The Showman The ShowmanThe Quarry Men set out in pursuit of their dream at a time when the world, especially Great Britain, seemed poised to oblige them. An enormous shift was taking place, nudged on by the climax of World War II and wrenched sideways by its aftershocks. The leitmotif of postwar life was the idea of endlessly unfolding progress. Jet plane travel idled on the horizon, as did color TV and England’s first high-speed motorway. Many working-class families in urban wastelands were moved into council estates near the suburbs, or into newly created towns. And despite a 47 percent increase in the cost of living, the growth in wages nearly doubled, putting more money in people’s pockets than at any time in fifty years. As Harold Macmillan, in his July 1957 speech at Bedford Market Place, enthused: “Indeed, let us be frank about it, most of our people have never had it so good.”
And those who believe, as Donne contends, that all circumstance is “slave to fate” would glean further significance from the fact that John Lennon and a teenager who would become his closest friend and partner began the school year of 1957 in twin limestone buildings linked by a courtyard and located within a hundred feet of each other. “There was neither an affiliation, nor appreciable synergy, between the art college and Liverpool Institute,” Quentin Hughes indicates in his sage evaluation, “but the proximity was such that they invited a certain kinship.” If John’s awakening to rock ’n roll and the formation of the Quarry Men was a prelude to what was to come, the arrival of the boy across the street commenced the first act of the legend. His name, of course, was Paul.
On the surface, Paul McCartney had it made. He possessed not only the most striking physical characteristics of the McCartney clan but also the expansiveness of their humor, their passion for music, and their practice of urbanity so epitomized by his uncle, the family patriarch, Jack McCartney, who was described as being “one of nature’s true gentlemen.” In a city of characters distinguished by dry, pithy pragmatists, Jack may have been the one Scouser who played against part. Tall, gaunt, always relentlessly debonair, he was a bon vivant and brilliant spinner of yarns in a raspy, unearthly voice that held listeners in thrall. As a deputy of the ubiquitous Liverpool Corporation, the bureaucratic rat’s nest that ran the city, he feasted on its foibles like a stand-up comedian. Everybody had a smile for Jack McCartney.
Such was the role of a patriarch in a family of underprivileged Scousers who refused to be cowed by their circumstances. Jack, the eldest among the nine children of Joe and Florrie McCartney, was a man for the new age: gregarious, pleasure-seeking, and properly awestruck. All Joe McCartney’s children—James (Jim), Joseph, Edith, Ann Alice, Millie, Jack, Ann, Jin, and Joe (named for an elder brother who died young)—it was noted, were “gentle, happy-go-lucky dreamers” and, fortunately, resourceful, if not simply oblivious, in their efforts to avoid the city’s strong criminal undercurrent. Despite their inquisitiveness, each chose to remain Merseyside.
The McCartneys were a boisterous crew, alight with affection. In 1912, nine years after Jim’s birth, Joe moved literally around the corner and resettled the family in a new, cheaply constructed terrace house at 3 Solva Street in Everton, a residential district in northeastern Liverpool, roughly three-quarters of a mile from the city center. The McCartney place, at the beginning of a narrow, cobblestone cul-de-sac, was woefully small for an ever-expanding family, but really no different from any neighbor’s situation in the solid but overcrowded Irish enclave. One of the rare remaining photos of the house (it was demolished in the Liverpool Slum Clearance Program of the late 1960s) depicts a sad, deeply rutted structure stripped of any decorative amenity other than what was required to hold it together. It was a typical redbrick Victorian cereal box, with three stingy bedrooms outfitted like barracks and a front parlor whose threadbare couch was occupied in shifts to accommodate the extra-heavy traffic. The toilet—really little more than a hole, a hunch-down arrangement, below two horizontal boards—was in a shed out beyond the kitchen and was shared by two other families, the Dowds and the Simnors, with washroom facilities in even shorter supply. Each Saturday morning, all the kids grabbed towels, a washcloth, soap, and clean underwear and trooped over to the Margaret Street Baths, a public swimming pool, for their weekly scrubbing. For Jim McCartney, who had an almost feline fastidiousness about his appearance, extreme measures were required just to stay comparatively groomed.
Before the McCartneys arrived, in the early nineteenth century, Everton had been “a place to aspire to.” Built on a steep natural ridge known as the Heights, it was the most elevated point in Liverpool, invigorated by the pure sea air, with views over the Mersey and Liverpool Bay across to the Welsh hills. It was, according to J. A. Picton, “a suburb of which Liverpool had cause to be proud.” Compared with the unsavory city center, it was considered “a healthy place to live” and drew the wealthy upper crust of society to its lush parkland setting. Noble mansions, in tier above tier, looked out on a lovely landscape. The district’s dense roster of churches spoke optimistically of its expectations: an expanse of cathedrals dotted the landscape, not the least of which was stately St. George’s, the first cast-iron church in the world. But by 1860 its allure had all but evaporated. A victim in its own right of the Irish potato famine, Everton was transformed into a ghetto known as Little Dublin, the first terminal of swarming refugees, as inbred and overcrowded as Calcutta. By 1881, the onetime jeweled paradise had become the most densely populated area of the city, its patchwork fields clawed under to dower the mazy grid of roads thronged by “cottages,” which sounds pastoral but is actually a euphemism for cheap terrace houses.
Jim McCartney probably had little time to submit to the temptations that were everywhere on Everton’s streets. His days were devoted almost entirely to part-time work in order to compensate for his father’s insufficient salary at Cope’s Tobacco (Everton’s largest employer, where he worked for thirty-two years as a cutter), various household chores, and the duty of watching out for six brothers and sisters who were barely of school age. With brother Jack, he attended the nearby Steers Street School, a county primary named for the city’s first dock engineer, just off Everton Road. He was a decent student but “never really excelled” in any subject, and left school at fourteen, as soon as he was old enough for a regular job.
For an Irish lad in Liverpool, the priesthood was the highest work, but it was a calling from which the McCartney boys were “gratefully exempt.” “Joe put all his faith in the almighty pound,” says an old Everton resident, “and he raised his sons to believe employment came before godliness.” Jack, who found a rock-steady, if innocuous, position with the Liverpool Corporation, offered to “inquire there” on behalf of his vivacious younger brother, but Jim had a taste for something more exciting. Eagerly and with great expectations, Jim went to work as a sample boy in the office of A. Hannay & Co., one of the myriad cotton firms servicing the Lancashire mills, where he did what salesmen referred to as “the donkey work”—running along Old Hall Street with bundles of extra-long-staple Sudanese, short-staple Indian, or strict low middling Memphis cotton earmarked for brokers or merchants in various salesrooms. He worked ten-hour days, five days a week, for less than £1, plus a bonus each Christmas that often doubled his annual salary. The duties called for neither much initiative nor imagination, but in the process, Jim soaked up the ins and outs of the business—from grading and warehousing to negotiating and bookkeeping—much of it over stand-up lunches with salesmen at the local pub.
A jovial, effusive man with a penchant for deadpan humor and the idioms of the Liverpool Irish, Jim McCartney had a streak of romanticism in him that can be traced directly to the influence of music. The house on Solva Street was flush with it; one form or another provided a constant soundtrack to the raucous family soap opera that unspooled in the overcrowded rooms. Joe loved opera and played the cumbersome E-flat double bass in the local Territorial Army band that entertained regularly in Stanley Park and at the commemorative parades that snaked along Netherfield Road so often that they seemed biweekly occurrences. When he wasn’t marching, there were evening practices with his brass band at Cope’s Tobacco. And Joe often played the double bass at home, hoping to encourage his children to pursue some form of music.
As it happened, none of the McCartney kids showed much interest. It wasn’t until 1918, when a neighbor unloaded his fusty piano, purchased from the local NEMS store, on Joe that the gesture bore real fruit. In no time, Jim had taught himself a shorthand method of chording that allowed him to play along with popular songs of the day. He had a brittle, choppy style that suited the syncopation inherent to ragtime, whose melodies seemed to fill every dance hall and pub. Nothing made Jim feel more carefree than music, and his exposure to potent entertainers only heightened this passion. He and Jack stole off regularly to the Hippodrome and the Olympia, both ornate neighborhood theaters, to catch the latest music hall revue. Standing along the Hippy’s balcony wall, the McCartney brothers enjoyed acts such as Harry Houdini, Little Tich, the Two Bobs, Charlie Chaplin, Rob Wilton, George Formby Sr., and the Great Hackenschmidt. “My father learned his music from listening to it every single night of the week, two shows every night, Sundays off,” Paul recalled. Jim entertained every chance he got, playing for family gatherings and impromptu community mixers. While oppressive summer days brought Everton to an early boil, more than a dozen neighbors often congregated in the street below the McCartneys’ parlor window and danced to Jim’s accompaniment into the night.
Before he was twenty, Jim was already “the swingman of Solva Street,” a youngster preoccupied with pop music who would stumble home from work, stay just long enough for dinner, then hit the road, looking for a jam. During the early 1920s, he fronted his own band, the Masked Melody Makers, a quintet of like-minded musicians, including his brother Jack on trombone, outfitted in “rakish” black facecloths, who played irregularly at small dance halls around Liverpool. The same configuration evolved into Jim Mac’s Jazz Band, with a repertoire of ragtime standards and at least one original McCartney composition, “Eloise,” a bright-eyed but unwaveringly banal ditty.
Jim McCartney’s performing wound down in 1930, at precisely the same time he was promoted to the position of salesman. No longer restricted to side streets girding the Cotton Exchange, he threw himself into the friendly price wars waged with local buyers, and with his easy Scouse affability and natural charm, he quickly became a fixture in the market, “a born salesman who invited easy confidence and left an imprint of his personality on everyone he met.” In his demeanor, his generosity, his plainspokenness, his effusiveness, his intimacy, and his irrepressible wit, Jim, like Paul later on, proved an earnest, often devoted companion. People of both sexes were attracted to him. But having served such a daunting apprenticeship to an industry that rarely promoted men of working-class backgrounds, he dedicated himself single-mindedly to the job, shunning serious relationships for a period of almost ten years.
It wasn’t until June 1940, during one of the increasingly frequent German air raids over Liverpool, that Jim fell in love. That night, the family had gathered at the McCartneys’ new home in the suburb of leafy West Derby Village to socialize with Jim’s sister Jin and her new husband, Harry Harris. There was a great deal of excitement, with whimsical toasts made in honor of the newlyweds and vain attempts at song. One of the guests, a fair, round-faced woman with unruly hair and a tender, abstracted look in her eye, gazed at the proceedings as if she belonged somewhere else. She’d arrived with the Harrises poised and gracious, but soon settled quietly in an armchair, an unseen presence.
Her name was Mary Mohin. Her voice was soft and resonant, without a trace of the guttural Scouse accent that echoed around the room. Paul would later say that she spoke “posh,” which was the basic Liverpudlian knock on anyone who practiced the King’s English. In Mary’s case, her accent didn’t sound at all pretentious, having been drawn quite naturally from the melodic Welsh and cultured university cadences of various hospital staffs on which she’d worked. It was indicative of her overall character, which is to say she was an exacting person who sought to refine her circumstances through hard work and determination. Yet at thirty-one and unmarried, Mary was no longer considered “a prime catch.” At the age of fourteen, she had worked as a nurse trainee at Smithtown Road Hospital, where dormitory accommodations were provided. Afterward, she enrolled in a three-year general program at Walton Hospital, the main neurological facility serving northwestern Liverpool, rising quickly through the ranks to become a staff attendant and eventually a prestigious state-registered nurse.
Remarkably, over the next seventeen years, there were no serious suitors in her life. “Mary was so career-conscious that she didn’t worry much about men,” says her sister-in-law and confidante Dill Mohin. A Welsh nurse who trained with and later worked alongside Mary explains how the job extracted an enormous commitment: “We were so immersed in our work,” she recalls, “no one was in any hurry to get married.” But if Mary Mohin harbored any regrets or disappointment in what had been dealt her, she never let on to a soul.
Jim, at forty, had settled into what friends considered “a confirmed bachelorhood.” Although he was about the same age as his father when he found a bride, he had shown no inclination toward marriage, and throughout the evening, the quiet guest who “wasn’t at all musical” did nothing to alter that facade. Had the festivities progressed as a matter of course, it is likely Jim and Mary would never have seen each other again. The reality, however, was more extraordinary. About 9:30, a blast of air-raid sirens rumbled across Merseyside. The Luftwaffe had resumed its habitual sorties, attempting to knock out the strategic port. Usually, an all-clear blew within the hour, but this time emergency measures lasted all night, so the McCartneys and their guests hunkered down in the cellar until dawn.
Despite such unromantic surroundings, Jim and Mary shared enough moments to kindle serious interest. She found him “utterly charming and uncomplicated,” delighted by his “considerable good humor.” With his steel-blue eyes, thin hair swept back from a high forehead, trim businessman’s build, and robust personality, Jim became an object of Mary’s disciplined interest.
She was no doubt enamored of his openly affectionate family as well, having been deprived of similar feelings in the Mohin house. The situation there had deteriorated soon after her mother’s untimely death in 1919 while giving birth to a fourth child. With her brother Wilf away in the army and two-year-old Bill in need of vigilant supervision, Mary, who was only twelve, found herself pressed into service. She looked after the family for two years and was predisposed to the maternal role until the spring of 1921, when her new stepmother, Rose, arrived. Rose was a witch, according to Bill Mohin. Elderly, embittered, reluctant to adapt, she was a scornful, iron-willed woman devoted entirely to a son and daughter from a previous marriage who’d accompanied her to Liverpool. It became instantly clear to everyone, especially Mary, that Rose had no love for domesticity, even less for sparing her new husband’s children. Within a year, the women had reached a point whereby they were unable to communicate. “Mary went to nursing school because she couldn’t stand being at home with her stepmother,” Dill Mohin recalls. “She’d occasionally meet her father on his rounds,” delivering coal by horse-drawn cart to Liverpool families. “That way, they could be together for a while. But because of Rose, she never went home again.”
Jim and Mary began dating that summer, an otherwise fearful, desultory period marked by the staggered advance of war. Hardly a day passed that prevented them from enjoying each other’s company. They were like a pair of mismatched bookends: Jim, frisky and unserious, a man of modest dreams; Mary, an earnest, resourceful nurse on the front lines of a dangerous world. Despite the depth of their love, it wasn’t an easy business. They faced turmoil head-on as a function of the war. The government formed the Royal Cotton Commission, becoming, in essence, the central body for importing the crop—as well as its rationing—which meant that after twenty-four years at A. Hannay & Co., Jim was chucked out of work. Mary’s job, too, was in turmoil, owing to the scarcity of experienced nurses at the front; rumor circulated that she faced imminent military conscription. “Medical personnel were being recruited for emergency posts as far off as Egypt and Ethiopia,” says one local historian. Jim, whose age and boyhood injury exempted him from national service, feared abandonment—and worse.* At forty, he was disconsolate, afraid of drifting into uselessness.
It was the “austere side” of Jim McCartney that regained its bearings in a temporary job designed to aid and expand the war effort. Everywhere in Liverpool, businesses had hastily retooled their facilities, becoming functional military providers. The Bear Brand Stocking factory was a perfect example, abandoning production of silk tights in favor of parachutes. Clothing factories in Litherland churned out infantry uniforms, auto assembly lines built tanks, warehouses were appropriated and conveyed to the Royal Ordnance Factory, churches were converted to mortuaries. The Napier plant, which had flourished making plane parts, was commissioned by the Air Ministry to produce engines for the streamlined Typhoons that strafed enemy skies. Ungrudgingly, Jim labored there for the duration of the war, turning a lathe that made shell casings for explosives.
There were other perks that rendered his job more agreeable. To good, solid citizens like Jim McCartney who did “war work,” the government made subsidized housing available. Tiny terrace dwellings, referred to as “half houses” inasmuch as they resembled sheds, were authorized on the outskirts of the city. That was all the incentive necessary to hasten Jim and Mary’s plans. They had been dancing around the issue of marriage for several months, postponing decisions on the pretext of Jim’s job loss or Mary’s possible transfer. Finally, unwilling to wait out the war, they took out a license at Town Hall on April 8, 1941, and got married a week later at St. Swithins Chapel, in a Roman Catholic ceremony that was undoubtedly a concession to Mary’s traditional Irish family.
On June 18, 1942, a boy was born in a private ward at Walton Hospital, coincidentally on the same floor where, twelve years earlier, Mary had satisfied her state registry requirements. As was customary with the practice of midwifery, no doctor was present during the delivery. Instead, Mary was attended by a team of maternity nurses, dressed in a spectrum of colored uniforms that determined their rank, most of whom the mother-to-be knew by name. Because of his volunteer service in the local war effort, Jim was detained fighting a blaze behind the Martin’s Bank Building, where German bombs had incinerated a warehouse, and arrived later that night after visiting hours were over and was granted a special dispensation to see his son.
There was never any doubt what the baby would be named. With the “teardrop eyes, high forehead and raised eyebrow—the famous McCartney eyebrow”—that were unmistakable characteristics, the firstborn would be James, after his father and great-grandfather, who brought the clan to Liverpool. As no one on Jim’s side had a middle name and in keeping with tradition, it was simply James McCartney IV. But before it was registered on the birth certificate, Mary, thoughtful and scrupulous as always, wondered how she would distinguish the men from each other. To solve the problem, it was decided that her son would be James Paul. Exactly when James was dropped in favor of the more familiar middle name has been a source of some speculation among family members. Some believe that during the hospital stay both parents referred to the baby as Jimmy; others swear that was never a factor. Given the circumstances, an explanation seems immaterial because by the time they brought their son home he was acknowledged only—and forevermore—as Paul.
The first few years of Paul McCartney’s life were marked by a blur of consecutive moves.
It was evident from the start that Jim and Mary’s flat in Anfield was hopelessly inadequate to shelter their little family. In addition, Everton was growing increasingly popular as a German bombing target, the district frequently a mottle of smoldering frames where houses once stood, the air heavy with lime from nearby mass graves where war casualties were buried. “Everton,” as a longtime resident put it, “was a place to leave.”
Wrapped snugly in Mary’s arms, Paul adjusted to the extreme northern weather as his parents hopscotched around Liverpool, scaling each rung up the Corporation housing ladder in measured stride. Initially, they commuted by ferry, relocating in Wallasey, across the Mersey and an ostensibly safer district by comparison. Then, in 1944, after the birth of another son, Peter Michael (he, too, known by his middle name), they moved back to the mainland, to a “drab part” of the city called Knowsley Estates, whose condition was typified by its street name: Roach Avenue. The building, called Sir Thomas White Gardens, was part of a semicircular complex and decent enough, according to a relative who visited often. They “had a [ground-floor] flat in a well-built tenement, a big block of concrete with kids everywhere. But the [neighbors] were very much to be desired.”
Jim, by this time, was beyond the restless stage, waiting for the Cotton Exchange to reopen. His job at Napier’s was eliminated, and a temporary position with the Liverpool Corporation’s sanitation department proved debilitating. Mary bore the brunt of his frustration. She returned to work part-time, in order to supplement their income—and get out of the house. Fortunately, the Corporation had been signing up state-registered nurses to canvass each district, inspecting the hygienic conditions in places where women elected to give birth at home. Such deliveries had grown common in the forties, in no small part because travel was severely restricted during the war. To meet the demand, district midwives took on great local importance, “much like the parish priest or the beat policeman.” People came to her door for advice. “Is the nurse in? I need to talk to the nurse,” they’d inquire, then anguish “about the sister-in-law who’d run off with the postman.”
But mostly Paul watched his mother depart at all hours of the day—or night—to assist in the home delivery of babies. The usually mellow Mary switched over to automatic pilot when pressed into action. Her transformation never failed to astound Paul. Double-time, she’d inventory her equipment, checking the contents of the black leather delivery bag for thoroughness. Her cases were thrown over a bicycle, whose front and rear lights were tested, as were the batteries in her headlamp. When everything was approved for takeoff, Mary straddled the bike, threw her purse into a brown wicker basket attached to the handlebars, and sped into the dark like Bruce Wayne, often not returning home in time for sleep.
Cycling around Liverpool was no waltz in the park. The hills surrounding the McCartneys’ residence were steep and unforgiving. Incredibly, Mary never surrendered to them, despite the effects of a deadly cigarette habit that left her gasping for breath. One road in particular, Fairway Street, was the steepest in all of Liverpool, but Mary routinely scaled it at all hours of the night, rain or shine.
Jim often put the boys to bed while his wife was on call, never complaining, taking great pleasure in raising his sons. During the spring, Mary would be called out nearly every night, leaving the house during dinner and not returning until after breakfast, while still finding time to lavish attention on Paul and Mike and produce “sumptuous casseroles” in her tiny kitchen.
In 1946, to everyone’s great delight, cotton was returned to the private sector and Jim found his old job waiting at A. Hannay & Co. No doubt this turn of events ended a grave personal crisis. It was a relief to be back doing the work he knew and loved. But almost immediately there was evidence that the once-vital industry lay in shambles; nothing stood up to five years of bureaucratic fumbling. The boom trade, when Lancashire imported 4.5 million bales of cotton annually, had dwindled to a lowly fraction of that bounty. Mills were encouraged to close, their machinery exported, along with jobs and taxable income. As one veteran of the cotton trenches described it: “The rot had set in.”
Still, Jim pushed on. The salary wasn’t commensurate with his experience, but his weekly take of £6 to £10 was enough to supplement Mary’s income. They’d “never be wealthy,” in the estimation of a relative, “but with two wages coming in, it wasn’t difficult” to make ends meet. And while not as comfortable, perhaps, as they had dreamed of becoming, the McCartneys were better off than the run of Scousers living in Liverpool center. Mary even mustered her courage and “asked [her bosses] for a move to Speke.”
Lured by the prospect of wide-open space, Liverpool families had begun migrating south a few miles, to where new settlements rose from lush glades and pastures, in pursuit of the middle-class dream. But Speke was the sort of culturally deprived suburb only the British could refer to as an “estate.” The area had existed since the sixteenth century as an old Elizabethan manor house that was rashly redesigned in the mid-1930s as “a new model town” for the masses. Street after street, row after row, the layout was a grid of numbing monotony superimposed on the landscape’s windswept fields. There were churches, clinics, and schools, but not the pubs and little shops that encouraged social interaction. Moreover, there was no social or economic diversity: Speke functioned as a one-class town of laborers, without any middle class aside from priests and doctors.
To many people, the eight-mile distance to Liverpool center seemed “half a universe away.” Cars and trains would one day bridge that gap, but when the McCartneys moved to Speke, few people in their financial bracket owned automobiles despite Ford and Vauxhall being the estate’s largest employers. And the bus routes were hopeless; necessitating a devious maze of transfers, it often took an hour or more to make the fifteen-minute trip into the city. Geographically, Speke had the forlornness and seclusion of a military installation, its residents’ sense of isolation—of being cut off from the rest of the city—overwhelming.
Still, there was something delicious about leaving all that inner-city congestion behind. The streets, though too close together, were spectacularly clean. Most houses had stopped burning coke and coal in favor of gas, “smokeless fuel,” providing an immediate sense of wholesomeness, and as a result Mary’s boys could play outside in a pillow of crisp, fresh air.
The house the McCartneys got at 72 Western Avenue on the edge of a flat, featureless field was comfortable by council standards: a living room with a generous bay window, a kitchen more spacious than Mary was accustomed to, and two snug bedrooms on a sooty lot that stood tangent to a neighboring orchard. Inside, it was roughly the same size as the flat in Everton, but thanks to the location and the promise of better things, Jim and Mary’s modest Scouse sense of how much of the world they deserved to call their own was satisfied. Paul was four when they arrived, and to this inquisitive city child, Speke was a magical, imaginary kingdom—unbounded by horizons and gaping with wide-open spaces—a kingdom that was at least as enchanting and magical as those in the stories his mother read at night. In summer, the bluebells that feasted on the sandy northern soil turned the estate from an undernourished tract into a picture postcard.
Within a year, however, the Corporation moved the family to another part of Speke, in an expansion that stretched a mile farther east, on Ardwick Road. This site was even more rudimentary than the last, just neat rows of brick buildings on either side of a muddy pudding of road gouged with irrigation ditches. It had a huge view of the fields opposite the house and a wind exposure that defied insulation. Only a handful of families had moved into this section of the development, and to young Paul it seemed particularly isolated, as though “we were always on the edge of the world.”
Soon after they unpacked, in early 1948, Mary began complaining to Jim about stomach pains. She had probably been experiencing discomfort, if moderately and privately, since returning to work. “Oh, I’ve been poorly today,” she complained to a relative at tea one afternoon after a comment about her low spirits. “I had terrible indigestion.” On another occasion she declined a plate of cucumber sandwiches, blaming them as the source of lingering “indigestion.”
But the distress wasn’t easily shrugged off. Eventually, Mary’s pains grew more severe. She tired easily from bicycling and early in the day. At first it was attributed to stress caused by her erratic work schedule, which seemed logical. Hastily eaten meals and extreme lack of sleep were enough to cause anyone nagging indigestion. But in Dill Mohin’s eyes, Mary hadn’t looked well for a long time. “Why don’t you go to the doctor?” she argued.
Mary dismissed her sister-in-law’s suggestion with a wave. “Oh, you don’t go to the doctor with indigestion, Dill,” she scolded her.
“I think, for the most part, she was afraid to go, she was afraid to know,” says Dill, who suspected that something more serious was involved. “I could see doubt and fear in her eyes. She was such a clever nurse, she must have known what was wrong.”
Finally, Jim persuaded her to have a thorough examination. It was scheduled for a Tuesday afternoon, but as he was due in Manchester that morning, his sister-in-law accompanied Mary to Northern Hospital, where she was to undergo an upper GI series. “I left her in the waiting room,” Dill recalls. “She wouldn’t have me stay. ‘I’ll catch the bus,’ she said, ‘and be home in time to get the boys from school.’ ”
However, by the time she was released later in the day, Mary was too shaken to go straight home. She found a telephone booth on the corner, just outside the hospital, and phoned Jim’s office. He could barely understand what she said through the tears. “Jim, oh, Jim,” she sobbed, “I’ve got cancer!”
“Don’t move—stay where you are,” he instructed her. “I’ll come get you.”
Within minutes, Jim had run several blocks to the telephone booth and found his wife curled up inside. It unnerved him to see her, always the unflappable nurse, in such a state of emotional distress. He was determined to console her, trying everything he knew to lessen her foreboding, but the doctor hadn’t minced words. The mastitis he diagnosed was already in an advanced stage; cases like these, as she knew, were almost always fatal.
Practical as ever, Mary put a good face on misfortune. The diagnosis passed as something instantly forgotten, like a fascination or a mistake. She could find no incentive in it, and that challenged her, touched off her stubborn Irish defiance to seek comfort where she could find it—in her family. The boys, especially, distracted her, demanding constant supervision.
There are numerous accounts of how Jim occasionally walloped his sons when provoked—Mike McCartney even claims they were “duly bashed”—but his sister-in-law maintains they are untrue. “Jim and Mary never smacked the boys,” she says. “They took them to their room and gave them a good talking-to, but they never hit them. Never.” Whatever the case, Paul and Mike remained a handful.
“The McCartney boys were like a circus all on their own,” says a cousin who was an occasional playmate. They were as rambunctious as any two brothers who depended on each other for entertainment. Paul, as ringmaster, set a ferocious pace for Mike, a full head shorter, who “followed him like a puppy down every street.” He could read, shoot conkers and ollies (Scouser for chestnuts and marbles), swim, chew gum, and whistle. Best of all, Paul was canny; even at an early age, he could “charm the skin off a snake” just by pulling that angelic face. A fleshy, rather pretty boy with dark brown hair and huge, expressive eyes accentuated by unusually long silky lashes and a tiny rosebud mouth, he developed a smooth, winning profile that was effective in any variety of situations. In photographs taken when he was a toddler, his face is a mask of bluff innocence, the lower lip carefully retracted while his mouth betrays the flicker of a smirk. These same pictures indicate another revealing pose: puffing out his chest and folding his arms across it in an expression of utter satisfaction. It was apparent that, more than anything, Paul had a real sense of himself. Of all the kids in the neighborhood, he was the most polite and well-spoken, ingratiating, eager to please and self-deprecating, which came in handy when denying a piece of infantile mischief. Hunter Davies referred to this style of Paul’s as “quiet diplomacy,” but it was more like a hustle. Already a song-and-dance man, he’d perfected this little shuffle that accommodated him for years to come. “Saint” Paul and his disciple, Mike, kept Mary on her toes.
Indeed, Mary would run herself ragged trying to keep up with those boys. They were always off on a rousing bicycle adventure whose itinerary rounded downhill through the lacy arc of nearby countryside. Beyond Speke itself the topography changed and the road fed into the green-striped fields that converged on Dungeon Lane. On those occasions when Michael was allowed to tag along, the brothers left the estate by that route and traversed the steep embankment that bordered the Mersey. From the top of the rise, they could see the entire northern coast: the unkempt sliver of beach that limned the shore to Hale Head, where an old lighthouse stood sentry to ships navigating around the yawning channel. On the Wirral side of the river, in dizzying perspective, was Ellesmere Port, glinting, turned into the wind, and beyond it the crenellated horizon of Wales, the gateway to other worlds unto themselves. A steady parade of ships wreaked havoc with the ledgy mud banks, but periodic lulls in traffic, at hours the boys knew by heart, enabled them to scramble down the forbidding incline and swim in the icy, graphite water. Other times, they bypassed the river entirely en route to Tabletop Bridge, where, lying in wait like a “super spy,” they would pelt onrushing trains with turnips scavenged from an adjacent field. “This is where my love of country came from,” Paul later recalled. Too young to travel long distances by himself, he would retreat to a secluded glade of the woods, entertained by a local cricket ensemble while he read book after book—a practice he repeated often over the years, albeit in cushier environs.
Even in Speke, where most families were blue-collar workers, parents chased the middle-class dream: that higher education would lead to advancement for their children. Jim and Mary were perhaps more aggressive than others in that regard. It became a passion for them, as they steered their sons toward the right venues. In addition to Stockton Wood Road Primary, not far from the house, Paul attended the Joseph Williams Primary School. Both were well regarded for their standards of academic achievement.
Jim and Mary also challenged the boys in their own ways. Jim was an armchair philosopher who rattled on incessantly about conventional “principles” such as self-respect, perseverance, a relentless work ethic, fairness. “He was a great conversationalist, very opinionated, an impassioned talker,” says a nephew who recalled Jim’s ritual of “matching wits” with everyone—and Paul, especially—in an effort to provoke an animated discussion. He devoured the newspaper each day, which provided fresh fodder for his observations—as well as an onslaught of information for his sons. In the evenings, with logs crackling in the fireplace, Jim would settle comfortably into an armchair in the front parlor, fold back a section of the Liverpool Echo or the Express, and scrutinize the crossword puzzle, inviting the boys to “solve clues” for him while explaining the meaning of new and uncommon words. “He was very into crosswords,” Paul recalled. “ ‘Learn crosswords, they’re good for your word power.’… If you didn’t know what a word meant or how it was spelled, my dad would say, ‘Look it up.’ ” Mary read poetry to them and insisted that her sons cultivate an interest in books and ideas that would carry them far beyond the limitations of their parents. “Mary was very keen on the boys’ schooling—very keen,” says Dill Mohin. “She knew Paul was clever and pledged to facilitate that in any way she could. No lazy Scouse accent was permitted. To her credit, he spoke right up, articulately, without sounding precocious. The boys weren’t allowed to go out to play until they’d done their [homework],” which Mary inspected as scrupulously as she did their appearance.
Despite the so-called model curriculum set by headmaster John Gore and his well-intentioned staff, Joseph Williams was a reflection of its constituency. Few students at the primary level went on to grammar school; most graduated to secondary modern schools, lingering there only until they were old enough to work. In Paul’s class, out of several hundred students only ninety chose to sit the eleven-plus exam—a test to determine whether or not a student was grammar-school caliber and eligible to work toward a General Certificate of Education—and only four, one of whom was Paul McCartney, received a passing grade. The divisiveness it caused was painful. Decades later, the effect of that exam was still fresh on Paul’s mind: “It was too big a cutoff. All your friends who didn’t make it weren’t your friends anymore.”
The grammar school Paul entered in September 1953 was a shining exemplar of the British education system. Founded as “a gentleman’s school” in 1825, the Liverpool Institute was a state-endowed academic facility whose ethos was geared exclusively to funneling as many of its students as possible into Oxford and Cambridge. Its Prussian curriculum was modeled on a university-type education, with streams, forms, and majors designed to maximize individual scholarship. The masters wore gowns in deference to their first-class pedigrees; an astonishing twenty of the fifty-two faculty members had Oxbridge degrees. Outstanding students were chosen as prefects in their later years. Administrators reported on the progress of standouts to sharp-eyed university dons. The whole process at the “Inny,” as it was known, imitated a grand and long-standing intellectual tradition, and nothing defined it better than the august school motto: No nobis solum set toti mundo nati—You’re born not for yourself but for the whole world.
On Monday, September 8, 1953, looking scrubbed, spruced, and more than the least bit intimidated, Paul, dressed in a navy blue blazer with a green badge over the heart, short gray trousers, a green-and-black-striped tie, and redoubtable dog’s-tongue cap, stumbled off the bus from Garston and walked up Mount Street and through the wrought-iron railing that delimited the yards behind the immense school building. Like most boys who crossed the threshold, he must have been swept with thoughts of smallness. The Inny was the largest building he’d ever entered, larger even than his mother’s hospital and almost as imposing as the mammoth Liverpool Cathedral, whose unfinished sandstone friezes loomed in eerie relief across the street. Nearly a thousand boys mingled in the lower yard, a sea of bodies, many of them seventeen or eighteen—grown men!—with serious features. “We were eleven,” says Colin Manley, who was in Paul’s class and later played guitar for the Remo Four. “They herded us into the auditorium, told us what forms we’d be split up into, what subjects we were to take, and what was expected of us. It was horrendous, really—overwhelming.”
Paul, slightly awed by it all, drew languages as his area of concentration, which seemed well suited to a boy with an ear for cadences. He began in the French stream but went on to do modern languages. “The first year, I was pretty lost,” he recalls. “But by the second year, I was learning Latin, Spanish, and German. At age twelve, which wasn’t bad.” Although spelling wasn’t a strong suit, and math even less so, he developed a particular knack for grammar and English literature, thanks in no small part to the influence of Alan Durband. Durband, known as Dusty to friends and colleagues, was somewhat of a celebrity at the Liverpool Institute, having written a short script for the BBC that was aired as a popular “morning story” on the radio. A disciple of the great literary critic F. R. Leavis, Durband brought the old rooted classics to life, beginning with Chaucer, which Paul read in its original Middle English, then trawled through Shakespeare’s plays. He responded strongly to the moral dilemmas faced by the characters, but he especially loved the way Alan Durband pared the stories down to their most basic themes, exposing the simplicity of it all. Indeed, Paul’s grasp of Durband’s lessons would be showcased in those early Beatles lyrics, deconstructing adolescent sexuality into pure sentiment (if not mere cliché): she loves you, I want to hold your hand, do you want to know a secret—small signs that what lay beyond might offer something more conceptual.
Fascinating as literature was, Paul found his firmest expression in art. “He had a real talent when it came to drawing,” remembers Don Andrew, another future Remo Four member, who sat next to Paul in class. “It wasn’t something he learned from a book, he was self-taught, and so the work he produced was truly imaginative.” Paul had drawn for as long as he could remember; he was “always sketching.” Come vacation time, he recalls, “I always [made] my own Christmas cards,” decorating them with nervous pencil sketches overlaid with watercolor washes.
Many years later he would linger in a Long Island barn and watch his friend Willem de Kooning “work on these massive, great canvases” that fed Paul’s own hunger to paint, but there was no such encouragement from the masters. At the institute, students never “stayed with art” throughout their school career; the meat-and-potatoes classes were so demanding that there just wasn’t enough time for it. But those boys who showed talent were given the opportunity to “stay behind on a Tuesday night” for extra art instruction. Once a week Stan Reed, the institute’s resident draftsman, conducted lessons in line and perspective drawing, as well as watercolors for a class of ten or twelve self-motivated students. Paul, who had energy, albeit conventional talent, flourished under Reed’s practical guidance. What’s more, Reed helped Paul overcome the insecurity he had in relation to “true” artistes at the art college next door—abnegating the notion “that they paint, and we don’t.” Paul took full advantage of the advice—so much so that, in time, some students actually approached him for tips and technical hints. Says Don Andrew: “I remember walking along the art room on Parents Nights, when our work was hung, and being drawn to the most outstanding piece on exhibit. It was always Paul McCartney’s—he was that good.”
But art wasn’t the anchor of a grammar-school education, not at the Liverpool Institute. Paul described his performance as “reasonably academic,” but the masters were anything but reasonable, especially not about his grades, which fell consistently—and sharply—toward the end of his third year. He knew the score: only true scholars gained admittance to university, and Paul wasn’t performing to those standards. Not that it would have mattered all that much. By then, there were too many distractions, and nothing in school could compete with a force as great as rock ’n roll.
There was always some vagrant rumble of music in the McCartney house, be it from the radio, which provided a constant source of entertainment; Jim’s stash of scratchy 78s, which contained an assortment of family favorites; or his repertoire of “party pieces” played to exhaustion on the piano with unflagging exuberance. Jim “had a lot of music in him,” Paul was to say, and throughout this period he took great care to convey its pleasures to the boys. Paul had been raised on an elementary mix of pop music—his father’s music hall standards, or what Paul referred to as “sing-along stuff,” plus highlights of the big band era coupled with the dreary mainstream hits of the day, such as “Greensleeves” and “Let Me Go Lover.” Aside from that fare and show tunes, there was little else that engaged him. Before 1955, if Paul wanted to hear live music, he accompanied Jim to the brass band concerts in Sefton Park, where he felt “very northern” settled on a bench, as he was, among an immense sweep of bedrock Liverpudlians, people rooted to the glorious past and proud to celebrate it in deference to the future. He had little if any sense of diversity or abundance. Music in general, to Paul, existed solely as entertainment, to be appreciated secondhand.
During Paul’s early teenage years, Jim began to concentrate more on fine-tuning his sons’ inner ear, identifying instruments whenever a record was played and talking in elaborate detail about chord patterns and the architecture of harmony. Piano lessons were encouraged as a matter of course; Jim knew it would give Paul the right foundation should he ever wish to play in a band. But though Jim’s intentions were good, his timing was god-awful. “We made the mistake of starting [the lessons] in the summer,” he soon realized, “… and all the kids would be knocking at the door all the time, wanting [the boys] to come out and play.” Concentration was next to impossible; Paul had no discipline whatsoever, and when he struggled to practice the scales—or develop greater interest, for that matter—the lessons were dropped without fanfare.
On Paul’s fourteenth birthday, Jim presented his son with a nickel-plated trumpet that had belonged to his cousin Ian Harris. There was more than a bit of family ritual in the passing of the horn. The trumpet was a real jazz musician’s instrument, the choice of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, and Dizzy Gillespie. It didn’t take a great ear to know that Paul McCartney wasn’t cut from the same cloth. Though he couldn’t articulate very well, he made up for it by blowing with great enthusiasm, learning how to make a big noise just by running the valves. But in truth, he had no range, no chops. He could blow his nose with more conviction.
Once again, Paul had his priorities elsewhere. Among his mounting distractions at the time was Radio Luxembourg’s nighttime broadcast of American music, which he listened to in bed via an extension-cord-and-headphone device that Jim had hooked up to the radiogram in the living room. Paul considered it “a revelation,” and in his enthusiasm he began to mimic the voices that wailed aross the airwaves. Whereas he’d taken only an occasional whiff of big band crooners, he inhaled the gut-wrenching rock ’n roll singers. The raw, raunchy and often ferocious intensity of Ray Charles, Ivory Joe Hunter, Hank Ballard, and Fats Domino riveted Paul; they were capable of anything, from lusty, menacing growls to lilting falsettos. Some vocal styles, like the freakish bump-and-grind vamping of Bo Diddley, were undoubtedly puzzling, while Little Richard’s explosiveness and extraordinary range would ultimately feed Paul throughout his career.
Of course, Paul’s itch to sing like these recording artists was next to impossible with a trumpet—the same dilemma John Lennon had faced with the harmonica. Fruitlessly, Paul pleaded with Jim to buy him a guitar. Whether money factored into the refusal that was given, it was certainly an issue for Jim; he couldn’t afford to blow almost three weeks’ salary on such an extravagance, especially since Paul already had a perfectly good instrument. After some wheel-spinning, Paul cleverly restructured his proposal: since the trumpet had no appeal, he sought permission to trade it for a more desirable instrument. Jim, sensing the futility of his position, finally gave in. Sometime about the end of June, just before school let out for vacation, Paul wrapped his trumpet in a cloth and took it to Rushworth and Dreaper, one of Liverpool’s leading music stores, where he exchanged it for a crudely made Zenith guitar—a henna-brown sunburst model, with f-holes, a cutaway tuning head, and action as high as a diving board—that was propped against one of the shelves. The salesman at Rushworth’s must have struggled to conceal his delight at the deal; it wasn’t every day he came by a trumpet worth five or six times the price of the £15 guitar. All the same, he had no idea how pivotal that transaction would be.
Throughout the sweltering summer months of 1956, Paul remained cloistered indoors, the guitar monopolizing his attention in ways that made him seem preoccupied, if not obsessed. “The minute he got the guitar that was the end,” his brother, Michael, told a writer in 1967. “He was lost. He didn’t have time to eat or think about anything else.” The lifelong romance had begun, but from the outset there were mechanical problems that tested his devotion. For instance, he struggled almost perversely to make right-handed chord patterns conform to his stubborn left-handed perspective. It was no easy feat; whatever natural instinct he relied on proved maddeningly ineffective. And he had no simple answer for it. Years before, Paul’s cousin Bett Robbins, who babysat him and was also left-handed, had tried teaching him chords on her ukulele. It seemed manageable at the time; he would “have a little go” and accompany himself to a medley of wide-eyed children’s songs. But a full-size guitar presented full-size problems. In most cases, a lefty would chord it as if he were right-handed or simply turn the guitar around so that the fingers were reversed. Neither method, however, met with any success. It intruded on his rhythm, his arm sawing the air clumsily in stiff, erratic curves, tripping his timing like a broken switch. At times, such lack of control felt like a physical disability. And yet, it wasn’t for lack of coordination; Paul had a gift for the considerable complexities that went into making music. But like an American’s spastic attempt to shift and clutch a British car, he simply couldn’t discipline his hands to make the necessary moves.
Yet he would not give up. Discipline had never been Paul’s strong suit, but this was something more. This was desire—and an inflexible determination. Ingeniously, Paul turned to the hardware, as opposed to merely technique, and restrung the guitar in reverse so that the thinnest, high-pitched strings were now in the bass-notes position, and vice versa. The solution was jerry-rigged and “all rather inexact,” in his appraisal, but served to give him the control necessary to synchronize the rhythm with the mechanics. Voilà! That got him up and running almost immediately. “I learned some chords my way up,” he recalled, “A, D, and E—which was all you needed in those days.”
The change it caused was stunning. Since entering Liverpool Institute, Paul had been focused almost intransigently on classwork, competing con brio against students in the upper streams, with the intention that one day he would return to his alma mater, awash in prestigious degrees, and teach alongside his tweedy mentors. But now only the guitar mattered, “and so the academic things were forgotten,” as Paul remembered.
Mary tried to stay after him as best she could, her ultimate goal being to groom Paul for medical school. But while Mary spared no effort to further Paul’s future, her own was on the verge of unraveling. “Physically, she wasn’t able to handle the load,” says Dill Mohin, citing the rigors of yet another residential move designed to march the McCartneys progressively up the food chain.
This time, Mary wrangled a council house on Forthlin Road in the suburb of Allerton, not far from their previous home but as different from Speke as go-karts are from Cadillacs. Founded as a manor settlement “for families of above-modest means,” Allerton had become an oasis of upward mobility on the clover-groomed pastures of South Liverpool. “I always thought of the area as being slightly posh,” says a friend who visited the McCartneys often at 20 Forthlin Road. Built in the 1920s, the quaint three-bedroom cottage in the middle of a terrace row reminded people of a gingerbread house, with its stubby picture window, smokestack chimney, and high-crowned brick facade the color of gravy. Slate-roof effects had been skillfully mimicked in asphalt. A lavender hedge squatted at the bend in a narrow walk. By the time the McCartneys took over the house, in late 1955, a garden budded nicely in the front courtyard. And best of all was the price: an affordable £1 6s. a week, thanks to Mary’s seniority at work.
But this move cost Mary more of her health and energy. In the spring of 1956, those bouts of “indigestion” resurfaced and the harsh reality cast a shadow over her short-lived contentment. There was no denying it this time: the cancer was back. She’d probably known it was there all along but felt too good to deal with it.
Yet, however much she suffered, Mary kept up appearances in an effort to counteract the inevitable. Work remained a perfect distraction. When midwifery proved too debilitating—which it did often now that the cancer flared up, wiping her out most days by noon—she reclaimed her old job as a health visitor for the Liverpool Corporation, while moonlighting at a clinic in the Dingle, a working-class ghetto. She even maintained an exhaustive regimen of housework: making the beds, washing the laundry, preparing the meals, cleaning the dishes, and vacuuming the rooms. It sometimes seemed as if she were able to defiantly squeeze out the last drops of reserve energy needed to tackle yet another punishing task. But at times the symptoms were too severe to keep hidden. Occasionally, she would yelp and double over, kneading her chest until the spasms passed. One day after school, Mike encountered her in an upstairs bedroom, sobbing, a silver crucifix clutched tightly in her fist.
As the cancer spread unchecked, her stamina faded. Relatives vividly recall how Mary could barely get up the stairs to the bedroom without help. Pain and shortness of breath played havoc with her strength. In an attempt to staunch the metastasis of malignant cells, her doctor, gambling for time, ordered a mastectomy. Relatively assured of a successful outcome, Jim remained at work instead of accompanying Mary to the hospital. Once again, he asked his sister-in-law Dill Mohin to act as a chaperone, planning to visit soon after the Cotton Exchange closed. When on the morning of October, 30, 1956, Dill arrived at Forthlin Road, she found Mary scurrying around, putting the final touches on each room. Dill remembers thinking how the house looked like “a pin in paper,” which was the Scouse equivalent of “impeccably tidy.” The breakfast dishes were drying in the sink; wastebaskets had been emptied. Nothing was out of place. “She had all the boys’ things ready for the next day,” Dill recalls. “Their shirts were ironed, their underwear cleaned.”
Standing back to admire her handiwork, Mary sighed and smiled sadly at her sister-in-law’s disapproving scowl. “Now everything’s ready for them,” she said, “in case I don’t come back.”
By the next afternoon, her words were all too prophetic. The mastectomy had been successful—up to a point—but the cancer was entrenched; there was no hope. “We knew she was dying,” Dill Mohin recalls, explaining how the family now assembled to pay their last respects. “Jim rang me up [that afternoon] and said, ‘I’m bringing the boys to see you, Dill. I’m taking them in to see Mary for the last time. I’ve put clean shirts on them; they’ve got on their best clothes, their school ties. Their fingernails are clean; so are their teeth. Would you look them over for me? If they pass [inspection] with you, they’re all right.”
The image Mary had cultivated so carefully was intact when Paul and Mike shuffled into her hospital room just after six o’clock on October 31. They had been groomed to perfection, “two little gentlemen,” and stood in sharp contrast to the “ghastly” figure of their bedridden mother that now struggled on an elbow to greet them. The operation had clearly ravaged Mary. Her usually open face was expressionless, rigid, grim; so dark were the circles under her eyes, so demonic and disfiguring, that a relative might have assumed they’d stumbled into the wrong room. Paul remembered that “there was blood on the sheets,” an image that never left him.
Dill and Bill Mohin waited anxiously in the reception area “so that she would have a bit of time on her own with the boys.” When they finally joined the family, however, Dill noticed with astonishment that the boys “were romping all over her.” Mary, “putting on a brave face,” seemed not to mind—or was too sick to object. “Oh, leave them alone,” she said in response to her sister-in-law’s remonstrances. “They’re all right.” Jim, silent as a statue, stood stonily in the corner, his eyes flushed with tears, his face so anguished, laboring—fighting hard—to maintain his composure. Inconsolability was not a part of his character. His gift had always been optimism, an extra beacon of light thrown onto the path of adversity; friends and family relied on him to pump up their spirits, and he did, too, always without a qualm. Ever the salesman, he had immense strength and the right words at hand to reverse any dark mood. And yet all of it failed him now.
That night, about 9:30, Jim arrived unannounced at the Eagle Hotel, on Paradise Street, where the Mohins were tending bar in the back room of their half-filled pub. He was physically wasted, empty. All he could manage to say was “She’s gone.” Mary had suffered an embolism and died shortly after the boys left.
Paul reacted to the news with misplaced alarm—it is rumored he blurted out: “What are we going to do without her money?”—but there was no misjudging the depth of his loss. It was a devastating blow. “The big shock in my teenage years,” he was to say. Jim may have helped shape Paul’s early attitude toward music, but no one had the impact on him that Mary did. In later years, after he was fabulously wealthy and knighted before the Queen, Paul would often talk about success in terms of his mother’s encouragement “to do better” than her and Jim, to improve his circumstances. Suddenly, without her stabilizing presence, without her insight and pragmatism, he felt desperate.
For weeks afterward, Paul bumped around the house “like a lost soul,” suffering the symptoms of an emotional free fall. He was aloof, unresponsive; when he spoke, it was through a smoke screen of feints and grunts. No one recalls ever seeing him sink so low. “I was determined not to let it affect me,” he said. “I learned to put a shell around me at that age.” For long stretches, sometimes hours, he would retreat into a cloud of silence. In all the upheaval, there was nothing, other than time, to bring him out of this depression.
To fill the gaps, Paul turned to music. He threw himself into playing the guitar, practicing chords and finger positions for hours on end, but not in any way that expressed a sense of pleasure. It was more therapeutic, a release—less musical than remedial. There was never any intention of sharing it with someone else. “He used to lock himself in the toilet and play the guitar,” says Dill, who visited often in order to help Jim around the house. “It was the only place he could disengage himself from the tragedy.”
Jim, who was himself heartbroken and threatening suicide, had nothing left in reserve for Paul. Dazed, in a state of emotional shock, he depended entirely on his sisters, Jin and Millie, to keep the family afloat. Millie arrived regularly to cook and help clean the house, but she was “much more straitlaced” than Jin, with an aversion “to showing her feelings” and “a very dour husband,” Paul’s uncle Albert, who had undergone “a bizarre personality change” in the navy that bordered on hostile. Jin Harris, on the other hand, was “the motherly aunt” whose manner was not dissimilar to that of Mary’s. A big, heavy woman with a cool head and an unchecked liberal philosophy, she knew intuitively that what the McCartney boys needed more than anything else was TLC. She showered them with attention, listened dutifully to them, indulged them, held and consoled them, devoting a lot of time and energy to the healing process. “There was no one better suited to picking up the pieces in Paul’s life,” according to her great-niece Kate Robbins. “She lived entirely through her heart.”
But Paul’s and Mike’s anguish spilled out in other, more detrimental ways. Paul’s grades, which had already been compromised to a degree, slipped even further. Grudgingly, he put in the necessary effort—but barely. He “skivved off” classes with alarming regularity, paid little attention to homework, and basically ignored the requirements necessary to prepare him for O-level exams, which were critical to his future.
In the midst of so much emotional turbulence, Paul quickly reached out for the one lifeline that held him in thrall: rock ’n roll. Listening to it for long stretches, escaping into its defiant tone and fanciful lyrics, took him away from the painful memories. Paul loved the improvisational aspect of it, and he loved mimicking its exaggerated nuances. Thanks to his ear for languages, it was easy to pick up the subtle inflections and shadings in the performances. Buddy Holly and Elvis, Chuck Berry, and even Carl Perkins—they had the magic, all right. He wanted to sound how they sounded, look how they looked, play how they played. Stretched across his bed, he would sink into a kind of reverie, staring out the window, not looking at anything in particular, not even thinking, but lulled by the music’s alchemy, hour after hour. There was nothing he could point to that supported a claim that music was anything more than a hobby, especially this music. His talent was at the service of some hidden energy. And yet at the center of this vortex was the desire to do something more with it. What or with whom, he wasn’t sure. But he sensed it was only a matter of time until it all came together and he put his own stamp on it.
Eight months later, he met John Lennon.