Sarah Mourad meets Julia Baird, John Lennon's younger sister More than 30 years have passed since the Beatles' legend John Lennon departed our world. Lennon has been one of the most influential singers and songwriters of the 20th century -- both during his time with the Beatles in the 1960s and as a solo artist in the 1970s -- until he was shot dead on 8 December, 1980. In the 1970s he was also a peace activist, and his "bed-in peace" events and participation in marches as well as songs like "Imagine" and "Give Peace A Chance" are as defining of the movement as anything. Julia Baird, Lennon's younger sister, used to work as a special needs teacher; in 1986, after Lennon's death, she wrote the book John Lennon, My Brother (with Geoffrey Giuliano), which included a foreword by Paul McCartney. But the experience left her feeling that her story was incomplete. She gave up working in 2004 to write Imagine This: Growing up with my brother John Lennon, which was published in February 2007. "It's the same basic story," she says, "both about family history and John." What made her write a new book was that she always knew that there was more to know, but couldn't get to the bottom of it. "Then my mother's sister, who lived the longest, died in 1997 -- and told me everything I had always been asking," Baird says. "I described in Imagine This how she would look through the window and talk about all the stuff she refused to discuss before. So it had to be re-written." John was older than Baird by six and a half years, "so exactly what you would expect of an older brother. He took us out, me and younger sister Jackie, told us off, played with us, helped us to read, write, count... and filled the kitchen with music-playing friends..." She remembers when John moved to London at the height of Beatle fame -- he was 23, she 16, and his first wife Cynthia invited her and the family over while they were still arranging their new home. "He was joking and messing around all the time, shouting 'I'm a Beatle, we can do anything!' But we were on the lookout for the police all the same," Baird says. It wasn't only John who was an activist, or politically involved. At the time of the Vietnam war, Baird was spending a year in France when she became involved in Paris protests against the war in Vietnam -- demonstrating alongside Simone de Beauvoir. "We are all watching, sometimes holding our breath for everyone in Egypt, Syria," she reports about more recent events. "And the 'Occupy' movement is so brave. The camp outside St Paul's is due to be dismantled, on a court order. Of course, the church and the government are in the pocket of the City -- money -- and if we only suspected it before, we sure do know it now." Baird, who is now a director at Cavern City Tours in Liverpool, believes that if Lennon had been alive, he would definitely have participated somehow in all those revolutionary movements. "I can't see John sitting back in the face of such oppression. Songs, interviews... He would be loud, as he was in the States, earning himself the reputation for being a rebel." Lennon had always had a rebellious streak, she adds; that didn't develop with being a Beatle. "It was just given a big voice, and people heard him from Amsterdam to Toronto to the streets of New York... He wasn't afraid to speak out..." Though Baird has never been to Egypt, she does have an Egyptian relative, as her aunt Harriet married an Egyptian student of engineering, Ali. "They met when Ali was at Liverpool University in 1936, and after they married, she lived in Egypt until 1941. He died after a tooth extraction, and she came back to Liverpool, to her family, with Leila who was then four years old. Their surname was Hafez."
