went to a cinema. She walked into 9 Newcastle Road waving the marriage licence and said to her family, "There!—I've married him." It was an act of defiance against her father, who had threatened to disown her if she ever cohabitated with a lover. On their wedding night, she stayed at her parents' house, and Lennon went back to his boarding house. The next day, he went back to sea for three months, on a ship bound for the West Indies. The Stanley family completely ignored her husband at first, believing him to be of "no use to anyone—certainly not our Julia". Her father demanded that he present something concrete to show that he could financially support his daughter, but Alf signed on as a Merchant Navy steward on a ship bound for the Mediterranean. He returned after a few months at sea and moved into the Stanley home. He auditioned for local theatre managers as an entertainer but had no success. Julia found out that she was pregnant (with John) in January 1940, but as the war had started her husband continued to serve as a merchant seaman during World War II, sending money home regularly. The payments stopped after Alf deserted in 1943. John Lennon gave birth to John Winston Lennon on 9 October 1940, in the second-floor ward of the Oxford Street Maternity Hospital in Liverpool, during World War II. Her eldest sister, Mimi Smith, phoned the hospital and was told that she had given birth to a boy. Smith would later claim that she went straight to the hospital during the middle of an air raid and was forced to hide in doorways to avoid the shrapnel from falling bombs, but in actuality, there had been no attack on Liverpool that night. Alf was not present at their son's birth, as he was at sea. John started at his first school in November 1945–Mosspits, on Mosspits Lane, Wavertree–so she found a part-time job at a café near the school. After numerous criticisms from the Stanley family about their (still-married) daughter "living in sin" with John Dykins, and considerable pressure from Smith–who twice contacted Liverpool's Social Services to complain about the infant John sleeping in the same bed as Julia and Dykins—she reluctantly handed the care of John over to Smith and her husband, George Smith. In July 1946, Alf visited the Smith house, Mendips, at 251