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

On the morning of July 15, 1958, as she unknowingly waved goodbye to her mother for the very last time, 11-year-old Julia felt a sudden clenching of her stomach, a premonition of the terrible events that were to follow that afternoon.
 
"I had a feeling that the world was wrong. I can't explain it and I can't talk about it too much because I feel it again," she says, crossing her arms across her chest as if to protect herself from the memory.
 
The girls were told their mother was in hospital and were taken to stay with an aunt in Edinburgh. The news of her death was not broken to them until two months later, when a family friend told them.
 
"They (the Stanley sisters) did everything wrong, and I know people say this is how children were treated in those days, but it wasn't," says Julia in an earnest tone.
 
"They couldn't cope with it and in never mentioning her they just thought they wouldn't have to face it. They couldn't deal with any emotion."
 
As their parents had never married, the family considered the girls' father unfit to take care of them. Julia and Jackie went to live with their Aunt Harrie, in Woolton, and their mother was never mentioned again.
 
Nearly three decades later, they are still trying to come to terms with the way they were treated. Julia is particularly upset that Mimi, then 50, who disapproved so strongly of her mother living with a man who wasn't her husband, had been having an affair with her 24-year-old lodger, Michael Fishwick. This went on while John was living at Mendips. But from her book it is clear that something Julia has managed to keep sacred are her vivid memories of her mother.
 
"I have refused to let her die. She was very special and she made sure that we knew how much she loved us," she says with a smile.
 
"Writing the book has been a traumatic experience but I had to do it. People forget when they write about her that John was not an only child, she was my and Jackie's mother too.
 
"Hopefully, I have credited my mother with her worth."
 
* IMAGINE This: Growing up with my Brother John Lennon, by Julia Baird, is released by Hodder & Stoughton in hardback today. The author will be signing copies of her book at Waterstones, on Bold Street, in Liverpool city centre, at 12.30pm on Monday, February 12.
 
lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk