Read John Lennon: The Life for Free Online

convalescent hospital, her charges included some former employees of a wealthy industrialist named Lynton Vickers, who remained conscientiously concerned for their welfare and came regularly to visit them. Between the caring plutocrat and the angular young ward sister there developed a mutual respect and affection. At Vickers’s invitation, Mimi took a sabbatical from nursing to become his secretary, living in at his Gothic mansion in Bettwys-y-Coed, in north Wales.
    Such diversions came to an end with her marriage to George Smith, at the mature age of thirty-three in 1939. The Smith family were dairy farmers in Woolton, a place which at that time, with its open fields and leafy lanes, resembled a country village more than a big-city suburb. George first got to know Mimi because the convalescent hospital where she worked was part of his morning milk round. The dairyman’s thoughts soon turned to marriage, but Mimi proved more cautious, declaring herself unwilling to be “tied to a gas stove or a sink” and regarding George as no more than a reliable standby “whenever I was hungry or stuck in town.” Even for that buttoned-up time and place, theirs was a relationship singularly lacking in romance. When Mimi finally did agree to get engaged, it was sealed with a businesslike handshake rather than a kiss. “George was different from me…chalk and cheese, really,” she would remember. “I was always filibustering about, but he was a quiet man. Set in his ways a bit, but a kind man.” She recalled, too, how George’s mild nature made him easily controllable, without resort to “filibustering.” “I used to give him a look and he’d know all right if he’d upset me. Just give him The Look and he’d know.”
    Possibly in reaction to their domineering father, all the Stanley sisters but Julia had ended up with quiet, unassertive men whose sole function in the family was to be breadwinners and who took little or no part either in its management or its complex internal politics. Elizabeth, the second eldest, known as Mater, had first married a marine surveyor named Charles Molyneux Parkes; after Parkes’s death in 1944, she had married a Scottish dentist, Robert (“Bert”) Sutherland. Anne, the third in seniority, known as Nanny, had married a Ministry of Labour official named Sydney Cadwallader. Harriet, known as Harrie, the second-youngest of the five sisters and most adventurous of the quartet, had first married an Egyptian engineering student named Ali Hafez and emigrated with him to Cairo. Just prior to the war, Hafez had died of septicemia after a routine tooth extraction, and Harrie had returned to Liverpool with their daughter, Liela. Having given up British nationality, Harrie was classed as a foreign alien and obliged to report regularly to the authorities. A judiciously swift remarriage to Norman Birch of the Royal Army Service Corps restored her UK passport to her.
    Mimi, Mater, Nanny, and Harrie were recognizably a clan. Though none was as strikingly pretty as Julia, all four had a rangy, suntanned elegance—not the Marlene Dietrich type so much as the Katharine Hepburn. All dressed immaculately, never setting foot out of doorswithout hats, gloves, and matching shoes and handbags; all were immensely house-proud, capable, talkative, humorous, and forceful. Later in John’s life, he would talk of writing a story on the lines of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga about the “strong, intelligent, beautiful women [who] dominated the situation in the family. I was always with the women. I heard them talk about the men and talk about life. They always knew what was going on. The men never ever knew.” Their husbands were categorized, even openly referred to, as outsiders—a tag that would also be given the marriage partner of every child in the family.
    But of the four, only Mimi had remained childless. Her explanation was that she’d had to be a mother to the others during their girlhood, and didn’t