So I sing a song of love for Julia

Feb 5 2007 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

JOHN Lennon's sister wants the world to know the truth about their mother. Laura Davis reports

"The first time my father told her to go away. She came back with a social worker who said, ‘you can't take this woman's child away, leave him alone'.
 
"When Mimi came back again, she brought the head of social services with her.
 
"He gave John to Pop and he handed him straight to Mimi who took him straight to Mendips (her home in Woolton now owned by the National Trust). Pop said it was just until my mother had sorted herself out, but Mimi went and changed John's school straight away."
 
Julia, now 59, believes Mimi actively prevented Lennon from visiting his mother, and later his two younger sisters, because they lived in a "house of sin".
 
Yet despite her opposition, he managed to fit in sneaky visits after school and sometimes at weekends. "He was quite small for a long time and then he got glasses when he was 11 - big Buddy Holly ones. Then he started wearing drainpipes and enormous winklepicker shoes that started here and ended here," she says, spreading her hands wide apart.
 
"One of my favourite memories is of him walking along the road, strumming on the guitar.
 
"But I never thought he was brilliantly talented. My mother had all the talent - she was extremely musical, very entertaining and could play the banjo.
 
"John learned to play with her by slowing down the records so he could learn all the chords.
 
"They were happy times but you don't know you're living in happiness until it's not there anymore."
 
The unconventional family's bubble of happiness burst on the day Julia Lennon crossed Menlove Avenue, in Woolton, after visiting Mimi and John, and was hit by a car driven by an off-duty police officer - a learner driver with no licence and no insurance.

She died before the ambulance arrived.