Paul McCartney (5 page)

The most vivacious of the aunts was Ginny or Gin, Paul’s favourite from the beginning–and also destined to be named in one of his songs. She was the matriarch of the family, the one to whom all the others turned for advice. ‘Mam was a very wise woman,’ her son, Ian Harris, remembers, ‘and she always knew how to get what she wanted. Once she even persuaded Liverpool Corporation to change a bus-route, so that the bus would run down our street.’

The children of the family, Harris recalls, were ‘like nomads, because we were always staying at one another’s houses. I spent a lot of time at Paul’s and Mike’s. Their mum, Aunt Mary, was very strict–but a lovely, kind woman.’ There were frequent get-togethers in the Liverpool style, with lashings of drink and singing, dancing and laughing into the small hours. Uncle Jack would tell jokes in his intriguing whisper while Jim thumped away at the piano. When New Year’s Eve was celebrated at Uncle Joe’s house in Aintree, midnight would be signalled by the wheezy wail of a Scottish piper outside the front door. Gin’s voice would always be loudest in the answering chorus of ‘Let ’imin!’

Mary’s Catholicism would normally have meant her sons being brought up and educated ‘in the faith’. But here, as in all things, she deferred to her nominally agnostic but fundamentally Protestant husband. After their Catholic baptisms, and a few classes at Catholic Sunday school when they were very small, Paul and Mike had no further involvement with their mother’s church. Instead, they were sent to Stockton Road Infants School, a short walk from their home, where the religious instruction was exclusively Anglican. Infants from other settler families were being enrolled at such a rate at Stockton Road that it soon became Britain’s most overcrowded junior school, with 1500 pupils. Paul and Mike were among a contingent transferred to Joseph Williams Primary School in Gateacre, a half-hour bus ride away.

Paul had turned out to be left-handed, a fact that could easily have blighted his early education. Left-handed children used to be regarded as deliberately perverse, if not slightly sinister (the Latin word for left is ‘sinistra’), and would often be forced to use their right hand, even held up to ridicule with terms like ‘cack-handed’ and ‘leftie’. But at Joseph Williams, he was allowed to go on working with his left hand. As a result, his writing became meticulously neat–as his mother’s was–and he showed a marked talent for drawing and painting.

From the start, he found his lessons easy and was popular with his teachers, thanks both to his impish good looks and the politeness and decorum Mary had instilled. The only criticism made of him then was one that would recur throughout his life–being too much reliant on his facility and charm and so never quite achieving the results he was capable of. One of his school reports described him as ‘a very intelligent boy who, with a little more care and application, could easily be first’.

Among his classmates at Joseph Williams Primary was a tall, flaxen-haired girl named Bernice Stenson whose mother knew Mary McCartney and sometimes helped her with her midwifery duties. On one occasion, they had to deliver a baby whose mother was deaf. Mary showed her usual calm and patience, delegating Mrs Stenson to handle the paperwork while she ‘got on down below’.

Bernice remembers how, by the age of six or seven, Paul was already known for his ‘strong, clear’ singing voice, and would always be given the lead role in school shows and pantomimes and the Christmas carol service. He had inherited his father’s passion for music, instinctively singing the harmony line with songs he heard on the radio. When he turned 11, Jim hoped he might get into the choir at Liverpool Cathedral, the great sandstone edifice towering over the city that had somehow escaped Hitler’s bombs. He was one of 90 boys who auditioned for the cathedral’s director of music, Ronald Woan, by performing the Christmas carol ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. When his turn came, something made him deliberately fluff a high note he was perfectly capable of reaching and he was turned down; it would be almost another 40 years before the cathedral opened its doors to him.

Meanwhile, he had to settle for the choir of St Barnabas’ Church, known as ‘Barney’s’, in Mossley Hill, near Penny Lane. The services implanted a deep love of Anglican hymns with their sonorous organ chords and often high poetic words. Years later, when he began writing songs that echoed all round the world, people would often say the more serious ones ‘sounded like hymns’. But at the time, Barney’s main attraction was that choristers received payment for singing at weddings and funerals. ‘If you did a wedding, it was 10 shillings [50p],’ he would recall. ‘I waited weeks–months–but I never got a wedding.’

Jim McCartney was understandably keen for him to learn the piano–learn it ‘properly’ rather than picking it up by ear, as Jim himself had done. No music lessons being available at Joseph Williams Primary, Paul began having private piano tuition from an elderly woman teacher. He soon gave up, complaining that it just added to his homework and that his teacher’s house ‘smelt of old people’.

In the end, what little formal musical tuition he ever had came mainly from his father and the upright piano in their living-room. While playing ‘Stairway to Paradise’ or some other old favourite, Jim would shout out the names of the chords, show him their shapes on the ebony and ivory keys and commentate on their sequences. His dad also loved brass band music and would take Paul to recitals in Liverpool’s spacious parks, so passing on another deeply traditional taste that stuck.

But Jim always insisted he wasn’t a ‘real’ musician, having had no professional training. Occasionally, he’d depart from his beloved Gershwin and Irving Berlin standards to play something he’d written himself back in his Jim Mac Jazz Band days, a pensive little tune named ‘Eloise’. He refused to say he’d ‘written’ it, however: for him–as for the world in general–songwriters were a mystical freemasonry, found only in London or New York. All he’d done, he insisted with the modesty of another age, was ‘make it up’.

The McCartneys were far from affluent. Jim’s £6 per week from Hannay & Co. was unaugmented by commission or any other perks. Mary’s pay as a midwife was six shillings (30p) more–a source of some embarrassment to them both–but still little enough for the long hours she worked.

However, in north-west England, just after the Second World War, a family of four could live quite comfortably on their combined earnings. Meat was not expensive, and formed the basis of Mary’s catering: lamb, pork, steaks, liver and Sunday roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, which she also served in the northern manner as a dessert, spread with Tate & Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Paul ate every sort of meat with relish except tongue, which looked altogether too much like his own. Fruit came mainly from tins, peaches, pears and mandarin segments, drowned in custard or condensed milk, his special favourite. For years, the only orange juice he knew was a concentrate which the government had issued to children during the war in small, official-looking bottles, and was still widely available. ‘You were supposed to dilute it,’ he would remember. ‘But we liked swigging it straight from the bottle.’

The brothers were always immaculately dressed, and lacked for nothing their schoolmates had. Every summer, Mary and Jim took them away on holiday, either to nearby North Wales or one of Butlin’s seaside holiday camps. This being before Britain discovered leisure clothes, the boys wore their school shirts and short trousers to play on the beach while Jim sat in a deck-chair in his business suit.

Both of them joined Liverpool’s 19th City Scout troop, which meant another uniform on top of their school one, and regular trips away to camp. Paul proved adept in Scout activities like tying knots and lighting fires, and took pleasure in the accumulation of badges proclaiming his multifaceted competence.

A snapshot taken on a Welsh hillside shows a prototypical 1950s family–Jim wearing a tweed jacket and open-necked shirt, looking rather like a pipe-puffing Fred Astaire; Mary in the rather formal frock for which she’s exchanged her usual starched apron. Nine-year-old Paul sits up straight with arms akimbo, at ease with the camera even then. Mike has laughed as the shutter clicked, so is slightly out of focus.

Though their mother ran their lives, Jim was the head of the household whose every word was law. He insisted they should be polite in old-fashioned ways that even then were dying out, such as raising their school caps to ‘ladies’, even perfect strangers queuing at a bus-stop. ‘We’d say “Aw, Dad, why do we have to do this? None of the other boys do,”’ Paul would remember. ‘But we still did it.’ Total honesty over even the smallest things was another of Jim’s unbendable rules. ‘I once found a £1 note in the street and he made me hand it in at the police station.’

In even the best British homes of this era, children were subjected to corporal punishment without any interference from outsiders. The blameless Jim had received his share of ‘good hidings’ in his boyhood, and in turn did not scruple to wallop his sons hard on the bottom or bare legs when they seriously misbehaved–though Mary never did. Generally it would be Mike, the more uninhibited and impulsive of the two, who felt the flat of their father’s hand whereas Paul usually managed to talk his way out of trouble.

That ability helped him navigate his way through the rough and tumble of primary school largely unscathed. Mike was always getting into fights, but something about Paul made even the worst bullies hesitate to pick on him. It didn’t work every time. Near his home, a narrow path called Dungeon Lane ran down to a stretch of the Mersey known as the Cast Iron Shore, because it was littered with metal fragments from a nearby ship-breakers. Here one day when he was on his own, two bigger boys waylaid him and robbed him of his cherished wristwatch. Both boys lived near the McCartneys; there was a police prosecution and Paul had to identify them in open court. Even if he was no bruiser, he didn’t lack courage.

Mary McCartney continued to devote herself to her midwifery so selflessly that Jim worried her own health might suffer. Eventually, to his relief, she took a different job with the local health authority, accompanying school doctors on their rounds in the Walton and Allerton area. That meant a normal nine-to-five day rather than turning out on her bike at all hours and in all weathers.

At the clinic where she was now based, Mary made friends with Bella Johnson, a youthful widow whose teenage daughter, Olive, was a secretary at the Law Society in central Liverpool, working just around the corner from Jim at the Cotton Exchange. She was a sophisticated young woman who owned her own car and spoke with–to Mary–an impressively ‘posh’ accent. She became Paul and Mike’s unofficial big sister, joining in their games, taking them for trips in her car and rowing on the lake at Wilmslow.

Bella would often join them for high tea at 12 Ardwick Road, when Mary served a special treat: sandwiches filled with sugar-sprinkled sliced apple. Both boys clearly adored their mother, though it always seemed to Olive that Michael had greater need of her. ‘I remember Mike sitting at Mary’s feet. He was the one you always felt you wanted to love and protect. With Paul, you loved him but you knew you’d never have to protect him.’

In 1952, Paul faced the hurdle of the Eleven Plus examination which decided the educational future of all British children in the state system, sending bright 11-year-olds to grammar schools and consigning the others to ‘secondary modern’ ones or technical colleges where they learned trades like carpentry or plumbing.

For his final terms at Joseph Williams Primary, he had an inspirational teacher named F.G. Woolard, who got all but one of a 40-strong class through the Eleven Plus. Paul was one of only four out of 90 candidates from Joseph Williams to be awarded places at Liverpool Institute High School for Boys–actually a grammar school, the most prestigious in the city, though known with typical Scouse familiarity as ‘the Inny’. Later, Mike would scrape in there, too.

June 1953 brought the coronation of 26-year-old Queen Elizabeth II, the moment when austerity finally ended for Britain. Like thousands of other people, Jim and Mary bought their first television set to watch the (rain-soaked) Coronation procession through London and the crowning in Westminster Abbey on a minute black and white screen. Bella and Olive Johnson were among the crowd of friends and relatives invited to ‘look in’ (as TV-watching used to be known) in a cinema-like atmosphere with rows of chairs, every light extinguished and the curtains drawn.

Getting a place at the Inny had not been Paul’s only recent triumph. He was also one of 60 Liverpool children to win a prize in a Coronation essay competition and receive it in a ceremony at the city’s Picton Hall. He would remember how hearing his name called to go up onto the stage made him shake with fear–not a reaction he’d often have in similar situations thereafter.

The page-long essay ‘by Paul McCartney, age 10 years, 10 months’, already shows a talent for telling a story in a short space and is a model of neatness, its spelling and punctuation almost perfect:

On the Coronation Day of William the Conquerer, senseless Saxon folk gathered round Westminster Abbey to cheer their Norman king as he walked down the aisle. The Normans thinking this was an insult turned upon the Saxons killing nearly all of them. But on the Coronation of our lovely young queen, Queen Elizabeth II, no rioting nor killing will take place because present day royalty rule with affection rather than force. The crowds outside Buckingham Palace will be greater than they have been for any other Coronation, so will the processional route to the Abbey. Preparations are going on all over the world, even in Australia people are preparing to take that long voyage to England. In London, children, for a Coronation treat, are being given a free seat by the roadside. But the London children are not the only lucky children, for youngsters in other parts of Britain are receiving mugs with a portrait of the Queen engraved on the china. Souvenirs are being made ready for any tourists who come to see this marvellous spectacle, one of these being the Coronation Loving Cup which is designed to show both Queen Elizabeth the Second on the front and Queen Elizabeth the First on the back. Another is a goblet which is being made in Edinburgh and has a bubble enclosed in its stem, and the fancy letters, ER, is engraved in the glass. One alteration is that the diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires in the crown are being dismantled, polished and replaced by expert jewellers. But after all this bother, many people will agree with me that it was well worth it.