Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (3 page)

What happened next is the defining event of Paul McCartney’s life, a tragedy made starker because the family had only just moved into their dream home, where they expected to be happy for years to come. Mum fell ill and was diagnosed with breast cancer. It seems Mary knew the prognosis was not good and kept this a secret, at least from her children. One day, in the summer of 1956, Mike found his mother upstairs weeping. When he asked her what was wrong, she replied, ‘Nothing, love.’

At the end of October 1956 Mary was admitted to the Northern Hospital, a gloomy old building on Leeds Street, where she underwent surgery. It was not successful. Paul and Mike were packed off to Everton to stay with Uncle Joe and Auntie Joan. Jim didn’t own a car, so Mike Robbins, who was selling vacuum cleaners between theatrical engagements, gave Jim lifts to the hospital in his van. ‘He was trying to put on a brave front. He knew his wife was dying.’ Finally the boys were taken into the hospital to say goodbye to Mum. Paul noticed blood on her bed sheets. Mary remarked to a relative that she only wished she could see her boys grow up. Paul was 14, Mike 12. Mum died on 31 October 1956, Hallowe’en, aged 47.

Aunt Joan recalls that Paul didn’t express overt grief when told the news. Indeed, he and his brother Mike played rambunctiously that night in her back bedroom. ‘My daughter slept in a camp bed,’ says Joan, ‘and the boys had the double bed in the back bedroom and they were pulling arms off a teddy bear.’ When he did address the fact that his mother had died, Paul did so by asking Dad gauchely how they were going to manage without her wages. Stories like this are sometimes cited as evidence of a lack of empathy on Paul’s part, and it is true that he would react awkwardly in the face of death repeatedly during his life. It is also true that young people often behave in an insensitive way when faced with bereavement. They do not know what death means. Over the years, however, it became plain that Paul saw his world shattered that autumn night in 1956. The premature death of his mother was a trauma he never forgot, nor wholly got over.

2

JOHN

HAIL! HAIL! ROCK ’N’ ROLL

A dark period of mourning and adjustment followed the death of Mary McCartney, as widower Jim came to terms with the untimely loss of his wife and tried to instigate a domestic regime at Forthlin Road whereby he could be both father and mother to his boys. This was not easy. Indeed, Paul recalls hearing his father crying at night. It was thanks to the ‘relies’ rallying round, especially Aunts Ginny, Milly and Joan, that Jim was able to carry on at Forthlin Road, the women taking turns to help clean and cook for this bereaved, all-male household.

Crucially, as far as the history of pop is concerned, Paul reacted to the death of his mother by taking comfort in music. He returned the trumpet his father had given him for his recent birthday to Rushworth and Dreaper, a Liverpool music store, and exchanged it for an acoustic Zenith guitar, wanting to play an instrument that would also allow him to sing, and not liking the idea of developing a horn player’s callous on his lips. Learning guitar chords proved challenging because Paul was left-handed and he tried at first to play as a right-hander. It was only when he saw a picture of Slim Whitman playing guitar the other way around (Whitman having taught himself to play left-handed after losing part of a finger on his right hand) that Paul restrung his instrument accordingly and began to make progress. Schoolmate Ian James also played guitar, with greater proficiency, and gave Paul valuable lessons on his own Rex acoustic.
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As to what the boys played, there was suddenly a whole new genre of music opening up.

Until 1955, the music Paul had heard and enjoyed consisted largely of the jazz-age ballads and dance tunes Mum and Dad liked: primarily the song books of the Gershwins, Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart; while trips to the movies had given Paul an appreciation of Fred Astaire, a fine singer as well as a great dancer who became a lifelong hero. Now bolder, more elemental rhythms filled his ears. The first real musical excitement for young people in post-war Britain was skiffle, incorporating elements of folk, jazz and blues. A large part of the genre’s appeal was that you didn’t need professional instruments to play it. Ordinary household objects could be used: a wooden tea chest was strung to make a crude bass, a tin washboard became a simple percussion instrument, helping define the rasping, clattering sound of the music. Despite being played on such absurd household items, skiffle could be very exciting, as Scots singer Lonnie Donegan proved in January 1956 when he scored a major hit with a skiffle cover of Leadbelly’s ‘Rock Island Line’ (though the recording features a standard double bass). Almost overnight, thousands of British teenagers formed skiffle bands of their own, with Paul among those Liverpool skifflers who went to see Donegan perform at the local Empire theatre in November, just a few days after Mary McCartney died.

Close on the heels of skiffle came the greater revelation of rock ’n’ roll. The first rumble of this powerful new music reached the UK with the 1955 movie
The Blackboard Jungle
, which made Bill Haley a fleeting sensation. In the flesh Haley proved a disappointment, a mature, heavy-set fellow, not a natural role model for teens, unlike the handsome young messiah of rock who followed him. Elvis Presley broke in Britain in May 1956 with the release of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. The singer and the song electrified Paul at the age when boys become closely interested in their appearance. Elvis was his role model, as he was for boys all over the world, and Paul tried to make himself look like his hero. Paul and Ian James went to a Liverpool tailor, who took in their trousers to create rocker-style drainpipe legs; Paul grew his hair, sweeping it back like ‘El’, as they referred to the star; Paul began to neglect his school work, and spent his free time practising Elvis’s songs, as well as other rock ’n’ roll tunes that came fading in and out over the late-night airwaves from Radio Luxembourg. This far-away European station, together with glimpses of music idols on TV and in jukebox movies at the cinema, introduced Paul to the charismatic Americans who sat at Elvis’s feet in the firmament of rock: to the great black poet Chuck Berry, wild man Jerry Lee Lewis, the deceptively straight-looking Buddy Holly, crazy Little Richard and rockabilly pioneer Gene Vincent, whose insistent ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ was the first record Paul bought.

Paul started to take his guitar into school. Former head boy Billy Morton, a jazz fan with no time for this new music, recalls being appalled by Paul playing Eddie Cochran’s ‘Twenty-Flight Rock’ in the playground at the Inny. ‘There must have been 150 boys around him, ten deep, whilst he was singing … There he was, star material even then.’ Paul imitated his heroes with preternatural skill. But he was more than just a copyist. Almost immediately, Paul started to write his own songs. ‘He said, “I’ve written a tune,”’ recalls Ian James. ‘It was something I’d never bothered to try, and it seemed quite a feat to me. I thought,
He’s written a tune!
So we went up to his bedroom and he played this tune, [and] sang it.’ Created from three elementary chords (C, F and G), ‘I Lost My Little Girl’ was of the skiffle variety, with simple words about a girl who had Paul’s head ‘in a whirl’. By dint of this little tune, Paul McCartney became a singer-songwriter. Now he needed a band.

THE QUARRY MEN

The Beatles grew out of a schoolboy band founded and led by John Lennon, an older local boy, studying for his O-levels at Quarry Bank High School, someone Paul was aware of but didn’t know personally. As he says: ‘John was the local Ted’ (meaning Lennon affected the look of the aggressive Teddy Boy youth cult). ‘You saw him rather than met him.’

John Winston Lennon, named after Britain’s wartime leader, was a full year and eight months older than Paul McCartney, born on 9 October 1940. Like Paul, John was Liverpool Irish by ancestry, with a touch of showbiz in the family. His paternal Irish grandfather Jack had sung with a minstrel show. More directly, and unlike Paul, John was the product of a dysfunctional home. Dad was a happy-go-lucky merchant seaman named Freddie Lennon, a man cut from the same cloth as Paul’s Uncle Will. Mum, Julia, was a flighty young woman who dated various men when Fred was at sea, or in prison, as he was during part of the Second World War. All in all, the couple made a poor job of raising their only child,
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whom Julia passed, at age five, into the more capable hands of her older, childless sister Mary, known as Mimi, and Mimi’s dairyman husband George Smith.

The relationship between John and his Aunt Mimi is reminiscent of that between David Copperfield and his guardian aunt Betsey Trot-wood, an apparently severe woman who proves kindness itself when she gives the unhappy Copperfield sanctuary in her cottage. The likewise starchy but golden-hearted Mimi brought John to live with her and Uncle George in their cosy Liverpool cottage, Mendips, on Menlove Avenue, just over the hill from Paul’s house on Forthlin Road. Much has been made of the social difference between Mendips and Paul’s working-class home, as if John’s was a much grander household. As both houses are now open to the public, courtesy of the National Trust, anyone can see for themselves that Mendips is a standard, three-bedroom semi-detached property, the ‘semi’ being a type of house built by the thousands in the 1920s and ’30s, cosy suburban hutches for those who could afford to take out a small mortgage but couldn’t stretch to a detached property. The essential difference between Mendips and 20 Forthlin Road was that the Smiths owned their home while Jim McCartney rented from the Liverpool Corporation, by dint of which the McCartneys were defined as working-class. It is also fair to say that Menlove Avenue was considered to be a much more desirable place to live.

John’s childhood was upset again when Uncle George died in 1955. Thereafter John and Aunt Mimi shared Mendips with a series of male lodgers whose rent allowed Mimi to make ends meet and who, in one case, shared her bed. One way or another, this was an eccentric start in life, and John grew to be an eccentric character. Like Paul, John was clever, with a quick wit and an intense stare that was later mistaken for a sign of wisdom - he seemed to stare into your soul - whereas in fact he was just short-sighted. He also had a talent for art and a liking for language. Like many solitary children who have suffered periods of loneliness, John was bookish, more so than Paul. John’s voracious reading accounts in part for his lyrics being generally more interesting than Paul’s. The literary influence of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll is strongly felt in John’s penchant for nonsense, for example, which first found expression in the
Daily Howl
, a delightful school magazine he wrote and drew for fun. The tone is typified by his famous weather forecast: ‘Tomorrow will be Muggy, followed by Tuggy, Weggy and Thurgy and Friggy’. This is also the humour of the
Goon Show
, which Paul and John both enjoyed. Above all else, the boys shared an interest in music. John was mad for rock ’n’ roll. Indeed many friends thought John more or less
completely
mad. In researching the story of Paul’s life it is remarkable that people who knew both Paul and John tend to talk about John most readily, often with laughter, for Lennon said and did endless amusing things that have stuck in their memory, whereas McCartney was always more sensible, even (whisper it) slightly dull by comparison.

Like Paul, John worshipped Elvis Presley. ‘Elvis Presley’s all very well, John,’ Aunt Mimi would lecture her nephew, ‘but I don’t want him for breakfast, dinner and tea.’ (Her other immortal words on this subject were: ‘The guitar’s all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living out of it.’) In emulation of Elvis, John played guitar enthusiastically, but badly, using banjo chords taught him by his mum, who was living round the corner in Blomfield Road, with her current boyfriend, and saw John regularly. Playing banjo chords meant using only four of the guitar’s six strings - which was slightly easier for a beginner. Having grasped the rudiments, John formed a skiffle group with his best mate at Quarry Bank High, Pete Shotton, who was assigned washboard. The band was named the Quarry Men, after their school. Another pupil, Eric Griffiths, played guitar, and Eric recruited a fourth Quarry Bank student, Rod Davis, who’d known John since they were in Sunday school together. Rod recalls: ‘He was known as
that
Lennon. Mothers would say, “Now stay away from
that
Lennon.”’ Eric found their drummer, Colin Hanton, who’d already left (a different) school to work as an upholsterer. Finally, Liverpool Institute boy Len Garry was assigned tea chest bass. Together, the lads performed covers of John’s favourite skiffle and rock ’n’ roll songs at parties and youth clubs, sometimes going weeks without playing, for one of John’s signal characteristics was laziness. Indeed, the Quarry Men may well have come to nought had they not agreed to perform at a humble summer fête.

Woolton Village is a short bike ride from John’s house, just east of Liverpool, its annual fête being organised by the vicar of St Peter’s Church, in the graveyard of which reside the remains of one Eleanor Rigby, who as her marker states died in 1939, aged 44. Starting at 2 o’clock on Saturday 6 July 1957, a procession of children, floats and bands made its way through Woolton to the church field, the procession led by the Band of the Cheshire Yeomanry and the outgoing Rose Queen, a local girl who sat in majesty on a flatbed truck. The Quarry Men followed on another, similar truck. Around 3 o’clock the new Rose Queen was crowned on stage in the church field, after which there was a parade of local children in fancy dress, and the Quarry Men played a few songs for the amusement of the kids as the adults mooched around the stalls. Looking at photographs taken that summer afternoon one is reminded that, although John’s band was named the Quarry Men, they were mere boys, gangly youths in plaid shirts, sleeves rolled up, their expressions betraying almost total inexperience as they haltingly sought to entertain an audience comprised mostly of even younger children. Typically, one little girl in a brownie uniform is captured on camera sitting on the edge of the stage looking up at John with the mildest of interest.

John, who had let his hair grow long at the front, then swept it back in a quiff, was standing at a stick microphone, strumming his guitar and singing the Dell-Vikings’ ‘Come Go With Me’. Unsure of the correct words, never having seen them in print, John was improvising lyrics to fit the tune, singing: ‘Come and go with me, down to the penitentiary …’ Paul McCartney thought this clever. Paul had been brought along to the fête by Ivan Vaughan, who knew John and thought his two musical friends should get together. The introduction was made in the church hall where the Quarry Men were due to play a second set. A plaque on the wall now commemorates the historic moment Lennon met McCartney. John recalled: ‘[Ivan] said, “I think you two will get along.” We talked after the show and I saw that he had talent. He was playing guitar backstage, doing “Twenty-Flight Rock”.’ In emulation of Little Richard, Paul also played ‘Long Tall Sally’ and ‘Tutti-Frutti’. Not long after this meeting Pete Shotton stopped Paul in the street and asked if he’d like to join the Quarry Men. He was asking on behalf of John, of course. ‘He was the leader because he was the guy who sang the songs,’ explains Colin Hanton, who was surprised how quickly John made up his mind about this new boy. ‘[Paul] must have impressed him.’

EARLY SHOWS

That summer Rod Davis went to France on holiday and never rejoined the Quarry Men. John Lennon left Quarry Bank High, having failed his O-levels, and was lucky to get a place at Liverpool College of Art, which happened to be next door to Paul’s grammar school on Hope Street. In their summer holidays, Paul and Mike McCartney attended scout camp, where Paul accidentally broke his brother’s arm mucking about with a pulley, after which Jim McCartney took his sons to Butlin’s in Filey, Yorkshire, where Paul and Mike performed ‘Bye Bye Love’ on stage as a duo.