She started going round with John Lennon in 1963, after he was already married to Cynthia, but they were quite widely known about as a couple throughout Liverpool and didn't seem to make any efforts to keep their relationship secret. It is possible that their relationship was a good way of disproving any of the rumours of John's marriage and child that Beatles manager Brian Epstein was trying to hide.

      Ida was totally unaware of John's married status when she started dating him, and was really a very prim and proper young lady. When John tried to unzip her dress "down to the bum" at the conclusion of their first date, Ida spun round and slapped him in the face for daring to consider that she would accept such behaviour. Far from being annoyed, John was impressed with her reaction. Ida discovered quickly that the young John Lennon divided women neatly into two categories. He reckoned that the majority of women were, as he called them, "slags" and would offer themselves to any bloke the instant a mutual attraction was felt. The rarer kind of girls were those who demanded his respect, the girls who reminded him of his much loved and proper Aunt Mimi whom Ida quickly realised was "his barrier, his protection, his shield.". The moment Ida lashed out at him, she joined the same category as Aunt Mimi and managed to have quite a long relationship with John without ever sleeping with him.

      The day that Please Please Me topped the charts, the seventeen year-old Ida was due to go out on a date with John. When she arrived a little late for their meeting at the Walker Art Gallery, John rushed through the revolving doors to meet her yelling "We're Number One! We're Number One!", swinging her round in his arms and taking her over to where George was waiting in the car to escort them to Brian Epstein's office for the celebrations.

      Ida felt that she and John had a good steady relationship until the day her irrate father discovered that John was secretly married and informed his daughter that he was going to expose Lennon in the press for his despicable behaviour. When Ida confronted John about it was to snarl that marriage was just a piece of paper, and then ruefully insist that he'd had to do it. From that moment on, the relationship between them was over.

      Ida appeared in the TV documentary 'Beat City' and shortly after moved down to London.

SOURCES: various Beatles and Lennon biographies and books on the Liverpool scene during the 1960s

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