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They became boyfriend and girlfriend, and Jane’s parents gave Paul his own little bedroom on the top floor of 57 Wimpole Street, next to Jane’s brother Peter’s room. Paul was to live there, as part of the Asher family, for the next three years, his bedroom filling up with the fruits of his extraordinary career: eventually he was to stow his gold records under his bed, and his MBE on a shelf, alongside two drawings by Jean Cocteau. It was at Wimpole Street that Paul received a letter from the Beatles’ accountant in 1965 informing him that, at the age of twenty-three, he had become a millionaire.

The Ashers were a remarkable family in every way: remarkably accomplished, remarkably civilised, remarkably welcoming. At the age of eight, Peter Asher had appeared opposite Claudette Colbert and Jack Hawkins in the film The Planter’s Wife, and at ten, opposite Cecil Parker and Donald Wolfit in Isn’t Life Wonderful. Jane’s younger sister Claire had acted in the BBC’s long-running radio soap opera Mrs Dale’s Diary. Their mother Margaret was a professor at the Guildhall: back in 1948 she had tutored George Martin in the oboe.

Just like Paul fifteen years later, Martin had relished his visits to the Asher home, with all its comfort and erudition. Despite his upper-class persona (the legacy of wartime service with the RAF, during which ‘we were taught important military details like how to hold a knife and fork correctly’) he had been brought up in a three-room flat in Drayton Park with no kitchen, no bathroom and a toilet shared with three other families. Coming from such an impoverished background, he had been tantalised by the glimpse of a more agreeable life offered by the Ashers of Wimpole Street. And now, Paul, in his turn, was to be tantalised. Everything seemed touched by culture. In the hall of no. 57 hung an engraved portrait of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a distant relative of Margaret Asher; the glass-fronted bookcase in the dining room contained a rare 1926 first edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, brought into the family by Margaret’s father, the Hon. Edward Granville Eliot, who had been Lawrence of Arabia’s solicitor.

Jane’s father, Dr Richard Asher, was a pioneering endocrinologist who in 1951 had named and identified Munchausen’s Syndrome, the mental disorder that drives individuals to fabricate symptoms of illness. He was also a skilled and witty writer: an article by him in the Lancet in February 1951 begins: ‘Here is described a common syndrome which most doctors have seen, but about which little has been written. Like the famous Baron von Munchausen, the persons affected have always travelled widely; and their stories, like those attributed to him, are both dramatic and untruthful. Accordingly, the syndrome is respectfully dedicated to the Baron, and named after him.’ Inevitably, the title ‘Munchausen’s Syndrome’ was criticised by the po-faced for being inappropriately light-hearted.

Dr Asher’s articles in the British Medical Journal remain a joy to read – funny, alert, aphoristic, self-deprecatory, sparklingly clear – and they indicate the breadth of education Paul would have received in his conversations with him. In ‘The Dangers of Going to Bed’, Asher argues against the medical consensus that staying in bed was the surest route to recovery: ‘Look at a patient lying long in bed. What a pathetic picture he makes! The blood clotting in his veins, the lime draining from his bones, the scybala stacking up in his colon, the flesh rotting from his seat, the urine leaking from his distended bladder, and the spirit evaporating from his soul.’ He then undercuts himself by saying, ‘I have painted a gloomy and unfair picture: it is not as bad as all that.’ Later in the same article, he speculated as to the reasons why confinement caught on: ‘Too often a sister puts all her patients back to bed as a housewife puts all her plates back in the plate-rack – to make a generally tidy appearance.’

Another of his articles in the BMJ, carrying the incendiary title ‘Why are Medical Journals so Dull?’, argues against stodginess and obscurity in favour of lucidity and precision: ‘A poor title dulls the clinical appetite, whereas a good title whets it. I have called this article “Why are Medical Journals so Dull?”. I do not claim this title is specially good, but it is better than “A Study of the Negativistic Psychomotor Reactions induced by Perusal of Verbalized Clinical Material”.’

It’s easy to see how Paul would have revelled in such cheery cut-and-thrust. The whole Asher family involved themselves in discussions around the table, alive with erudition and curiosity and fun. ‘They would do things that I’d never seen before, like at dinner there would be word games,’ Paul told Barry Miles. ‘Now, I’m bright enough, but mine is an intuitive brightness. I could just about keep up with that, and I could always say, “I don’t know that word.”’ He remembered an argument over dinner between Dr Asher and his son Peter, Paul’s contemporary, over when the tomato was first introduced to England. This was not the sort of topic they discussed in Forthlin Road. Throughout his years with the Ashers, Paul was treated not as a pop star, but as one of the family: ‘It was very good for me, because in their eyes I wasn’t just the Beatle.’ The atmosphere at Wimpole Street also appealed to his competitive spirit: ‘I often felt the guys were sort of partying, whereas I was learning a lot; learning an awful lot.’ In her music room in the basement, Margaret Asher taught Paul how to play the recorder – he plays it on ‘Fool on the Hill’ – though her attempts to teach him how to read music were soon abandoned.

His intellectual curiosity was stimulated. ‘I don’t want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on, but I’m trying to cram everything in, all the things I’ve missed,’ he told the journalist Maureen Cleave in 1966. ‘People are saying things and painting things that are great, and I must know what people are doing … I vaguely mind people knowing anything I don’t know.’ He read Jung and Huxley, watched plays by Alfred Jarry and Harold Pinter and listened to avant-garde composers like Stockhausen and Luciano Berio.

Sometimes Jane would take Paul to stay with family friends out of town. ‘This was another rather upper-class thing: going for the weekend to the country … It was the first time I’d seen people leaving a book by your bedside for you to read. I was quite impressed by their choice of books. It was the assumption that you were reasonably intelligent that I liked. They didn’t talk down.’

John Downing/Stringer

Inevitably, Beatles fans would linger outside the house, ready to pounce. While Paul was away filming Help!, Jane’s father set himself the task of plotting an escape route for him. He climbed out of a back window and scaled his way along to the house next door, then tapped on a window to explain Paul’s peculiar problem to the occupier of the neighbouring flat. On Paul’s return to London, Dr Asher was thus able to present him with a secret route through to New Cavendish Street. ‘I used to go out of the window of my garret bedroom, onto a little parapet. You had to be pretty careful, it wasn’t that wide, it was only a foot or so, so you had to have something of a head for heights. You’d go along to the right, which was to the next house in Wimpole Street, number 56, and there was a colonel living there, an old ex-army gentleman. He had this little top-floor flat, and he was very charming. “Uh! Coming through, Colonel!” “Oh, oh, OK, hush-hush and all that!” and he’d see me into the lift and I’d go right downstairs to the basement of that house. There was a young couple living down there and they’d see me out through the kitchen and into the garage.’

If I could be any Beatle, at any time, I would be Paul in his Wimpole Street years, living with Jane, cosseted by her family, blessed by luck, happy with life, alive to culture, adored by the world, and with wonderful songs flowing, as if by magic, from my brain and out through the piano: ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘I’m Looking Through You’, ‘The Things We Said Today’, ‘And I Love Her’, ‘We Can Work it Out’, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, ‘Yesterday’.

But nothing lasts. On Christmas Day 1967, Paul and Jane announced their engagement; seven months later, in reply to a chance question from the TV chat-show host Simon Dee, Jane announced that it was all over: ‘I haven’t broken it off, but it is broken off, finished. I know it sounds corny, but we still see each other and love each other, but it hasn’t worked out. Perhaps we’ll be childhood sweethearts and meet again when we’re about seventy.’

Over fifty years on, they both remain discreet about the break-up, speaking about it in nothing but the most general terms, leaving others to speculate. Some suggest Jane caught Paul in bed with an American woman called Francie Schwartz.1 While Jane was away acting, Paul and Francie had been together in his new house in St John’s Wood. ‘There were fans waiting at the gate as usual and they tried to warn Paul that Jane was approaching. But Paul thought they were joking,’ recalled Alistair Taylor. According to Taylor, Jane broke up with Paul, rather than vice-versa, and refused to take him back. Though Paul, a master of self-possession, has said ‘I don’t remember the break-up as traumatic really,’ and ‘I got cold feet,’ elsewhere he has admitted, ‘It was shattering to be without her.’ Others remember the shock he suffered. Taylor, who thought Jane ‘the most adorable woman you could expect to meet’, recalled Paul being ‘absolutely devastated … he went completely off the rails. “I had everything and I threw it away,” he would say.’ His hairdresser, Leslie Cavendish, noted that ‘he seemed heartbroken to me. He’d stopped shaving his beard, hardly ever left the house and began taking more drugs.’

One or two of their acquaintances claim to have seen it coming. Marianne Faithfull never felt they were a natural fit: ‘I always thought Jane and Paul were very tense. I do remember very clearly an evening at Cavendish Avenue where she wanted the window shut and he wanted the window open. That really was like a Joe Orton play. It was fucking great. I sat there all night watching Jane get up and open it, and Paul close it, and … nothing was said. And quite soon after they split up, which of course I could have told anyone they would.’ But she fails to offer a reason why Jane would have wanted the window open. Might it have been to release the fumes of marijuana that were the necessary accompaniment to any visit by Mick and Marianne?

1 Who later wrote a kiss-and-tell book called Body Count.