Memoir:The Fab Four are a dwindling band of brothers nowadays but their music still effortlessly transcends wave after wave of fad and fashion. And as we push on remorselessly towards the 30th anniversary (imagine) of the assassination of John Lennon, the most waspish and brilliant of The Beatles continues to fascinate.
This is the latest addition to the hefty collection of writings about Lennon and at the very least the author's claims to knowing him ring true. To be precise, Julia Baird is a half-sister of Lennon's. For the generations of music lovers obsessed with John, this book is a peek behind the curtains at what was a highly dysfunctional family in post-war Liverpool. Philip Larkin's much- quoted lines about sex being invented in 1963 "between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles first LP" stand corrected here. Perhaps life was dull in Hull and Coventry, but on this account there was plenty of passion in Liverpool.
John and Julia's mother, the often maligned Julia, had two daughters with a restaurant manager named Bobby Dykin after her marriage to Alf Lennon - an Irish-blooded merchant sailor famous for his spectacularly long absences - had irretrievably broken down. Prior to meeting Dykin, Julia Lennon conducted an affair with a Welsh soldier during the second World War that led to a scandalous pregnancy and another baby girl, who was, at her family's insistence, released for adoption. Glamorous in an austere, strawberry coloured 1940s way, musically gifted and prone to depression, Julia Lennon struggled with Mimi, her elder sister, for control of her children until her violent death at the hands of a dangerous driver in 1958. This book is her daughter's plainly heartfelt attempt to redress her mother's flighty reputation, both within the family legacy and the parallel universe that John would inhabit with The Beatles.
IN FACT, THIS memoir is primarily about that mother-daughter relationship, with wistful portraits of their early happiness together followed by the bleak years when Baird would stalk red-haired women around the local shops fantasising that her mother was still alive. Mimi had swept in to remove John from Julia's care when he was just an infant and is generally credited as his chief source of love and nurture. That legacy comes in for some dark revision here, with the implicit suggestion that Mimi all but thieved her nephew to ease the barrenness of her own life and negatively controlled the relationship between mother and son. Here, Lennon's half-sister lovingly recreates the moments of snatched happiness they shared with their mother and convincingly presents a sense of family that was blossoming anew when she was killed. John Lennon shares two chief traits with his mother. He was - to state the obvious - musically gifted and he would die young and violently. If her mother's shocking death is the primary haunting for Julia Baird, then her half-brother John is like a secondary ghost, lurking in the shadow lands, suffering the same maternal loss as she did and then disappearing into the elsewhere of rock'n'roll immortality.
The most powerful part of this memoir is watching the rise of The Beatles through the eyes of John Lennon's kid sister. To us, Lennon has been the famous, bespectacled peacenik ex-Brit New Yorker for so long that it is easy to forget he was also a traditional Liverpudlian child dressed in the shorts and blazers of Just William. At the Liverpool premiere of A Hard Day's Night, Julia watched John, besieged by cameras, and she feared he was hungry. "I gave John a sandwich but he held it in his hand and eventually gave it back to me."
Over the years, such intimacies grew more rare. John was shielded in adulthood by Yoko Ono as he had been in childhood by Mimi. By the time of his death, the old family ties were so buried that when Julia contacted the BBC about a documentary, she was brusquely informed that the singer didn't have any sisters. Julia maintained a warring but caring relationship with the fascinating Mimi. She was told her aunt's final words were: "I'm terrified of dying. I have been so wicked."
It would be wrong to dismiss this book as another attempt to cash in on one of the truly gigantic names in the rock'n'roll pantheon.
More likely, Julia Baird wrote this all down to clear her own mind, to bid farewell to the superstar brother she last spoke to by transatlantic phone call some 27 years ago and to present, in a clear fashion, all the lonely people that made up John Lennon's childhood of absent figureheads.
Keith Duggan is an Irish Times journalist
Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother By Julia Baird Hodder & Stoughton, 316pp. £18.99
