Beatles (14 page)

‘I was pretty sneaky,’ says Paul. ‘If I ever got bashed for being bad, I used to go into their bedroom when they were out and rip the lace curtains at the bottom, just a little bit, then I’d think, that’s got them.’

Paul easily passed the Eleven Plus and went to the Liverpool Institute. This is the best known of Liverpool’s grammar schools. It was founded in 1825 as a Mechanics’ Institute which is how it got its name. Liverpool Art College, which shares the same building, was part of the Institute until the 1890s. The University of Liverpool also shares the same origins. It became an ordinary boys school, giving up all adult classes, around the turn of the century. Its old boys today include Arthur Askey, James Laver, Lord Justice Morris and the late Sydney Silverman also.

Michael also passed for the Institute but he eventually ended up in the lowest stream. Paul did very well and was always in the top forms.

‘Paul was able to do his homework while watching TV,’ says Jim. ‘I used to tell him not to, that he couldn’t possibly do both. But I once asked him exactly what had been on, and he knew, and he’d also done an essay. He was smart enough easily for a university. That was always my intention for him. Get a BA or a BSc behind his name, then he’d be okay. But when he knew what was in my head, Paul tried to stop himself doing well. He was
always good at Latin but when I said he’d need the Latin for a university, he started slacking up.’

At the Institute, Paul became about the most sexually precocious boy of his year, knowing what it was all about, or almost, even from his early years.

‘I once did this dirty drawing for the class. I was the lad who did them. It was folded so you just saw the head and the feet of a woman, but when you opened it out, she was all naked. The full schoolboy bit, with pubic hair thrown in, not that I had any idea what that looked like. By mistake I left it in the top pocket of my shirt. This was the pocket I used to keep my dinner tickets in and my mother always searched it before washing as I often left some.

‘I came home one day and she held it out to me. “Did you do this?” I said no, no, honest, no. I said it was Kenny Alpin, a boy in our class. He must have put it there. “I’d tell you if I’d done it.” I kept it up for two days. Then I admitted it. The shame was terrible.’

After the first year, when he got 90 per cent for Latin, he got fed up with school work. ‘It was nice and easy that first year. I kept myself clean and eager because it seemed the thing to do. Then it all became woolly. Never once in my school days did anyone ever make it clear to me what I was being educated for, what the point of it was. I know my dad went on about needing certificates and all that, but I never listened to that. You heard it so often. We had masters who just hit you with rulers, or told us a lot of shit about their holiday in Wales or what they did in the army.

‘Homework was a right drag. I just couldn’t stand staying in on a summer night when all the other kids were out playing. There was a field opposite our house in Ardwick and I could look out the window and see them all having a good time.

‘There weren’t many other kids from the Institute living round our way. I was called a college pudding, fucking college puddin’ was what they said.

‘All I wanted was women, money and clothes. I used to do a bit of stealing, things like ciggies. We’d go into empty shops,
when the man was in the house part at the back, and take some before he came in. For years, what I wanted out of life was £100. I thought with that I could have a house, a guitar and a car. So, if money had been the scene, I’d have gone wild.’

However, Paul wasn’t all that useless at school. In 1953, he got a school prize for an essay – a special Coronation Prize, a book called
Seven Queens of England
by Geoffrey Trease, published by Heinemann, which he still has. He always got good marks for all his essays. ‘I remember a school inspector once asking me how I could write such a technical essay about potholing. I’d heard it all on the earphones in bed. They were marvellous, just lying in bed listening to the radio. Did incredible things to your imagination.’

Jim had rigged up a set of earphones for each of them in bed, as an attempt to get them to bed early, keep them there and stop them from fighting. They did fight a lot, but not more than most brothers. Michael used to call Paul ‘Fatty’ to annoy him. ‘He had been beautiful as a baby, with big eyes and long eyelashes,’ says Jim. ‘People used to say, “Oh, he’ll break all the girls’ hearts one of these days.”’ But as an early teenager, he went through a chubby stage.

The McCartneys moved from Ardwick when Paul was about 13. His mother gave up being a domiciled midwife, though she later went back to being a health visitor.

They got a council house at 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton, where Paul spent all his boyhood from then on. It is in the middle of a low terrace row, a bit poky and insignificant, but neat and clean. Menlove Avenue was now just two miles away.

They hadn’t been at Forthlin Road very long – Paul was just 14 – when his mother suddenly started to suffer pains in her breast. They went on for about three or four weeks, coming and going, but she put it down to the menopause. She was then 45. ‘It must be the change,’ she used to say to Jim. She told various doctors but they agreed that was what it was and told her to forget it. But she kept having them, and more and more seriously.

One day Michael came into the house suddenly and found her crying. He thought it was because he and Paul must have been doing something they shouldn’t have been doing. ‘We could be right bastards.’ But he never asked her what it was. She never told them. But she decided this time to see a specialist. He diagnosed cancer. They operated and she died. It had all happened within a month of first having had any serious pains.

‘It just knocked me down,’ says Jim. ‘I couldn’t understand it. It was awful for the boys. Michael especially was still only 12 and very close to her. They didn’t break down or anything. It just hit them very slowly.’

‘I can’t remember the details of the day we were told,’ says Michael. ‘All I can remember is one of us, I don’t remember who, making a silly joke. For months we both regretted it.’

Paul remembers what it was. ‘It was me. The first thing I said was, “What are we going to do without her money?”’

But they both cried on their own in bed that night. For days afterwards Paul prayed for her to come back. ‘Daft prayers, you know, if you bring her back, I’ll be very, very good for always. I thought, it just shows how stupid religion is. See, the prayers didn’t work, when I really needed them to.’

The two boys moved out for a few days, during the funeral, to stay with their Aunt Jinny. ‘I think Dad didn’t want us to see him breaking up,’ says Paul. ‘It was a bit of a drag at Aunt Jinny’s. We both had to sleep in the same bed.’

Jim was left with the biggest problem. He’d never done much in the house, as his wife was so organized. He was now left, at 53, to bring up two boys of 14 and 12, through perhaps their most difficult years. He had money problems as well. His wife as a midwife had made more than him, as Paul had so cruelly mentioned. By 1956, Jim’s salary was only £8 a week. Every other working man was at least feeling the beginnings of affluence, but the cotton trade, in which you were supposed to be secure for life, was having a very tough time.

Two of his sisters helped a great deal – Aunt Milly and Aunt Jinny. One of them would come one day a week to Forthlin
Road to clean out the house properly. And when the boys were young, they often popped round in the evening to let them in from school.

‘The winters were bad,’ says Jim. ‘The boys had to light the fires themselves when they came home from school. I did all the cooking.

‘The biggest headache was what sort of parent was I going to try to be. When my wife had been alive, I’d been the one who chastised them. I delivered the hard stuff when it was needed. My wife had done the soft stuff. If we sent them to bed without their supper, it would be her who took something up to them in bed later, though it would probably be my idea.

‘Now I had to decide whether to be a father or a mother or both, or rely on them and just be friends and all help each other.

‘I had to rely on them a lot. I would say, “Don’t come in when you come home from school unless one of your aunts is here.” Otherwise, they would have their friends in and wreck the place.

‘I’d come home and find five eggs gone. They wouldn’t let on at first, saying they didn’t know what had happened to them. Then they’d say, oh yes, we did give the lads a fried egg each.

‘By and large, they were quite good. But I missed my wife. It knocked me for six when she died.’

Michael particularly doesn’t know how his father managed it. ‘We were terrible and cruel. He was bloody marvellous. And all that time without a woman. I can’t imagine it. Paul owes a lot to his dad. We both do.’

Both of them used to mock his two pet bits of homespun philosophy. ‘Here he comes, with his two ‘ations,’ they used to say. Jim used to tell them that the two most important things in life were toleration and moderation.

‘Toleration
is
very important,’ says Jim. ‘They would laugh at people with infirmities, as kids do. I’d explain to them how
they
wouldn’t like it. And moderation, a lot of trouble is caused without that. You’re always hearing people say, “I’d string the bugger up,” without thinking carefully about what would be the best for someone.’

Jim always did think about what was the best for people. He has a natural charm and courtesy with everyone, but it’s not just the salesman’s cosy touch, it’s much deeper and more genuine than that. In the hands of a less thoughtful or considerate father, they could easily have broken out when their mother died.

From his mother Paul seems to have inherited his capacity for hard work and dedication. He is the sort of person who can always get things done, when he wants to.

In some ways Paul despised school and the whole system of passing on processed rules, as much as John did. But there was a part of him which didn’t want to let himself down. He could always turn on the hard work, even in little bursts, enough to get him through. John became completely bolshie and uncooperative. Paul could never be that.

His brother Michael thinks there was one direct result in Paul of their mother’s death.

‘It was just after mother’s death that it started. It became an obsession. It took over his whole life. You lose a mother – and you find a guitar? I don’t know. Perhaps it just came along at that time and became an escape. But an escape from what?’

As a child, Paul showed no particular interest in music. Both he and his brother Michael were sent once for a couple of piano lessons, but nothing happened. ‘We made the mistake of starting them in the summer,’ says Jim. ‘The teacher used to come to the house and all the kids would be knocking at our door all the time, wanting them to come out and play. So I made them go to the teacher’s house, but that didn’t last long.’

Jim also wanted Paul to join Liverpool Cathedral Choir. ‘I made him go, but he deliberately cracked his voice in the audition. Later on he did join St Barnabas Choir, near Penny Lane, for a while.’

Later still Paul was given an old trumpet by an uncle, on which he managed to pick out tunes, teaching himself. This talent for picking up music came from his father. As a boy, Jim taught himself to play the piano. Of all the Beatles’ parents, Paul’s father was the only one with any experience of being a musician.

‘I never had any lessons. I just used to pick out chords on an old second-hand piano someone gave us when I was about 14 and living in Everton. It came from North End Music Stores – NEMS – I can remember the name on it. I had good rhythm and could knock out most tunes. I never disgraced myself.’

Not long after he had started work, Jim McCartney began a little ragtime band to play at works dances. This was around 1919, when he was 17.

Their first public performance was a dance in St Catherine’s Hall, Vine Street, Liverpool. ‘We thought we would have some sort of gimmick so we put black masks on our faces and called ourselves “The Masked Melody Makers”. But before half-time, we were sweating so much that the dye was running down our faces. That was the beginning and end of the Masked Melody Makers.’

Instead they called themselves ‘Jim Mac’s Band’. They all wore dinner jackets with paper shirt fronts and cuffs. ‘They were very good. You could buy paper cuffs twelve for a penny. No one could tell the difference.

‘I ran that band for about four or five years, just part-time. I was the alleged boss, but there was no distinctions.

‘We played once at the first local showing of the film
The Queen of Sheba
. We didn’t know what to play. When the chariot race started we played a popular song of the time called “Thanks for the Buggy Ride”. And when the Queen of Sheba was dying we played “Horsy Keep Your Tail Up”.’

When the Second World War came, and a family, Jim packed in his playing career, although he often played a bit on the piano at home. ‘Paul was never interested when I played the piano. But he loved listening to music on his earphones in bed. Then suddenly he wanted a guitar, when he was 14. I didn’t know what made him want it.’

His guitar cost £15 and Paul couldn’t get anything out of it at first. There seemed to be something wrong with it. Then he realized it was because he was left-handed. He took it back and got it altered. ‘I’d never been really keen on the trumpet. But I liked the guitar because I could play it after just learning a few chords. I could also sing to it at the same time.’

He’d followed pop music since he was about 12, like most of his friends. The first concert he went to was Eric Delaney’s Band at the Liverpool Empire when he was twelve. At 14 he queued
up in his lunch hour from school to see Lonnie Donegan. ‘I remember he was late arriving. He wrote out little notes for the factory girls explaining it was his fault they were late back as he’d kept them waiting.

‘We used to hang around the stage door waiting for anybody and get their autographs. I once queued up for Wee Willie Harris’s autograph.’