Paul McCartney (6 page)

That ‘portrait of the Queen’ would reappear in another much-praised composition, 14 years later. And the whole thing might be paraphrased as ‘Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl’.

‘I learned to put a shell around me’

Liverpool Institute High School for Boys was housed in a neoclassical building in the heart of the city’s once affluent, still elegant Georgian quarter. It had been founded in 1837 as an adult education ‘institute’, which later split into a boys’ school and Liverpool College of Art. The two shared the same L-shaped block while functioning independently with separate entrances–the Inny’s mini-Parthenon colonnade in Mount Street, the art college around the corner in Hope Street.

As a grammar school in the best Victorian tradition, it educated its pupils free of charge yet with the same refinements as public (which in Britain denotes private) schools like Eton and Harrow. There was a uniform of black blazers, green-and-black striped ties and caps; there were teachers known as ‘masters’ in black scholastic gowns, licensed to administer ritual public chastisement with a cane. An ethos of public service was expressed in a Latin motto which for two of its pupils was to prove eerily prophetic: ‘Non Nobis Solum Sed Toti Mundo Natior’–‘not for ourselves alone but for the whole world were we born’.

Over the decades, the school had produced an impressive crop of politicians, industrial tycoons and academics, most notably the Nobel prize-winning physicist Professor Charles Glover Barkla. Another old boy was Arthur Askey, one of many nationally famous professional comedians to come out of Liverpool. At one stage in his school career, Paul would sit at the same wooden, slope-topped classroom desk Askey had used 40 years earlier.

New boys at the Inny spent a year in its Lower School, then were sorted into streams according to their academic aptitudes. The A-stream’s syllabus revolved around classics, Latin and/or Greek, and the B-stream’s around modern languages. Though Paul was clearly bright enough for either, he went into the B-stream. One of his earliest school friends was a fellow B-streamer named Ian James, from Elswick Street in the humble quarter of south Liverpool known as the Dingle. Classroom desks being arranged in alphabetical order, the two sat near each other and attended the same lessons except that Ian took French while Paul took German. They both learned Spanish from a teacher named Miss Inkley whose thick make-up, in her class’s perfervid imagination, concealed scars acquired as a wartime secret agent. She taught them a silly little Spanish song about three bunny rabbits in a tree, ‘Tres conejos en un árbol’, that would stay imprinted on Paul’s memory for ever.

Ian James remembers him as a highly personable, popular figure with an appeal by no means limited to their fellow juniors. ‘He was a brilliant mimic,’ says James. ‘We were just starting to get the Goon Show on the radio, and Paul could do all the voices from it, like Eccles and Bluebottle. In the mornings, you’d see him in the playground with a little crowd around him, acting out the show he’d heard the night before. He was an entertainer even then.’

Schoolboy nicknames derive either from mockery and contempt or respect and affection. Paul’s nickname of Maca–with one ‘c’ rather than its familiar two–definitely belonged to the second category even though, after a year, he had to share it with his brother Michael.

Yet, despite the promise he’d shown in primary school, he did not shine particularly brightly at the Inny. None of his lessons was a problem to him, and he could easily have come top, or nearly, in every subject. The problem was one belied by his innocent face and always polite, conciliatory manner: he hated being told what to do.

Even in his two strongest subjects, his performance fell below expectations. Ian James, who shared his English class, saw little sign of the care and enthusiasm he’d expended on his Coronation essay. ‘Our English master, Mr Jones, had the same initials as the Queen’s on the Coronation mugs, E.R. [Elizabeth Regina], so we used to call him Lizzie. You were each given a certain number of good-conduct marks that were taken away for bad behaviour. Paul and I used to chatter so much in Lizzie’s class that we’d both lose nearly all our good-conduct marks.’

Nor did the Inny much develop the talent for drawing and painting he’d had since kindergarten or his keen interest in all the visual arts. His Coronation essay prize had included a book token, which he’d used to buy a grown-up volume about Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Victor Pasmore. He’d also since won a prize for a drawing of St Aidan’s Church in Speke, an oasis of beauty among the raw council estates.

At school, he felt a powerful attraction to the art cupboard with its blocks of cartridge paper and bundles of virgin pencils and paintbrushes. But the lessons themselves were lost on him. He turned his talent, instead, to drawing caricatures of his teachers and classmates and the characters he observed each day from the top deck of his bus to school.

The Inny’s distinguished alumni included several who had made their mark in music, like the conductor and composer Albert Coates, the baritone Sir Charles Santley and the folk singer and composer Stan Kelly-Bootle. The school’s prospectus in the mid-Fifties recorded that its music room ‘has a piano where boys can play by arrangement with the teacher. It also has a gramophone player on which boys can play records after 1.30 p.m.’ The music master from 1955, Noel ‘Neddy’ Evans, is remembered by other former pupils, such as newsreader Peter Sissons, as ‘a fantastic teacher’.

But none of this was to figure in Paul’s musical development. He decided early on that Mr Evans wasn’t worthy of his attention and ‘Neddy’ seemingly made little effort to change his mind.

British children at that time were subjected to nothing like the deluge of erotica that nowadays saturates even the youngest. Most boys of Paul’s generation did not reach puberty until the start of their teens and many didn’t learn about sex until even later. As a rule, enlightenment came from their fathers–as uncomfortable as their own fathers had been in the same situation–wrapped up in evasive metaphors about ‘the seed of life’ and ‘the birds and bees’.

Reserved, rather straitlaced Jim McCartney was particularly ill-equipped for this most important talk with his elder son. As Paul would remember, Jim’s idea of sex-education was advising him to watch dogs ‘at it’ in the street. For amplification, he’d secretly consult Black’s Medical Dictionary, which his mother used in her midwifery, leafing through gruesome chapters on boils and haemorrhoids to a section with illustrations of the female anatomy. Even to a 13-year-old crackling with testosterone, they could not be called erotic, though the term mons Veneris, once he’d discovered it meant ‘mound of Venus’, set his imagination racing.

Ever since kindergarten, he’d been aware of his attractiveness to girls and the infallible effect of turning his brown eyes full on them. A slight blip occurred in his early teens when, for no discernible reason, he suddenly ballooned in size. The chubbiness soon disappeared, never to return, but the self-consciousness it brought lingered long afterwards. Years later, when writing about the most important encounter of his life, he would describe himself on that day at St Peter’s church fete as ‘a fat schoolboy’.

By now, he was attracting girls by the flock. Bernice Stenson, his former classmate at Joseph Williams Primary, had a crush on him, so did most of her friends. ‘He had this angelic-type face and we’d see it peering out from the top deck of the 86 bus as it passed us [when] he was on his way to Liverpool Institute and we were waiting for our bus to Aigburth Vale High School,’ Bernice recalls. ‘We’d all jump up and down and wave and shout at him.’

In 1955, Mary McCartney’s good name with the local authority took her family another step up the housing ladder. They left Speke for 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton–part of a council estate, like their two previous homes, but in an area that was predominantly middle class, in places even ‘posh’. This meant an enormous amount to Mary in her constant battle to raise the sights of her two sons; as Paul would remember, ‘She hoped some of the poshness would rub off on us.’ Much as he loved, even revered, his mother, he’d reached the age when all young people criticise their parents without mercy. He would tease Mary about her genteel speech mannerisms, for example the way she always pronounced ‘ask’ as ‘ah-sk’. ‘That’s “ask”, Mum,’ he once corrected her, using Scouse pronunciation, as in ‘Askey’. All his life, he was to reproach himself for so thoughtlessly hurting her feelings.

Twenty Forthlin Road was the McCartneys’ first home with an inside toilet. Though small, it was built to a high standard, with three bedrooms and a dining-as well as a sitting-room. Its rear windows overlooked Mather Avenue’s police training school, whose extensive grounds lent a rather countrified atmosphere. The weekly rent was 26 shillings, or less than £1.50. A telephone was installed so that Mary could always be contacted by the health authority in an emergency. It was the only private phone in the street, so a constant stream of neighbours would always be dropping by to make calls, each leaving three old pennies in payment.

The police training school over the back garden wall did not take long to make its presence felt. On their first night in the house, Paul and Mike slept in twin beds in the large back bedroom. Next morning, they were awoken by dogs barking and what sounded like a gunshot. ‘We looked out, and there was a policeman running away from a big Alsatian like a wolf,’ Mike McCartney remembers. ‘He was turning and firing a gun at it, and we could see he had a big thick glove on. Bang, bang! went the gun, but it was firing blanks. They were training dogs to grab the arm of someone trying to escape and getting them used to the noise of guns. We thought it was a pretty exciting way to say “Hello”.’

The family saw 20 Forthlin Road as the start of a bright new era and refurbished it extensively, though there wasn’t much money to spare. For a sitting-room carpet, they could afford only runners–narrow offcuts in different patterns–while the wallpaper was a selection of ‘roll-ends’ in various designs including silver-grey willow pattern. Mary couldn’t decide which paper she preferred, so the samples were hung together in a patchwork to help her make up her mind. Sadly, she never would.

After Michael’s birth, she had suffered from mastitis, an inflammation of the breast-tissue caused by breastfeeding. Recently, she had begun to feel similar pain, which at first she’d thought no more than heartburn and tried to treat with the indigestion remedy Bisodol. When that had no effect, she decided the menopause (in those days more delicately known as ‘the Change’) must be to blame. In the summer of 1956, 14-year-old Paul and 12-year-old Michael, as usual, went away to Boy Scout camp together. The weather was unusually cold and wet, and Mary told her clinic colleague Bella Johnson she was concerned they might be suffering under canvas. She was so worried that Bella’s daughter, Olive, offered to drive her to the camp to make sure they were all right.

They were quite all right, but Mary wasn’t: on the return journey to Liverpool she was in such pain that she had to lie down on the car’s back seat. When she got home, she went straight to bed. Trained nurse that she was, she already suspected the worst. ‘Oh, Olive,’ she whispered to her friend, ‘I don’t want to leave the boys just yet.’

The pain seemed to subside but, in a few days, came back worse than ever. Paul and Michael had by now returned from camp, with no idea anything was wrong, for Mary seemed her usual brisk, capable self–and, as everyone knew, nurses never got sick. The only giveaway was her sudden yearning for the Catholic faith she’d all but abandoned since her marriage. Michael was mystified one day to find her sitting on her bed weeping, holding a crucifix and a picture of a relative who’d recently become a priest.

Finally Jim persuaded her to use her contacts in the health service to get a quick appointment with a specialist. He diagnosed breast cancer and arranged for her immediate admission to Liverpool’s Northern Hospital. From her own medical training, Mary knew he’d as good as pronounced a death sentence. Before leaving her precious new home–whose array of sitting-room wallpaper samples still awaited her decision–she cleaned it from top to bottom and washed and ironed all Jim’s and the boys’ clothes.

She was rushed straight into the operating theatre for a mastectomy, which wasn’t carried out: the cancer had spread too far. There was no hope. Paul and Michael hadn’t been told what was wrong with her, and now weren’t told she was dying. When Jim took them to see her in hospital, she did her best to be cheerful and reassuring, but Paul, the ever observant, saw blood on her bed-sheet and guessed the truth.

Mary received the last rites from a Catholic priest and asked for a rosary to be put around her wrist. Before she slipped into a coma, her last thoughts were of her sons and how she would have loved to see them grow up. She died on 31 October 1956, aged 47.

Suddenly Paul’s and Michael’s world no longer had its warm centre of hugs, nice meals, gentle fingers on their foreheads when they felt ill, thermometers comfortingly shaken and popped under their tongues. Everything the word ‘mum’ calls to mind–and that teenage boys still need as much as newborn infants–was gone, except for that last pile of lovingly laundered shirts and towels back at Forthlin Road.

For Jim McCartney, the blow was devastating. Mary had not only been the love of his life but its organiser. Outside of his beloved garden, he had always left domestic matters to her. Now he faced the task of caring for Paul and Michael and steering them through adolescence and its numerous problems–all without the second wage packet Mary had always provided. When the awful news was broken, Paul couldn’t help blurting out, ‘What are we going to do without her money?’

At first, Jim seemed unable to come to terms with his loss, sobbing that he wanted ‘to be with Mary’, almost as if he meant to end his own life, too. Men in that era, especially northern men, were not supposed to show emotion, and his sons had never known him other than totally composed behind his pipe.

‘That was the worst thing for me,’ Paul would remember. ‘Seeing my dad cry.’ But, grief-stricken though he was, the brown eyes shed no public tears. ‘I was determined not to let it affect me. I carried on. I learned to put a shell around me.’