By the end of his first year at college, John was spending more and more nights with his mother and her family. When he was there, his two half-sisters, Julia and Jacqui, would sleep together in one room, while he was given Jacqui’s bed. He was there on Saturday, 15 July 1958, watching television with the girls and Bobby Dykins when, at about seven in the evening, his mother announced that she was just going out to see Mimi. Dykins may well have had an inkling of what that might have been about, but John wouldn’t.
Over the years there had been times when Mimi and Julia hadn’t got on, but they had remained devoted to one another. And if John was a problem, it was one that they both now shared. Optimist that she was, Julia was sure things would turn out well for him; realist Mimi could only hope.
It was about John that Julia needed to talk to Mimi that night, and it can’t have been easy for her. The problem was, she explained, he was spending so much time at her house that Bobby, who had just lost his job, was complaining about the cost of feeding him. That may just have been an excuse. John wasn’t his son. It wouldn’t have been surprising if Dykins, who was now unemployed and at home much more, simply resented John’s frequent presence around the house.
Julia loved having John there, but she now suggested to Mimi that perhaps Bobby could be assuaged if her son visited a little less often. That wasn’t unreasonable, and Mimi agreed to have a diplomatic word with her nephew when he returned to Mendips. With that settled, the conversation moved back to other matters. Then, at around a quarter to ten, Julia said goodbye to Mimi, and set off to catch her bus, running into Nigel Walley at the front garden gate as she did.
Nigel had been about to call at Mendips to see if John was at home. But, as he wasn’t, Julia and he chatted as they walked a little way along Menlove Avenue together, before they reached the junction with Vale Road. There they bade each other ‘goodnight’, Nigel turned up the hill to go home, and Julia crossed the first part of the dual carriageway.
Nigel hadn’t got very far before he heard a loud screech of car brakes and a heavy thud. ‘I turned to see her body flying through the air,’ he told Beatles chronicler Mark Lewisohn. ‘I rushed over. It wasn’t a gory mess, but she must have had severe internal injuries. To my mind she’d been killed instantly.’
Inside Mendips, Mimi had heard the sound of the brakes too, and rushed out, followed by lodger Michael Fishwick. Julia’s body was lying several feet in front of the car, a Standard Vanguard. She looked quite peaceful, Fishwick would later say. An autopsy would reveal that she had died as a result of a fractured skull. She was just forty-four.
John’s memory of the night was told to the Beatles’ biographer, Hunter Davies. ‘The copper came to the door to tell us about the accident . . . It was just like it’s supposed to be, the way it is in the films . . . asking if I was her son . . . It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. We’d caught up so much, me and Julia, in a few years . . . I thought, “fuck it, fuck it, fuck it! That’s really fucked it. I’ve no responsibilities to anyone now . . .”’
He and Bobby Dykins took a taxi to Sefton General Hospital. ‘I talked hysterically to the taxi driver all the way and ranted at him, the way you do.’ When they got there, he refused to go in to see his mother’s body. Dykins did. He broke down.
Pete bumped into John in Woolton the following day. He’d heard the news from Nigel. He told John how sorry he was.
‘I know,’ John replied. That was all.
They never discussed the subject again. ‘It was like when a master beat him at school, he never gave anything away,’ Pete would say. ‘His exterior never showed his feelings.’
The funeral was held nine days later after which Julia was buried at Allerton Cemetery. Tea and sandwiches followed at Aunt Harrie’s house in Woolton, where cousin Liela, who was now a medical student, sat with John’s head in her lap. Neither spoke. There was nothing either could say. The one person John did want to see and talk to was his old girlfriend Barbara. Julia had always been kind to her. After the funeral he went over to her house and the two went for a walk in the park, where he talked and talked.
At the inquest it was revealed that the driver of the car had been an off-duty policeman, who shouldn’t have even been driving unaccompanied as he didn’t have a full driving licence. The verdict was ‘misadventure’ and he was banned from driving. He later resigned from the police force. A distraught Mimi is said to have shouted out ‘Killer!’ when the verdict was announced.
John would tell me that his mother was killed by a ‘drunk driving, off-duty cop on a Saturday night’, but the ‘drunk’ part may well have been his own embroidery of the facts. It’s most likely that Julia simply stepped out from behind the bushes that separated the dual carriageway without realising how close was the oncoming car.
The favour that Julia had hated having to request of Mimi earlier that evening needn’t now be carried out. John wouldn’t be going to stay at Blomfield Road any more.
Julia’s death changed the lives of several people. As Julia and Dykins were not legally married, her two daughters, then aged eleven and eight, were taken to Scotland the following day to stay with Aunt Mater. They were told that their mother was in hospital. Only several months later when they returned to Liverpool to live with Aunt Harrie and her husband Bert in Woolton did they learn that she was dead. Having lost their mother that night in July, they couldn’t go home and would never live with their father again. Dykins, who also had children by an earlier marriage, took the death of Julia very badly. On a couple of occasions John would take Paul to visit him, sitting in the loneliness of Dykins’ new flat and playing the records that Julia had liked.
Mimi’s plans were also affected. She had inherited some money a few months earlier and was secretly considering going to live in New Zealand with Michael Fishwick. It may only have been the vague, unlikely, romantic dream of a middle-aged woman, which would never have come to anything, but that thought ended with Julia’s death.
‘I couldn’t leave John now,’ Mimi would later say. ‘He had nobody.’