coal lorry, giving one performance in the afternoon and another in the early evening. At the second, their audience included a hugely proud Julia, who made the long bus journey from Bloomfield Road, bringing John’s halfsisters, Julia and Jackie. The two little girls sat on the lorry’s tailboard while Julia watched from the Roberts family’s living room.
Many cameras were in use that day, and one of them chanced to take the first-ever picture of John in performance. There he is on the coal-dusty stage, wearing the checked shirt Julia had bought him at Garston’s open-air market, singing raptly into a stand microphone whose cord extends perilously and through the open ground-floor window of the house behind, to the nearest accessible electrical outlet. His fellow Quarrymen are grouped slightly behind him, all but for little Colin Hanton, in a garish two-tone jumper, who sits some way to the left—‘half-cut’, as he now admits, on pints of black velvet. The backdrop of grimy Victorian brickwork and celebration flags makes it more like a scene from the late-19th century than the mid-20th.
During their second show, as dusk was falling and fairy lights twinkled on overhead, Colin’s rather isolated position on the lorry turned out to be providential. Just behind it stood a group of tough boys from neighbouring Hatherley Street whom he overheard plotting to ‘get Lennon’ after the show. When their last number ended, the Quarrymen did not wait for applause but bundled their instruments offstage and sought sanctuary in Charlie Roberts’ house, where his mother regaled them with a high tea. The Hatherley Street roughs were not easily deterred, banging on the windows and calling on John to come out. The problem was solved by the arrival of a single policeman, in those days a magisterial presence, who warned off the troublemakers, then gave the Quarrymen safe escort to their bus stop.
Summer’s ritual festivities promised more busy times ahead. On 6 July, the Quarrymen were booked to appear at the annual garden fête of their own parish church, St Peter’s, Woolton. John had lately astonished Pricey, the rector, by submitting himself for formal confirmation into the Church of England—not through any deep religious awakening, as he would later admit, but for the sake of the cash gifts that confirmation candidates traditionally receive from their families. Whether or not Pricey realised this, John was once again persona grata at St Peter’s, and his group was not only to perform at the fête itself, but also aboard one of the motorised carnival floats that paraded through Woolton village beforehand. Shades of his grandfather Jack, in days when Andrew Roberton’s Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels always came to town in triumph, plinking and plunking on the back of a decorated wagon!
It went through my head that I’d have to
keep him in line if I let him join.
Paul McCartney had known John well by sight for some time before their carefully arranged official introduction. To Paul, judging solely by appearances, ‘John was the local Ted. You saw him rather than met him…This Ted would get on the bus and I wouldn’t look at him too hard in case he hit me.’
The two might have been expected to strike up a natural acquaintanceship, living as near to each other as they did, with close friends in common and a mutual, consuming passion for rock ‘n’ roll. The main obstacle was an 18-month age difference between them. John, at 163/4, was considered to be on the edge of manhood, while Paul, having only just turned 15, was still in the outer reaches of boyhood. The discrepancy would never be an issue once they knew each other, and would grow less noticeable with each passing year; but in their first brief encounters on the Allerton-Woolton bus, it had prevented them from exchanging even so much as a nod.
The fact that Paul went to school with two cronies of John’s, Ivan Vaughan and Len Garry, brought no fast-track introduction either. Ivan, it so happened, had long since marked Paul down as being of potential value to the Quarrymen, but guessed how John might react if a new recruit were too pointedly shoved under his nose. So Ivy bided his time until the right moment came, which it did not do until Saturday, 6 July, 1957, when the Quarrymen were to play at the St Peter’s Church fête in Woolton. Having presold Paul to John as ‘a great fellow’, Ivy then oh so casually invited Paul, who oh so casually agreed, to cycle over from Allerton, watch the Quarrymen in performance and say hello to their leader afterwards.
The baby-faced 15-year-old whom John was to meet on this innocent summer’s afternoon—the more-than-collaborator, more-thanpartner, more-than-brother destined to share his life and live in his mind and voice for almost the whole of the next decade—would always seem like his polar opposite in every possible way. Yet in their origins and family backgrounds they were remarkably similar.
As John’s late grandfather George Stanley had done, Paul’s father, Jim McCartney, held a position of the utmost respectability in Liverpool’s mercantile world. Jim was a salesman for Hannay & Co., a firm of cotton brokers he had faithfully served for almost three decades, except for a necessary interlude in a war munitions factory. Despite the industry’s steep postwar decline, working ‘in cotton’ remained as much a badge of prestige among Liverpool’s upper working class as having assisted salvage operations on the Thetis. With his brown chalkstripe suits, polished brogues and stiff-collared shirts, Jim McCartney was a type of man now—sadly—almost vanished from British commerce: diligent, loyal, principled and seemingly devoid of greed, ruthlessness or ego.
Like John, Paul had grown up in an atmosphere of social aspiration. His mother, Mary, was a trained nurse (like John’s Aunt Mary) who subsequently became a domiciliary midwife employed by the local authority to tend to the large numbers of women who still chose to give birth at home. This meant that, although Paul and his younger brother, Michael, were raised on the succession of council estates where their mother was based, they always had a sense of being slightly apart and special. Mary McCartney was a woman of natural refinement who encouraged her sons to try to speak more ‘nicely’ than the estate children they played with.
Like John, Paul came from Irish forebears, with all the lyricism and charm that implies, and had music and the instinct to perform in his genes. As a young man in the 1920s, Jim McCartney had led a small amateur dance band, to whose syncopated rhythms, it is more than likely, John’s parents, Alf and Julia, had Charlestoned or Black-Bottomed in their good times as a couple. Though Jim’s bandleading days were long past, he still played the upright piano he had bought on the instalment plan from North End Music Stores (NEMS) in Walton Road. Paul had inherited his father’s instinctive musical ear and an ability to sing in harmony, which Jim encouraged with the same community-spirited maxim John had so often heard from Julia: if he could do a song or play something, he’d always be popular at parties.
Like John, Paul had shown himself to be clever and artistic at an early age, had passed the Eleven Plus and won a place at a renowned city grammar school, Liverpool Institute in Mount Street. Like John, he wore a black uniform blazer with a Latin motto, in this case Non nobis solum sed toti mundo nati (‘We are born not for ourselves only, but for all the world’); like John, he excelled in English, was a fan of Richmal Crompton’s William books, and showed a talent for cartooning and caricature.
Paul’s life had already been blighted by a tragedy that, all too soon, was to repeat itself in John’s. In October 1956, Mary McCartney died from breast cancer. After an initial period of emotional collapse, 53-year-old Jim rallied heroically, teaching himself to cook and keep house for his two sons while continuing to travel for Hannay’s. The three lived a bachelor existence in the last council house Mary’s job had provided, number 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton, a short bus ride away from Menlove Avenue. Without Mary’s extra income, money was tight, but a circle of good-hearted aunts helped care for Paul and Michael just as a corresponding one always had for John. Although never educated to any advanced degree, Jim was as much a proponent of reading and linguistic fluency as was Aunt Mimi: a recent spelling test at Liverpool Institute had shown Paul to be the only boy in his class able to spell phlegm.
But Paul, while being as much an individualist as John, possessed none of John’s reckless rebelliousness. He had a profound and most un-Liverpudlian dislike of all overt aggression and confrontation, preferring to bend others to his