Baird contacted the ex-lover, whereupon he confirmed the affair, and the fact that Mimi, despite being married, years before, had been a virgin when they got together. And through a fog of mutterings and hints by her Aunt Georgina (known as Nanny), Baird gradually revealed that Mimi, the sainted, hell-and-damnation moralist, had for years been sleeping with her lodger (she in her fifties, he in his twenties). She discovered, for instance, the existence of her half-sister, the baby sent away for adoption. What brings a tremble to Baird's voice are the revelations she unearthed in researching the past.
She effectively kidnapped John and barred the door against poor, distraught Julia when she called to see her son. That she went to live with a man who had two children from a previous relationship - as if my sister and I weren't born to our mother at all!" The truth, it seems, involves the grotesque, condemnatory figure of Aunt Mimi, who waged a bitter war with her own sister for possession of the little boy, claiming that Julia and her new man were disgraceful public sinners their house an unfit arena in which to bring up a child. I still hear and read things." Such as? "That my mother gave John away. "I felt I had to do something, so I put together a handwritten, limited-edition copy, using all the family photographs. "Only five years after he died, there was a BBC 'celebration' of John's life that I watched and it was so badly wrong," she says. She has been a tenacious guardian of his flame since 1985. Then, while waitressing, she met "Bobby" Dykins, a demonstrator of invisible mending, and they fell in love. Julia became pregnant by a passing Welsh soldier and was persuaded to give up the baby girl for adoption. With the child's father mostly out of the picture, Julia and John moved in with her disapproving father. Alf, now a merchant seaman, came home long enough to make Julia pregnant, then decamped across the Atlantic. When war broke out, the Liverpool shipyards were bombed but the family (now living in Penny Lane) survived. They were married in a register's office in 1938 with no family members present Alf put to sea the following day. Alf became a ship's steward and spent long periods at sea, but their romance survived his absences. Julia Stanley - red-haired, exuberant, musical and headstrong - was only 14 when she began seeing a hotel bellboy, Alfred Lennon, to her parents' chagrin. She was one of the five Stanley sisters - Mimi, Betty, Anne, Julia and Harriet, all born in the shadow of Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral. It's a tragic story, and at its centre is Julia's and John's mother, also called Julia.
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