AFTER THE BEATLES THING BECAME SO DEPRESSING, LINDA and I decided we’d get out of London and start living full-time on our small holding in Scotland. It was quite a difficult period because of the band’s breakup, but it allowed me to see another side of myself.

First and foremost, we did everything for ourselves, and at this point it was Linda, Heather, Mary – who was still a baby – and me. If we needed something to eat, we’d go into town in the little Land Rover, come back up, and cook it. We didn’t have anyone helping us, except for one guy, the shepherd, because it was a little sheep farm. It was an experience that allowed me to be a man. If a picture needed hanging, I was your man. If something needed doing on the farm, I’d do it. If we needed a new table, I’d make it.

‘When Winter Comes’ is a series of memories of activities that had enriched me; each one makes up a nice little scene. I would fix fences, dig a drain, keep some chickens, somehow plant a vegetable garden. These are things I’d learnt. You’ve got to put a fence up or the fox will have your chickens. You’ve got to dig a drain because if the vegetable patch gets too wet, nothing will grow there. All these new experiences were feeding into the songs I was writing at the time, like ‘Heart of the Country’.

I’d grown up in Liverpool and gone on the road with The Beatles around the world and then around again, and now here I was on a farm in the middle of nowhere, and it was sensational. There wasn’t a bath in this little farmhouse, but there was a big steel tub in which they’d cleaned the milking equipment, so we would just start filling this thing and about two hours later it would be ready. It wasn’t quick, but that was the joy of it. We’d get towels and just run – because the bath was in the barn next door, and it was bloody cold in the winter. We’d run in and jump in this bath, which was not easy to get into. But we were young and vigorous, and the kids were too young to know to complain. We’d jump in the big tub and have this fantastic Japanese-style bath. This was the kind of thing I’d never done, ever, in my life, and it was amazingly liberating. I got to do all the things I think a lot of young people still dream about today – the famous ‘gap year’. I sense a lot of people want that freedom, escaping the rat race.

‘I must find the time to plant some trees’. That was something else I’d actually done, though I’d planted them very badly. But we were learning these new skills, and it was fun, and now I’m a dab hand at it. I just lifted a piece of sod, stuck the roots of a little one-foot seedling underneath it and plonked the sod back down. In Scotland the weather can be harsh, and this was a hill farm, so there weren’t really many trees to speak of. On the hills where we were, the only things that could really survive were Douglas fir or Norway spruce and the like. By the time I wrote this song, around the early 1990s, those little one-foot things I’d planted in Scotland were bloody giants – thirty-foot giants.

I rediscovered this song in 2019 when I was listening to old demos for the Flaming Pie archive release. It felt special, so I pulled it out and worked on it for a short video of the song at my recording studio in the first pandemic-related UK lockdown of 2020. It actually ended up inspiring what became the McCartney III album.

On the farm. Scotland, 1970–71