m the press!’
Dykins was held overnight in a cell, taken to court the next morning, and then released on bail. A fortnight later, on 1 July 1958, he was disqualified from driving for a year and fined £25 – roughly three weeks’ wages – plus costs.
Dykins decided that cuts to the household budget were in order; he centred them on the seventeen-year-old John. They could, he said, no longer afford his rapacious appetite; he would have to stay with Julia’s sister Mimi. On Tuesday, 15 July, Julia popped round to Menlove Avenue to tell Mimi of these new developments.
Having sorted things out with Mimi, Julia set off for home at 9.45 p.m. Sometimes she would walk across the golf course, but on this occasion she opted for the no. 4 bus, due in a couple of minutes, a hundred yards along on the other side of the road.
As Julia was leaving, John’s friend Nigel Walley dropped by, but Mimi told him John was out.
‘Oh, Nigel, you’ve arrived just in time to escort me to the bus stop,’ said Julia. Nigel walked her to Vale Road, where they said goodbye, and he turned off. As Julia crossed Menlove Avenue, Nigel heard ‘a car skidding and a thump and I turned to see her body flying through the air’. He rushed over. ‘It wasn’t a gory mess but she must have had severe internal injuries. To my mind, she’d been killed instantly. I can still see her gingery hair fluttering in the breeze, blowing across her face.’
The impact of his mother’s death on John was immediate. ‘I know what a terrible effect it had on John,’ Nigel said, decades later. ‘He felt so lonely after it. His outlook changed completely. He hardened and his humour became more weird.’ For months, John refused to speak to him. ‘Inwardly, he was blaming me for the death. You know – “If Nige hadn’t walked her to the bus stop, or if he’d have kept her occupied another five minutes, it would never have happened.”’