The first Mrs Lennon and mother of Julian, Cynthia. has stepped out of the shadows and made a record, Those Were The Days. But were they? Secrecy, heartache. harassment, boredom. infidelity - "1 know who Norwegian Wood was about, but I'm not telling" she, er, tells Paul Du Noyer.

Brian Epstein wrote: ''A Beatle must not marry. It is all very well if one is married before one is a fully-grown Beatle, but a fully-grown Beatle must stay single." As usual it was John Lennon who broke the rules.

Cynthia Powell was John's art school girlfriend and they were married in 1962 after she became pregnant. When they met, in 1958, he was a teddy boy with dismal prospects, but she was with him through Hamburg,Beatlemania, LSD and the Maharishi. Their child, Julian,would grow up to be a pop musician himself. Few people have had a life as extraordinary as hers, and today, Cynthia Lennon ("55 and menopausal," she volunteers, cheerfully) is in nostalgic mood.

Those Were The Days was a hit for Mary Hopkin on The Beatles' Apple label and it's the song that Mrs Lennon has chosen for her first ever single. She'd tried some demos with her neighbour on the Isle Of Man, Chris Norman, the former singer with '70s popsters Smokie. In fact, she'd not sung since her last appearance, aged 13, performing Who Is Sylvia, What Is She? with the Hoylake Parish Girls' Choir. But they made the record 'Wth the help of a few glasses of wine" and now it's out on Norman's own label, Dice.



She and her present partner, Jim, live by a waterfall ("very tranquil, good for the soul") and visit the mainland for occasional caravan holidays, or when she is invited to speak at Beatle conventions: "The fans are wonderful. They always were.You get one or two odd- balls, but that's life, isn't it?" The tale she tells them is not without pain. But, she says, "the actual talking about it sometimes helps a great deal. When you've actually experienced it, that is part of you. Nothing could hurt any more than that hurt at the time."

The young John and Cyn shared a class in Liverpool Art College. "John was very wayward in those days, he didn't want to work, he wanted to play his guitar." They found common ground in their poor eyesight. She agrees the recent movie Backbeat is a fair account of those early years, "but I think there was one comment from me that all I wanted was a house and babies. But I had been studying for five years to be a teacher, so to say all I wanted was the house missed me slightly. I also had a headscarf and a tweed coat on which was not me, because I was quite a with-it student, in trousers." At John's urging, she tried to re-vamp her look in line with his pin-up, Brigitte Bardot.

When The Beatles' career exploded in 1963, the star put his "secret wife and baby in a London flat: 'Top floor, £15 a week, and no lift, which was great fun with thepram, with fans outside, blocking up the key- hole with chewing gum and sleeping on the stairs overnight, Thankfully we were young, and everything was so exciting. They were going to the top of the charts. It was just an amazing experience." They could no longer hide their marriage, but the fans didn't mind.

Soon they moved to the Surrey stockbroker belt, and lived in what John would later call "a happily married state of boredom." It was not to last - John's growing interest in the obscure Japanese performance artist Yoko Ono saw to that - but their time together was undeniably Lennon's most creative. "I'm sure I was part of John's writing," she allows. In those days none of them would say, I'm writing this for so-and-so, because it would be too embarrassing. But John actually wrote poetry to me quite a lot. The only song that I thought might be something to do with me was Girl, but of course John isn't here to say any more. But whatever they were writing at the time was about their lives anyway."

John admitted that some of his songs, such as Norwegian Wood, were coded accounts of his extra- marital affairs. She accepts this: "Absolutely. I know who Norwegian Wood was about, but I'm not telling. " In fact, Lennon described his life on tour as Satyricon". In the years between Hamburg and Yoko he had countless sexual encounters; he was even linked with Joan Baez, Jackie de Shannon and Eleanor Bron. But Cynthia was stunned by his first confession of infidelity, shortly before he took up with Yoko. She had been naive, surely?

"Well, I'm glad I was naive," she replies. I really am. Naivety can be a bonus sometimes. If I'd known what was going on, life would have been much harder for me. I wasn't that naive but I was naive enough, and it saved me a lot of heartache."

One day in 1968 she came home from a holiday to find Yoko staying with John atthe family's Weybridge house. The marriage was finally over, and Cynthia was shattered. That was a horrendous period for me. Horrendous! We all go through such periods, or we're very lucky if we don't, but when it's on a world scale and the spotlight is on you, that's even harder." She later wrote: I understood their love. I knew I couldn't fight the unity of mind and body that they had with each other ... Yoko did not take John away from me, because he had never been mine." It seems a philosophical reaction, doesn't it?

"It was a fait accompli, I had no choice. I knew that whatever I did, I would be hitting my head against a wall, so I bowed out as gracefully as I could. I'm not a vengeful person anyway." At least Paul McCartney was supportive. He drove out to console her, composing a song for little Julian on the way. "He was devastated by the break- up. He brought me a rose and offered marriage, as a joke: We'll show'em, won't we, Cyn? It was very touching and on the way to the house he had written Hey Jude. It always brings tears to my eyes, that song."

Cynthia would not see John again until 1974, in New York. "I took Julian out to reunite him with his father. Their relationship was very good after that. But for four years there was no contact, which I found terribly sad."

She remarried twice in the 1970s, the second time opening a restaurant in North Wales with her new husband John Twist - hence the title of her 1978 autobiography, A Twist Of Lennon, about which John was scathing ("They all get one shot. Each chauffeur and ex-wife and ex-lover and ex-servant gets one book if they're lucky. ") but his High Court action failed to stop it coming out.

What was Cynthia's view of her ex in his "house- husband" years? "I'd lost touch with John. My only contact was when Julian went to stay and he'd come back and tell me what was going on. I just hoped that he was happy. That was all I ever wanted." John claimed he was redefining himself, getting away from being the macho working class man.

"To a certain extent. But he was never really a macho working-class man. I think his talents were above and beyond that. He was like a chrysalis. He had to bemacho to cope with the types he came across in Liverpool. He tried to look like the tough guys so that they wouldn't pick on him. What John became was what John really was, underneath it all." When did you last meet Yoko? "At Aunt Mimi's funeral, and Sean was there. We chatted. It's all calm on the Western Front. It's called Make Love Not War." (She laughs.)

Are you not bitter? "Not at all. We've got our own crosses to bear. I get on with my life and she gets on with hers. She's a mother to Sean and I'm a mother to Julian and we try to protect our children considering the legend that we are left with."What advice do you give Julian? "Oh, lots. 'Beware of drugs, sex and rock'n'roll,' is it. But it's no good telling them, because they'll do it anyway! My father would never have allowed me to go out with John Lennon. We all fly in the face of our parents' advice. But it all comes round if you're patient enough. Julian has been the best thing. He is the jewel in the crown as far as I'm concerned."

Have the good times outweighed the bad times in your life? "Pretty evenly balanced, I would say. I hope I take the best out of life. It's the only way to survive. I had some fantastic times, I also had some very tragic times, but there are many people who have such extremes. You just get on with it."

Could you have behaved differently and not split? "No. I think those years were our growing years, growing into individuals. And John's path was a different path to mine."

Was John the love of your life? "I think first loves are always very special, and I don't think you ever lose that feeling."



From the April 1995 edition of Q Magazine.