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want to go through it all again. She was, in fact, thought not to care very much for small children, preferring them when they grew older and could join in intelligent conversation about things she cared for, such as reading and music.
    From gentle George Smith, Mimi received social standing as a farmer’s wife in a salubrious part-rural area, and a home that more than met her exacting standards. This was a house named Mendips, at 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton, where the couple took up residence in 1942. Even to someone less attuned to nuances of class, the dwelling proclaimed its superiority in diverse ways: the fact that it was semi-detached rather than terraced; that, instead of plain brick, it was coated in knobby gray pebble dash; that it stood on an avenue, so much more exclusive-sounding than a mere street or road; above all that, far from being just a number on the postman’s round, it also had a name, grandiosely identifying it with a range of hills in far-off Somerset.
    On the inside, Mendips was designed to suggest an Elizabethan manor house. Its entrance hall had a half-timbered finish, the lower beams serving as display shelves for Mimi’s prized collection of Royal Worcester and Coalport china. The baronial-looking staircase ascended past a large stained-glass window inset with a Tudor rose motif. The remaining windows had stained-glass borders decorated with Art Nouveau flowers. In addition to the ground-floor living room and dining room, there was the country-manor touch of amorning room, a space rather more modest than its title suggests, immediately adjacent to the kitchen. When the house had been built in 1933, its first owners would have employed a uniformed housemaid rather than just an occasional cleaning lady. Above the morning-room door still hung a board with a row of five panels, indicating where electric bells once summoned the maid to the dining room, drawing room, front door, front bedroom, or back bedroom. Yes, the future self-proclaimed working-class hero grew up in a house equipped with servants’ bells.
    Mimi always described her acquisition of John solely in terms of family duty—the habit ingrained since childhood of straightening out her younger sister’s muddles. “Julia had met someone else, with whom she had a chance of happiness,” she would say. “And no man wants another man’s child….” In fact, the relationship between Julia and her headwaiter, Bobby Dykins, had never excluded John in any way. Far from discriminating against “another man’s child,” Dykins was prepared to bring John up as if he were his own. He was serious enough about this to have persuaded Julia to move out of 9 Newcastle Road with John and into a small rented flat in Gateacre, where the hoped-for family unit might evolve with less pressure from her relatives.
    But for Mimi, Julia’s “living in sin” so publicly with Dykins threatened to make her sister the object of scandalized gossip such as even Alf Lennon had never visited on the super-respectable Stanley family. Julia might be old enough to lead her own life, but little John should not have to live in such an atmosphere of moral laxity.
    Mimi had other motives, too, compounded not only of her unassailable moral certitude but also her reluctance or inability to have a baby by the usual channels, and the almost mystical affinity she had felt with John since first seeing him newly born in his mother’s arms. “She decided she wanted him,” her niece Liela Harvey says. “And who could blame her, because he was the cutest little fellow you ever saw.”
    Mimi therefore enlisted her father in a campaign against Julia and Dykins that today might almost be defined as harassment. One day, she and Pop Stanley both turned up unannounced at the Gateacre flat, declaring it an unfit place for John to live and demanding toremove him. But Julia, supported by Dykins, refused to give him up. Mimi then sought the intervention of a Liverpool Corporation