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child-welfare officer, who visited the flat and expressed concern that John was sharing Julia and Dykins’s bedroom. Even by the puritanical ethos of 1940s welfare services, this was not sufficient reason to separate him from his mother. Such a decision could only be Julia’s.
    Despite the Stanleys’ disparaging nickname of Spiv (war slang for a small-time shyster), Dykins was generally a kindly and civilized man. However, when he took a drink too many, the suave, decorous headwaiter turned into an all-too-typical Liverpool male who could “lose his rag” in an instant, bellowing abuse at Julia, sometimes hitting her. And, as ever in times of emergency, her oldest sister was her first port of call. One day while John was with Mimi at Mendips, his mother came in, as he later remembered, “wearing a black coat and with her face bleeding.” He was told she had had an accident, but clearly suspected something more sinister. “I went out into the garden,” he recalled. “I loved her, but I didn’t want to get involved. I suppose I was a moral coward. I wanted to hide all feelings.”
    The upshot was a furious argument between the sisters, as Mimi herself later recounted, which yet again dragged up Julia’s wartime affair with the Welsh soldier, and baby Victoria Elizabeth. “[Julia] was looking for sympathy but as far as I was concerned she’d made her bed and had to lie on it, and I told her ‘You’re not fit to be a mother.’ She reacted like I’d slapped her in the face. I just said I think I should have John…[it] just seemed to make sense. George was very fond of him. In many ways our house was a lot quieter than the places he’d been living in and we could give him some stability. He’d had a bit of a bumpy ride up till then.”
    In Mimi’s version, Julia was by now ready to agree willingly, even thankfully. But John’s cousin Liela, who was also in the room, saw a very different end to the long tug-of-love. “I remember Mimi standing in front of John and telling Julia, ‘You’re not having him.’”
     
     
    O nce she had won him, Mimi devoted herself completely to John’s care. What little social life she and George used to enjoy she willingly sacrificed; in later life it would be her proud boast that“for 10 years [after John was in bed] I never crossed the threshold of that house at night.” She was careful always to leave a light on outside his room, until a voice sternly called after her, “Mimi…don’t waste light!”
    Mimi gave John’s life an order and structure he had never known with easygoing Julia—meals served as regularly as clockwork, bed at the same fixed (early) hour each night, baths and shampoos a regular ritual in the house’s single bathroom with its black-and-white checked linoleum and freestanding, claw-footed tub. Before meals—usually served in the morning room but sometimes in the rather somber rear dining room—he would be called on to say grace. He was not allowed to come to the table without first washing his hands, or to leave it without asking, “Can I get down?”
    Above all, Mimi was determined that he should speak like a nice middle-class boy from the suburbs, not a coarse, raucous “wacker.” Under her tutelage, there was soon not the slightest taint of inner-city Liverpool in John’s voice. “I had high hopes for [him] and I knew you didn’t get anywhere if you spoke like a ruffian. I remember once he came home from town on the bus and he’d heard these Liverpudlians talking to each other—Scouse, you know—and he was shocked, he couldn’t understand what they were talking about…. I told him he should avoid people like that…. He was a country boy…he would never meet [them] except if anyone came to the house to mend something. It was a world away really.”
    Yet Mimi’s care, for all its scrupulousness, was not maternal. She remained at heart a hospital nurse who ran her home, and its occupants, with the brisk efficiency of her old