Paul McCartney (4 page)

His paternal great-grandfather, James McCartney, was part of the mass emigration of the late nineteenth century when Ireland’s horrific poverty drove thousands abroad in hopes of finding a better life. James was one of many who crossed the Irish Sea to Liverpool, whose teeming port and factories upheld its claim to be ‘the second city of the British Empire’. He arrived in the early 1880s, settling in the humble Everton district and working as a house-painter. James’s son, Joseph, grew up to become a leaf-cutter at Cope’s tobacco factory and, in 1896, to marry a local fishmonger’s daughter, Florence Clegg. She bore nine children of whom two, Ann and Joseph junior, died in infancy (their names being re-assigned to another boy and girl who came later). Joseph and Florrie’s second surviving son and fifth child, born in 1902, was Paul’s father, James, ever afterwards known as Jim.

Home for Jim and his six siblings, Jack, Joe junior, Edith, Ann, Millie and Jane–nicknamed ‘Gin’–was a tiny terrace house in Solva Street, in the poorest part of Everton. Later in life, he would recall how the McCartney children possessed two pairs of shoes between them, one for the boys, one for the girls. As their school forbade its pupils to go unshod, they took turns to attend in the precious footwear, then came home at night and repeated the day’s lessons aloud to the others.

Despite the family’s extreme poverty, and the many dubious influences of the neighbourhood, Jim grew up to be honest, modest and punctiliously courteous, earning the nickname ‘Gentleman Jim’ even from his own brothers and sisters. When he left school aged 14, his headmaster’s report ‘[couldn’t] find a word to say against him’. His one childhood misadventure was falling off a wall at the age of ten and damaging his right eardrum, which left him permanently deaf on that side.

Since the eighteenth century, Liverpool’s prosperity had been largely founded on cotton, brought by ship from the Americas and Asia and sold on to textile mills and clothes manufacturers all over northern Britain. Jim joined one of the city’s oldest-established cotton brokers, A. Hannay & Son, as a ‘sample boy’, taking samples of newly-arrived cargoes around to prospective buyers. To supplement his six shilling (30p) per week wage, he sold programmes at Everton’s Theatre Royal and occasionally operated the limelight, the piercing beam reserved for top artistes at extra special moments.

For the son he was to have one day the world would pour out almost its whole stock of limelight. But a little fell on Jim, too. His father, Joseph, had been a keen amateur musician, playing the E-flat tuba in the Cope’s factory’s own brass band and organising concerts and sing-songs for neighbours. Despite Jim’s partial deafness, he proved to have a natural musical ear which allowed him to teach himself both the trumpet and the piano. Just after the Great War, in which he’d been too young to serve, he formed a semi-professional dance band that included his older brother, Jack, on trombone.

To begin with, they wore Zorro-style black masks and called themselves the Masked Music Makers, but the heat of performing made the dye in the masks trickle down their faces, so they hurriedly relaunched as the Jim Mac Jazz Band. They would perform at local dances and occasionally for silent movie shows, improvising tunes to fit the action on the screen. Jim’s father and brother Jack had good singing voices but he attempted no vocals, preferring to stick to his ‘horn’. A family photograph shows the Jim Mac Jazz Band sometime in the 1920s, wearing tuxedos and wing collars, with a group of their female followers around a bass drum very like the future Sgt. Pepper’s. The bandleader’s fragile face and wide-open eyes are a further portent of astonishing things to come.

By the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Jim was 37 and, despite the matchmaking efforts of his mother and five sisters, seemed happy to remain what used to be called, without any ulterior meaning, a ‘confirmed bachelor’. At Hannay’s, he had risen to the rank of cotton salesman, dividing his time between Liverpool’s Cotton Exchange in Old Street and the docks where consignments were unloaded, with interludes of visiting clients at mills in Manchester, 35 miles to the east. One of his jobs was checking the length of the cotton staple, or fibre, a longer staple being more suitable for spinning. Despite his hearing impairment, he became able to do this aurally. ‘He could fluff a bit of cotton against his good ear and instantly be able to grade it,’ his adopted daughter, Ruth McCartney, remembers.

As Britain’s principal port for Atlantic food convoys and a major armaments-manufacturing centre, Liverpool was a prime target for Hitler’s Luftwaffe, enduring a Blitz almost as ferocious as that visited on London. Jim was over the age for military service and further exempted by his partial deafness. When Hannay’s shut down for the duration, he operated a lathe in a munitions factory and did night shifts as a volunteer fireman.

One day, while visiting his widowed mother in Norris Green, he met a hospital nurse of similarly Irish origins named Mary Patricia Mohin, who was boarding with his sister Gin. Though the worst of Liverpool’s Blitz had passed by now, raids still continued intermittently. While Jim and Mary were getting acquainted, the sirens began to wail, forcing them to continue their conversation in the Anderson shelter in the garden. As they huddled together inside the Anderson’s flimsy corrugated-iron walls, ‘Gentleman Jim’ finally fell.

Mary’s father Owen, a coal deliveryman, had come over from County Monaghan at the turn of the century, changing his name from Mohan to Mohin to make it sound less Irish. In what was to prove an unhappy precedent, Mary’s mother died when she was ten, leaving her and two brothers, Wilfred and Bill (two sisters having not survived). Her father remarried and started a second family, but her stepmother cared little for Mary, finally freezing her out of home altogether.

After this, it was perhaps no surprise she should have felt a vocation to care for others. At the age of 14, she became a nursing trainee at Smithdown Road Hospital. She went on to a three-year course at Walton General Hospital in Rice Lane, qualifying as a state registered nurse and becoming a ward sister aged only 24.

When Mary met Jim McCartney, she was 31, an age when most women in those days resigned themselves to what used to be called spinsterhood. But to Jim, on the cusp of 40, she was a catch with her very Irish good looks–the kind suggesting forebears from Spain or Italy–and shy, gentle manner. Nonetheless, it was Mary who took the initiative in their courtship. ‘My dad said he had really fancied my mum and he took her out for a long time,’ Paul would remember. ‘Then he suddenly twigged that she’d been getting him to take her around to dances… She was going to joints and she wasn’t that kind of girl. It turned out to be where my father was playing. She was following him round as a fan. [Later] it made me think “God, that’s where I get it all from!”’

The romance might have ended as soon as it began, for Mary had been brought up as a Catholic while the McCartneys were Protestant. Among Liverpool’s Irish population, the sectarian divide was as fiery as back in the Old Country; Catholics and ‘Orangemen’ each held triumphalist parades and marches that usually ended in violence, and intermarriage was deplored by both communities. However, Mary had no close family on hand to make difficulties and Jim anyway declared himself agnostic: they were married at St Swithin’s Roman Catholic chapel in April 1941.

Their first child, a boy, was born on 18 June the following year at Walton General Hospital. Mary had once been sister in charge of the maternity unit there, so was given the luxury of a bed in a private ward. When the baby arrived, he was in a state of white asphyxia, caused by oxygen-deficiency in the brain, and appeared not to be breathing. The obstetrician was ready to pronounce him dead but the midwife, who knew Mary well and was also a Catholic, prayed fervently to God and after a few moments he revived.

Jim was on fire-watching duty and didn’t reach the hospital until some hours later, by which time the baby was definitely breathing and no longer deathly white. ‘He had one eye open and he squawked all the time,’ his father was to recall with true Liverpudlian candour. ‘They held him up and he looked like a horrible piece of red meat.’

Learning of the miracle that had occurred, Jim raised no objection when Mary wanted him baptised into the Catholic church. He was given his father’s and great-grandfather’s first name of James and the saintly middle name Paul, by which he would always be better known.

His first home was a set of furnished rooms at 10 Sunbury Road, Anfield, close to the cemetery where hundreds of Liverpool’s air-raid victims had been buried. Soon afterwards, Jim left the munitions factory and became an inspector with the Corporation’s Cleansing Department, checking that refuse-collectors did not skimp their rounds. In a city where 20,000 homes had been destroyed by bombs, accommodation was a continual problem. The McCartneys had four further temporary addresses on both sides of the River Mersey, never staying longer than a few months. The pressure increased in January 1944, when Mary returned to Walton General to have a second son, Peter Michael, always to be called Mike.

After the war, A. Hannay & Son reopened and Jim returned to his old job of cotton salesman. But five years of global conflict had left the cotton market severely depressed and he was lucky to bring home £6 per week. To augment his pay packet, Mary used her nursing experience to become a health visitor with the local authority, treating people for minor ailments in their own homes.

In 1947, when Paul wasn’t quite five, she became a domiciliary (i.e. resident) midwife on the new housing estate at Speke, some eight miles south-east of Liverpool’s city centre. The chief attraction of the job was that a rent-free council house went with it. When the McCartneys moved into their new home at 72 Western Avenue, the estate was still only half-constructed, a wilderness of muddy roads and roofless brick shells. His imagination already vivid, Paul felt they were ‘like a pioneer family in a covered wagon’.

One of his earliest memories was being cold–the icy winter winds off the Mersey, the burn of chapped lips, ears and knees exposed by the short trousers to which all small boys in those days were condemned.

Nineteen forty-seven was the hardest of Britain’s postwar austerity years, when a battle-exhausted, bankrupted nation seemed to have no warmth, no food, no fun, no colour but the bleary black and white of cinema newsreels. Liverpool felt like the austerity capital of the UK with its acres of shattered buildings and gaping craters. In common with most urban children, Paul and Mike’s main outdoor playgrounds were bomb sites, known in Scouse slang–which refuses to take anything too seriously–as ‘bombies’.

Inside 72 Western Avenue it was never cold, for Mary McCartney gave her two sons the loving, secure home she herself never had. Paul was to remember ‘lots of hugs and kisses’ from his mother, combined with a nurse’s brisk practicality that always knew just what to do if he or his brother fell and hurt themselves or developed a temperature. More comforting even than a hug was the brisk professional way she applied bandages or sticking-plaster, and shook the thermometer vigorously before popping it under his tongue.

Mary was tireless in caring for her maternity patients, a job which became ever more demanding as the new estate began to fill up. Paul always retained a vision of her going out to deliver a baby late one snowy winter’s night, pedalling off on her bicycle, with a basket in front for her birthing requisites and a little lamp glimmering above. Her aura to him seemed almost saintly, for grateful patients were always leaving gifts of flowers or hard-to-obtain sweets on the doorstep of number 72 like offerings at a shrine.

It was a curiosity of Britain’s class system in the 1940s and 1950s that nurses of whatever background became honorary members of the middle class and considered the acquisition of a genteel accent to be part of their training. Thus, despite being so integral to the Speke community, Mary was also somewhat apart from it, and Paul and Mike came to feel the same. Their mother’s particular concern was that they shouldn’t talk the same glottal Liverpudlian as other children on the estate, and should always be more polite and punctilious than was the general Merseyside way. After a couple of years in Western Avenue, the family were moved to another council house, 12 Ardwick Road, just a few streets away. It was no larger than their previous home, and still had only an outside toilet, but Mary considered the neighbourhood a better one.

Despite having come so late to parenthood, Jim turned out to be a dutiful and loving father. His manner was rather serious, befitting one who went off each day in a business suit to ‘the City’, but, according to Mike McCartney, ‘he had a subtle underground bubbling sort of fun which could explode at any minute’. The boys discovered early on, for instance, that it was no good competing to ‘pull tongues’ with Dad, as he had much the fattest tongue and could poke it out much farther.

Jim had had to give up the trumpet-playing when he lost his teeth, but the piano remained a passion with him. In pride of place in the living-room stood a sturdy upright model, bought on the instalment-plan from NEMS’ music store in Walton. Paul’s earliest inklings of melody were his father’s exuberant cross-handed versions of old standards like George Gershwin’s 1922 hit ‘Stairway to Paradise’.

Though the boys never knew either of their McCartney grandparents, they were well provided with aunts and uncles through Jim’s two brothers, Jack and Joe, and four sisters, Edie, Annie, Millie and Ginny. Tall, romantically handsome Uncle Jack, one-time trombonist in the Jim Mac Jazz Band, now a rent-collector for Liverpool Corporation, had been gassed in the Great War and ever afterwards was unable to speak above a whisper. Aunt Millie had married one of Jim’s Cotton Exchange colleagues, Albert Kendal, so Paul really did have the ‘Uncle Albert’ he would later put into a song. The family reprobate was Aunt Edie’s husband, Will Stapleton, a ship’s steward who–like most of that profession–pilfered extravagantly from the vessels on which he served and eventually served three years in jail for stealing £500 from a cargo of banknotes on route to West Africa. Not for half a century was another family member to experience life behind bars.