Beatles (16 page)

They had a great deal of trouble getting George into primary school. The worst of the bulge years were starting. All the schools were full. ‘I tried a Roman Catholic school. He’d been baptized a Catholic. But they said I’d have to keep him at home till he was six, then they might be able to take him. He was so intelligent and advanced, so I just sent him to an ordinary state primary school.’

This was Dovedale Primary. The same school that John Lennon was already at. He was two and a half years older and three classes ahead of George. They never met. But Peter
Harrison, one of George’s brothers, was in the same year as John Lennon and Jimmy Tarbuck, the Liverpool comedian.

‘I took him to school that first day, across Penny Lane,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘He wanted to stay dinners right from the beginning. The next day, as I was getting my coat off the hanger, he said, “Oh no, I don’t want you to take me!” I said, “Why not?” He said, “I don’t want you to be one of the nosy mothers, standing round the gate talking.” He’s always been against nosy mothers. He used to hate all the neighbours who stood around gossiping.’

George’s first home memory is of buying live chickens for sixpence, along with his brothers Harold and Peter, and bringing them home. ‘Mine and Harold’s both died, but Peter’s was kept in the back yard and grew and grew. It was massive and wild. People were so scared of it they came round to the front door instead of the back. We ate it for Christmas. A fellow came and strangled it for us. I remember it hanging on the line after he’d done it.’

George was six when they moved from Wavertree to a council house in Speke. ‘It was very nice and modern. It seemed fantastic to me, after a two up and two down terrace house. You could go from the hall to the sitting room, then into the kitchen, then into the hall again and back into the sitting room. I just ran round and round it all that first day.’

The house was Number 25 Upton Green, Speke. They’d put their name down for a council house 18 years previously in 1930, when Lou was a baby.

‘It was a brand new house,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘But I hated it from the minute we moved in. We tried to keep the garden nice, but kids just wrecked it. They stole your plants in the middle of the night. It was a sort of slum clearance area, but they’d mixed up the good and bad families together, hoping the good would lift the rest.’

George did fairly well at primary school. ‘After we sat the scholarship exam,’ says George, ‘the teacher asked us who thought they had passed. Only one person put his hand up. He was a little
fat lad who smelled. It was very sad, really. He turned out to be about the only one who didn’t pass.

‘Smelly kids like that were the sort teachers made you sit next to as a punishment. So the poor smelly kids really did get screwed up. All teachers are like that. And the more screwed up
they
are, the more they pass it on to the kids. They’re all ignorant. I always thought that. Yet because they were old and withered you were supposed to believe they weren’t ignorant.’

George started at the Liverpool Institute in 1954. Paul McCartney was already there, in the year ahead. John Lennon was in his fourth year at Quarry Bank High School.

‘I was sad leaving Dovedale. The headmaster, Pop Evans, told us that we may feel smart big boys now, but at the next school we’d be the little boys once again. It seemed such a waste. After all that hustling to be one of the big lads.

‘The first day at the Institute Tony Workman leapt on my back from behind a door and said, “Do you want a fight, lad?”’

After a short spell of feeling lost and out of it, during which he tried to do a bit of homework and fit in, George gave up being interested in school work. ‘I hated being dictated to. Some schizophrenic jerk, just out of training college, would just read out notes to you which you were expected to take down. I couldn’t read them afterwards anyway. They never fooled me. Useless, the lot of them.

‘That’s when things go wrong, when you’re quietly growing up and they start trying to force being part of society down your throat. They’re all trying to transfigure you from the pure way of thought as a child, forcing their illusions on you. All those things annoyed me. I was just trying to be myself. They were trying to turn everybody into rows of little toffees.’

At the Institute, George was known from the beginning as a way-out dresser. Michael McCartney, Paul’s brother, was a year below him. He remembers George always having long hair, years before anybody else did.

John Lennon’s rebellion took the form of fighting and causing trouble. George did it by his dress, which annoyed masters just as much.

But one of the reasons George had long hair was that he always hated getting his hair cut. To save money, his father had continued to cut the family’s hair, as he had done in the navy. By this time the shears were old and blunt. ‘He used to hurt them,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘And they hated it.’ ‘Yes, perhaps they were a bit rough,’ says Mr Harrison. ‘Rough? You’re joking, boy,’ says his wife.

‘George used to go to school with his school cap sitting high on top of his hair,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘And very tight trousers. Unknown to me, he’d run them up on my machine to make them even tighter. I bought him a brand new pair once and the first thing he did was tighten them. When his dad found out, he told him to unpick them at once. “I can’t, Dad,” he said. “I’ve cut the pieces off.” George always had an answer. He once went to school with a canary-yellow waistcoat under his school blazer. It belonged to his brother Harry, but George thought he looked terrific in it.’

‘Going in for flash clothes, or at least trying to be a bit different, as I hadn’t any money, was part of the rebelling. I never cared for authority. They can’t teach you experience, you’ve got to go through it, by trial and error. You’ve got to find out for yourself you shouldn’t do certain things. I always managed to keep a bit of individuality. I don’t know what made me do it, but it worked. They didn’t get me. Looking back, I feel pleased they didn’t.’

For the first three years he was in continual trouble. ‘“Harrison, Kelly and Workman, get up and get out,” that’s all I used to hear. If it wasn’t that I was being sent to go and stand in the chewer’s corner.’

When winkle-pickers came in, George had a monster pair in blue suede. ‘One of the masters, Cissy Smith, went on at me about them. We called him Cissy because he was always smoothly dressed. He said, “They’re not school shoes, Harrison.” I wanted to ask him what
were
school shoes, but didn’t.’

Cissy Smith’s real name was Alfred Smith, the brother of John Lennon’s Uncle George. ‘I didn’t discover that for years later either. I had hysterics when John told me.’

In his fourth year at the Institute, George began to stay out of trouble. ‘I learned it was best to keep cool and shut up. I had this mutual thing with a few masters. They’d let me sleep at the back and I wouldn’t cause any trouble. If it was nice and sunny, it was hard to keep awake anyway, with some old fellow chundering on. I often used to wake up at a quarter to five and find they’d all gone home.’

Harry, George’s eldest brother, had by this time finished school and had become an apprentice fitter. Lou, his sister, was at training college, and Peter was about to start a job as a panel beater.

Harold, George’s father, was still a bus driver but he had also become a successful union official. He started to spend a lot of time at Finch Lane, the Liverpool Corporation social centre for conductors and drivers. By the 1950s, he was the MC for most of their Saturday night socials, introducing the guests.

‘One of the earliest comedians we launched was Ken Dodd. We’d seen him at the club, having a drink, and we knew he was very funny, but he was always too nervous to go on stage. But he eventually went on. He did this act, “The Road to Mandalay”, with shorts on and one of those pith helmets. It was a riot. I don’t think he’s half as funny now.’

Harold Harrison was naturally pleased that George was at last appearing to stick in at school. He was the only one of his three sons to have got into a grammar school so he wanted him to do well. As a hard-working, meticulous union official, he wished he had had the chances George was getting.

He saw education, the way John’s Aunt Mimi did and Paul’s dad Jim, as the only way, not just to self-advancement but to success and respectability in the world.

A good secure job is what most parents want for their children, but particularly people of Harold Harrison’s generation. He had been through the worst of the depression days of the thirties, when he had been out of work for years and forced to bring up a family on meagre dole money.

George’s individualism and anti-authority don’t seem to have come from his father. At least his father’s tough early life probably drove into him the need for steadiness. But his mother was always an ally. She wanted all her children to be happy. It didn’t matter really what their interests were, as long as they enjoyed doing them.

Even when George became interested in something patently pointless, a hobby that nobody could ever make anything of, which clearly didn’t lead to security or respectability, his mother still encouraged him.

Mrs Harrison isn’t just jolly and outgoing. In her own little way, unlike all the other Beatle parents, she is one of nature’s ravers.

Mrs Harrison was always interested in music and dancing. Along with her husband, she ran a learners’ dancing class – mainly ballroom dancing – at the Finch Lane bus conductors’ and drivers’ club for almost ten years.

George showed no interest in music as a child, as far as his parents can remember. ‘But he would always give you an entertainment if you asked him,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘He would get down behind a chair and do you a puppet show.’

It wasn’t until George was about 14 that he suddenly came home and started covering bits of paper with drawings of guitars. ‘One day he said to me, “This boy at school’s got a guitar he paid £5 for, but he’ll let me have it for £3, will you buy it for me?” I said all right, son, if you really want. I had a little job by then. I’d gone back to working at a greengrocer’s, the job I’d done before I was married.’

The first person to make any impression on George musically was Lonnie Donegan. ‘I’d been aware of pop singers before him, like Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray, but never really taken much interest in them. I don’t think I thought I was old enough for them. But Lonnie Donegan and skiffle just seemed made for me.’

His first guitar, the one his mother bought for him for £3, lay in a cupboard for about three months, forgotten. ‘There was a screw holding the neck to the box part,’ says George. ‘In trying to play it, I took it off and couldn’t get it back on again. So I put it away in the cupboard. Then one day I remembered about it again and got Pete to fix it for me.’

‘George tried to teach himself,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘But he wasn’t making much headway. “I’ll never learn this,” he used to say.

‘I said, “You will, son, you will. Just keep at it.” He kept at it till his fingers were bleeding. “You’ll do it, son, you’ll do it,” I said to him.

‘I sat up till two or three in the morning. Every time he said, “I’ll never make it,” I said, “You will, you will.”

‘I don’t know why, really, I encouraged him so much. He wanted to do it, so that was enough for me. I suppose at the back of my mind I remembered all the things I wanted to do as a girl, but nobody encouraged me.

‘So when it came to George, I helped all I could. Eventually, he was way beyond anything I could understand. “You don’t understand about guitars, do you, Mum?” he said to me once. I said no, but you stick in, I’m sure you’ll make it. Keep at it. He said no, he didn’t mean that. He needed a new guitar, a better guitar. He said it was like playing a mouth organ. There are certain notes you just can’t get because it’s not a good enough mouth organ. Well, he’d soon come to that stage with this £3 guitar.

‘So I said sure, I’ll help you to buy a new one. He got one, £30 it cost. Electric as well, or something.

‘Peter had also taken up the guitar. He had one first, in fact, now I think about it. A broken one which he got for five bob. He glued it and put it together and put strings on and it was great.’

‘My mum did encourage me,’ says George. ‘Perhaps most of all by never discouraging me from anything I wanted to do. That was the good thing about her and my dad. If you tell kids
not to, they’re going to do it in the end anyway, so they might as well get it over with. They let me stay out all night when I wanted to and have a drink when I wanted to. I’d finished with all that staying out all night drinking bit when everybody else came to it. Probably why I don’t like alcohol today. I had it all by the age of ten.’

‘One day George came home and said he’d got an audition, at the British Legion Club in Speke,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘I told him he must be daft. He hadn’t even got a group. He said don’t worry, he’d get one.’

George did get a group for his big night at the Speke British Legion. He got his brother Peter on guitar, his friend Arthur Kelly on guitar and two others, one on a tea chest and another on a mouth organ. He himself was on guitar. They all left the house one by one, ducking down behind the hedge. George didn’t want all the nosy neighbours to know what they were doing.

They got to the hall and found that the real artists hadn’t turned up. They had to go straight on and play all night as there was no one else there.

‘They were so excited when they came home, all shouting together,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘I couldn’t make out at first what happened. Then they showed me the ten bob they’d got each, their first professional engagement. The poor boy on the tea chest looked awful. His fingers were bleeding from playing. The blood was all over the tea chest. They called themselves The Rebels for that night. They had it painted on in red.’

George didn’t play in a proper group, although he did odd nights sitting in with other groups, until through Paul he joined the Quarrymen.

He first got talking to Paul shortly after he had started at the Institute. They used to meet on the same bus journey. George remembers the day his mother paid his and Paul’s fare. When the skiffle phase arrived and they both had guitars, they became closer friends.