The wife's tale

Cynthia Lennon - first wife of John Lennon and mother of their son, Julian - is often relegated to a 'puff of smoke' in Beatles history. She wants to set the record straight, she tells Róisín Ingle

One of the most poignant stories about Cynthia Lennon, John Lennon's first wife, concerns the day in the mid 1960s when The Beatles and their entourage were rushing to catch a train bound for a transcendental- meditation seminar in Wales. Struggling with her's and her husband's bags, Cynthia tried to keep up with the group, only to be blocked

from boarding by an overly zealous policeman, who, facing the full force of Beatlemania, did not recognise her as a Beatles wife. She was left standing on the platform, watching the train pull off without her. "It was hugely symbolic," says Cynthia,

who has written about the experience in her new book, John. "It was the beginning of the end. When it came to The Beatles I was the first to get off the train."

As anyone with even a passing knowledge of Beatles legend knows, she didn't get off the train voluntarily. John pushed her off when he began a relationship with Yoko Ono right under her nose. It is that part of the book that Cynthia says she found most difficult to write. "I'd buried a lot of it, because it was too painful, so to rake over all that was incredibly hard," she says. She describes returning home from a holiday to find John and Yoko sitting cross-legged, facing each other, Yoko wearing Cynthia's bathrobe. "The scene is implanted on my mind forever," she says. "John had such indifference in his eyes. I held no fascination for him any more."

Cynthia Powell, a middle-class girl from across the River Mersey, was 18 when she met Lennon in the lettering class at art college in Liverpool. He sat behind her and "borrowed" pencils that he never returned.

"He wasn't like any of the boyfriends I'd had before," she says. "He didn't have good looks. He was just a guy with horn-rimmed glasses and scruffy hair. There was something incredibly sexy about him, but he didn't have to play at it. The first real connection we had was him playing Ain't She Sweet on guitar. I just melted."

By the time The Beatles were starting to make it, she had become pregnant with their son, Julian, but was forced to hide herself from fans as the band's manager, Brian Epstein, believed a pregnant wife would be bad for business. She stayed with John's Aunt Mimi, whom she depicts as a woman with a cruel streak who had dominated and emotionally bullied her nephew for much of his young life. "I think her cruelty influenced him a great deal," she says softly, a Liverpool twang only faintly audible. "It created a lot of rebellion in him, because he would be one person inside her house and another one outside. John was the substitute man in Mimi's life, but he didn't get the kind of warmth and love from her that his mother could have given him."

Cynthia has a theory that Yoko was a replacement for Mimi, the domineering woman in John's life. "He was basically a coward," she says. "He gave everything up for her: his friends - the other Beatles had to make appointments with Yoko to see him - and his family. She became all-powerful because he had given her that power."

Cynthia also depicts John as a hypocrite, spreading the message of peace and love while being dismissive and downright cruel to Julian. Once, on one of his son's infrequent visits to see him in New York, John shouted at a giggling Julian that he never wanted to hear that "horrible laugh" again. It took years before Julian would allow himself to laugh, Cynthia says. Julian writes in the introduction to the book that his mother is often relegated to a "puff of smoke" in John's life. They clearly hope the book will change that.

Cynthia, who lives in Spain with her fourth husband, says that had she known the heartache that being John's girlfriend and, later, his wife would bring, she would have walked away when the scruffy Teddy boy tried to steal her pencils, all those years ago.

"It's not just the cruelty of John but the loss of people I loved. There was Stuart Sutcliffe [ the Beatles' early bassist], Brian [ Epstein], Mal Evans [ a Beatles roadie] and John. All these people were sacrificed for this huge story, this huge legend. If I'd have known I would have to go through all these periods of mourning; if I'd known Julian would be treated so badly by his father, I might have said no thanks," she says wearily. "I'm glad I didn't, though. I've had an amazing life. I don't want to be seen as a victim. I just want people to know my side of the story."

John, by Cynthia Lennon, is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £20