Unable to resolve their dilemma, Julia and Freddie finally turned to John and confronted him with the cruelest choice two parents could ever give a four-year-old. Goaded by Mimi, Julia went to Blackpool, found the boarding house where Freddie was keeping John, and had a furious row with him. Mimi was in despair when it soon became known that Freddie was planning to emigrate to New Zealand with John. Suddenly, Freddie Lennon returned from sea, took Johnout for the afternoon and, without telling Mimi, went off to Blackpool with him.The errant father had, in effect, kidnapped his son. John was four and already living with his Aunt Mimi, thoughseeing much of his mother. ''Īnd that's the important line: ``You didn't want me.'' John probably never got over the idea that he hadn't been wanted, and although he would have had only hazy memories of it, theway Julia went about casting him off for ever must have been traumatic. As he said in his song, Mother, from his first solo album in 1970 (made after a course in Primal Scream psychotherapy): ``Mother, you had me, but I never had you. So, from the beginning, John was the boy who was given away. The rumours were that she hadn't been exactly a stay-at-home, constant wife during her husband's years at sea, anyway. She gave John away to her elder sister when her marriage to John's father, the shiftless merchant seaman Freddie Lennon, disintegrated during the war. She lived only three or four miles away from where he was brought up in Woolton, South Liverpool, by his Aunt Mimi and her husband.īut Julia Lennon chose differently. No, John's tragedy was that he had hardly got to know the mother they all sharedbefore she was killed in a road accident outside the house in which he lived when he was 17.He could have known her better. Let's face it, he had two other half-sisters as well and never showed particularinterest in them. The real, all-pervading, ever-gnawing and continuous tragedy in John Lennon's life was not that he failed to find and therefore never met his half-sister,Ingrid Pedersen, whose existence was revealed earlier this week. But Ray Connolly argues it was his mother's rejection that haunted all his relationships This week the sister for whom the Beatle searched in vain was discovered.
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