Beatles (13 page)

‘I was disappointed at not getting Art at GCE, but I’d given up. All they were interested in was neatness. I was never neat. I used to mix all the colours together. We had one question which said do a picture of “Travel”. I drew a picture of a hunchback, with warts all over him. They obviously didn’t dig that.

‘But I’d say I had a happy childhood. I came out aggressive, but I was never miserable. I was always having a laugh.

‘It was all imagining I was Just William really.’

Towards the end of his days at school, John had become interested in pop music, although pop music was something that Mimi had always discouraged. She never liked him singing pop songs which as a little boy he picked up from the radio.

John had no musical education or training of any sort. But he did teach himself to play the mouth organ, after a fashion. Uncle George had bought him a cheap mouth organ.

‘I would have sent him to music lessons,’ says Mimi, ‘the piano or violin, when he was very young. But he didn’t want that. He couldn’t be bothered with anything which involved lessons. He wanted to do everything immediately, not take time learning.

‘The only musical encouragement he ever got was from a bus conductor on the way from Liverpool to Edinburgh. We packed him off with his cousins in Edinburgh each year to stay with my sister. He’d got a battered old mouth organ from George and played it all the way there, driving everybody mad, no doubt.

‘But the conductor was greatly taken by him. When they got to Edinburgh, he said come down to the bus station tomorrow morning and I’ll give you a really good mouth organ. John couldn’t sleep that night, and he was down there first thing. It was a real good one as well. John must have been about ten at the time. It was the first encouragement he ever had. That conductor didn’t know what he started.’

The sort of pop songs John did listen to, when he listened to any, were by Johnnie Ray and Frankie Laine. ‘But I didn’t take much notice of them.’

Nobody took much serious notice, at least not boys in Britain of John Lennon’s age. Pop music, up to the mid-fifties, was all somehow remote and had no connection with real life. It all came from America and was produced by very show businessy professionals in lovely suits with lovely smiles who sang lovely ballads, mainly for shop girls and young mums.

Then three things happened. On 12 April 1954, Bill Haley and his Comets produced ‘Rock Around the Clock’. It took a year for it to have any effect on Britain. But when it did, as the theme song in the film
Blackboard Jungle
, rock and roll hit Britain and cinema seats started to be ripped up.

The second event occurred in January 1956 when Lonnie Donegan produced ‘Rock Island Line’. This had little connection with the wild rock music, despite the title. What was new and interesting was the fact that it was played on the sort of instruments anyone could play. Lonnie Donegan popularized skiffle. For the first time, anyone could have a go, with no musical knowledge or even musical talent.

Even the guitar, the hardest instrument in a skiffle group, could be played by anyone who mastered a few simple chords. The other instruments, like a washboard, or tea chest bass, could be played by any idiot.

The third and in a way the most exciting event in pop music in the 1950s and the most influential single person in pop at any time, until the Beatles themselves, was Elvis Presley. He also
appeared in the early part of 1956. By May his ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was top of the charts in 14 different countries.

In a way it was obvious that someone like Elvis should happen. You just had to look at Bill Haley in the flesh, podgy, middle-aged looking and definitely unsexy, to realize that this new exciting music, rock’n’roll, eventually had to have an exciting singer to go with it.

Rock was the music that excited all kids. Elvis was the exciting singer singing the exciting songs. ‘Nothing really affected me until Elvis,’ says John.

All the Beatles, like millions of boys of the same age, were affected. They all have the same sort of memories, of groups springing up in every class at school and in every street at home. There were overnight about a hundred dances in Liverpool with skiffle groups queuing up to perform. It was the first time for generations that music wasn’t the property of musicians. Anyone could get up and have a go. It was like giving painting sets to monkeys. Some of them were bound to produce something good sometime.

John Lennon didn’t have a guitar or any instrument when the craze first began. He took a guitar off a boy at school one day but found he couldn’t play it, so he gave it back. But he knew that his mother, Julia, could play the banjo, so he went to see her. She bought him a second-hand guitar for £10. It had on it ‘guaranteed not to split’. He went for a couple of lessons, but never learned. Instead Julia taught him some banjo chords. The first tune he learned was ‘That’ll Be The Day’.

He had to practise behind Mimi’s back at home. She made him stand in the glass porch at the front, playing and singing to himself. ‘The guitar’s all right, John,’ Mimi used to tell him, ten times a day. ‘But you’ll never make a living with it.’

‘We eventually formed ourselves into a group from school. I think the bloke whose idea it was didn’t get in the group. We met in his house first time. There was Eric Griffiths on guitar, Pete Shotton on washboard, Len Garry, Colin Hanton on drums and Rod on banjo.

‘Our first appearance was in Rose Street – it was their Empire Day celebrations. They all had this party out in the street. We played from the back of a lorry. We didn’t get paid or anything.

‘We played at blokes’ parties after that, or weddings, perhaps got a few bob. But mostly we just played for fun.’

They called themselves the Quarrymen, naturally enough. They all wore Teddy Boy clothes, had their hair piled high and sleeked back like Elvis. John was the biggest Ted of all, which was another reason why mothers warned their sons about him, once they saw him or even when they didn’t see him but just heard the stories.

In these first months of the Quarrymen in late 1956, when John was supposedly sticking in hard at school, it was all very half-hearted and irregular. They wouldn’t play for weeks. People were always coming and going, depending on who turned up at the party, or who wanted to have a go.

‘It was all just a joke,’ says Pete Shotton, ‘setting up a group. Skiffle was in, so everybody was trying to do something. I was on washboard because I had no idea about music. I was John’s friend, so I
had
to be in.’

With John being the leader, there were constant rows, which also led to people leaving. ‘I used to row with people because I wanted them out. Once you had a fight, that was the end and you had to leave the group.’ One regular was Nigel Whalley, who played now and again but mainly tried to get them dates, acting as a manager.

Over at the Liverpool Institute, the same sort of thing was happening, groups growing up like mushrooms, though Ivan Vaughan had brought Len Garry over from the Institute into John’s group. It seemed to go down well.

On 6 July 1957, he took along another friend from his school to meet John.

‘I knew this was a great fellow,’ says Ivan. ‘I only ever brought along great fellows to meet John.’

The occasion for the meeting was the Church Fête at Woolton Parish Church, not far from John’s house. He knew the people there and had got them to let his group perform.

Ivan had talked a lot at his school about John and his group. He knew that his friend was interested in that sort of thing, though Ivan himself wasn’t.

‘Mimi had said to me that day that I’d done it at last,’ says John. ‘I was now a real Teddy Boy. I seemed to disgust everybody that day, not just Mimi.

‘I was looking the other day at the photograph of myself taken at Woolton that day. I look such a youthful young lad.’

What happened that day is a bit cloudy to John. He got drunk, though he was still several years under age. Others remember it very well, especially the friend Ivan brought along – Paul McCartney.

‘That was the day,’ says John, ‘the day that I met Paul, that it started moving.’

Paul was born James Paul McCartney on 18 June 1942, in a private ward of Walton Hospital, Liverpool, the only Beatle to be born in such luxury. His family were ordinary working class and it was the height of the war. But Paul arrived in state because his mother had at one time been the sister in charge of the maternity ward. She was given the star treatment when she went back to have Paul, her first baby.

His mother, Mary Patricia, had given up hospital work just over a year previously, when she’d married his father, and had become a health visitor. Her maiden name was Mohin and, like her husband, she was of Irish extraction.

Jim McCartney, Paul’s father, began his working life at 14 as a sample boy at A. Hannay and Co., cotton brokers and merchants in Chapel Street, Liverpool. Unlike his wife, Jim McCartney was not a Catholic. He has always classed himself as an agnostic. He was born in 1902, one of three boys and four girls.

It was considered very lucky when he left school and got a job in cotton. The cotton industry was at its height and Liverpool was the centre of its importation to the Lancashire mills. Getting into cotton, you were reckoned settled for life.

As a sample boy Jim McCartney got six shillings a week. He had to run round prospective buyers letting them see bits of cotton they were interested in buying. Hannay’s imported the cotton, graded it and classified it, then sold it to the mills.

Jim did well at the job and at the age of 28 he was promoted to cotton salesman. This was considered a big success for an ordinary lad. Cotton salesmen usually had more of a middle-class background. Jim was always neat and dapper with a gentle open face.

When he got his big promotion, they put him up to £250 a year. Not a great salary, but reasonable.

Jim was too young for the First World War and too old for the Second, although with the use of only one ear – he broke an eardrum falling off a wall when he was ten – he would not have been liable anyway. But he was liable for some sort of war work. When the Cotton Exchange closed for the war, they sent him to Napiers, the engineering works.

In 1941, at the age of 39, he got married. They moved into furnished rooms in Anfield. Jim was working at Napiers during the day and fire-fighting at night when Paul was born. He was able to go in and out of the hospital as he liked, instead of during the normal visiting hours, as his wife had worked there.

‘He looked awful, I couldn’t get over it. Horrible. He had one eye open and he just squawked all the time. They held him up and he looked like a horrible piece of red meat. When I got home I cried, the first time for years and years.’

Despite his wife’s medical work, he’d never been able to suffer illness of any sort. The smell of hospitals made him nervous, a fear he has passed on to Paul.

‘But the next day he looked more human. And every day after that he got better and better. He turned out a lovely baby in the end.’

One day when Paul had been out in the garden at home, his mother discovered some specks of dust on his face and said they must move. The work at Napiers on the Sabre engines was counted as working for the Air Force so through that Jim was able to get a house on the Knowlsely Estate, Wallasey. They were council houses, but some were reserved for Air Ministry workers. ‘We used to call them half houses, they were such small, diddy houses, with bare bricks inside. But it was better than furnished rooms with a young baby.’

His work at Napiers came to an end before the war finished and he was moved to a job in Liverpool Corporation Cleansing Department, as a temporary inspector, going round making sure the dustbin men did their job properly.

Jim got little money with the corporation and his wife went back to health visiting for a while, till the birth of her second child, Michael, in 1944.

But she never really liked health visiting as much as nursing. It was too much nine to five, like an office job. So eventually she went back to midwifery. She took two domiciliary midwife jobs, which meant living on large estates and looking after all the mothers-to-be in that one area. There was a council house thrown in with the job. The first post was in Western Avenue, Speke, and the second in Ardwick Road. She was called out every night.

Jim says she worked far too hard, more than she should have done, but she was always over-conscientious.

Paul’s earliest memory, probably from around the age of three or four, is of his mother. He remembers someone coming to the door and giving her a plaster dog. ‘It was out of gratitude for some delivery she had done. People were always giving her presents like that.

‘I have another memory, of hiding from someone, then hitting them over the head with an iron bar. But I think the plaster dog was the earliest.’

One of his other early memories of his mother is when she was trying to correct his accent. ‘I talked real broad, like all the other kids round our way. When she told me off, I imitated her accent and she was hurt, which made me feel very uptight.’

Paul started primary school – Stockton Wood Road Primary – when they were living in Speke. His mother decided against a Roman Catholic one as she had seen too many as a health visitor and didn’t like them. Michael soon followed at the same one. ‘I remember the headmistress saying how good the two boys were with younger children,’ says Jim, ‘always sticking up for them. She said Michael was going to be a leader of men. I think
this was because he was always arguing. Paul did things much quieter. He had much more nous. Mike stuck his neck out. Paul always avoided trouble.’

When the school became overcrowded, they were moved out to another primary school in the country, Joseph Williams Primary School at Gateacre.

Paul perfected his quiet diplomacy even more as he got older, still always doing things quietly – like his mother – instead of noisily like Michael.

‘I was once hitting Michael for doing something,’ says Jim. ‘Paul stood by shouting at Mike, “Tell him you didn’t do it and he’ll stop.” Mike admitted he had done it, whatever it was. But Paul was always able to get out of most things.’