Читать книгу John Lennon: The Life - Philip Norman - Страница 11

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 will by charm, diplomacy and the sometimes deceptive innocence of his oversized brown eyes.

Well before rock ‘n’ roll hit Britain, Paul had been able to pick out tunes on the family piano and, with Jim’s encouragement, had begun learning the trumpet, hitherto the most glamorous instrument on the bandstand. As soon as he heard Elvis and saw Lonnie Donegan, he took his trumpet back to Rushworth and Draper’s department store and swapped it for a £15 Zenith guitar with cello-style f-shaped sound holes. Being left-handed, he found he had to play his instrument in reverse, strumming with his left hand and shaping chords on the fretboard with his right.

Although by now a more than proficient guitarist with an obviously usable voice, he had not been snapped up by any skiffle group—nor, apparently, sought to be. Like John, he had been captivated by the Everly Brothers’ close harmony, and vaguely planned to form an Everly-style duo with a friend named Ian James (as John had with Len Garry), but nothing came of it. On the daily bus trip to school, he’d become friendly with another Institute boy, George Harrison, who shared his fascination with guitars and rock ‘n’ roll. Though George was nine months his junior, they found common ground in drawing pictures of curvaceous guitar bodies and comparing new chords, and had become close enough to go on a hitchhiking holiday together.

The hot Saturday of 6 July did not seem an auspicious one for John. In the morning, Mendips’ mock-Tudor hallway echoed to another blazing argument when he came downstairs in his chosen outfit of drape jacket, open-necked checked shirt and ankle-hugging black jeans. ‘Mimi…said to me I’d done it at last, I was a real Teddy boy,’ he would recall. ‘I seemed to disgust everyone, not just Mimi.’

The afternoon unfolded with the slow-motion predictability of every village pageant John had ever read about in a William story. The procession of decorated carnival floats made its way down Allerton Road, Kings Drive and Hunts Cross Avenue, at its head the brass band of the Cheshire Yeomanry (‘By permission of Lt Col. CGV Churton, MC, MBE’), at its rear a flatbed coal-merchant’s lorry bearing the Quarrymen. Despite the grinding slowness of the parade, it was difficult to play with any effectiveness on such an unsteady perch, and John quickly gave up, took off his guitar and sat on the tailboard with his legs dangling. A little way on, he spotted his mother and two half-sisters in the crowd. Julia, the younger, and Jackie walked behind the truck, trying to make him laugh, but he still regarded himself in serious performance mode and refused to respond.

At the fête itself, his group had been allotted two brief spots, at 4.15 and 5.45, separated by a display of dog-handling from the City of Liverpool Police. By John’s own account, that afternoon was the first time he ever attempted Gene Vincent’s ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ live onstage. One can shut one’s eyes and almost hear the crazy words that, for once, he didn’t have to invent (‘We-e-ll she’s the woman in the red blue jeans…’) rising and falling against the competitive clamour of craft-and homemade cake-stalls, games of hoop-la, quoits and shilling-in-the-bucket, children’s cries, indifferent adult conversation, and birdsong. Paul McCartney, quietly checking him out from the sidelines, remembers him also doing his reworded version of ‘Come Go with Me’.

A famous photograph of him in mid-performance was taken by his Quarry Bank schoolfriend Geoff Rhind from directly in front of the low open-air stage. Jacketless and tousled, visibly wilting in the heat, he has the narrow-eyed, challenging look that always went with leaving off his glasses. Behind him is a screen of ragged hedgerow; to his right stand a knot of expectant-looking younger boys, rather like the village children who always collected around William, hoping he would liven things up. At one point, so the story goes, he looked down into his audience and met the horrified gaze of his Aunt Mimi. According to Mimi, she had been unaware that John was performing that afternoon until a loud clash and a familiar raspy voice penetrated the refreshment tent, where she was savouring a quiet cup of tea. She would describe how when John saw her, he turned the words he was singing into a mock-fearful running commentary: ‘Oh-oh, Mimi’s here! Mimi’s coming down the path…’ However, his cousin Michael Cadwallader, then aged ten, remembers being at the fête in a large family group that, besides Julia and John’s two half-sisters, included two more aunts, Nanny and Harrie, and his ten-year-old cousin, David. ‘I got the sense that we’d been rounded up to go,’ Michael says. ‘And Mimi was the only one who could have been behind that.’

The Quarrymen were also booked to play at the Grand Dance, which was to round off the day’s merrymaking—that is to say, they’d been given another brief youth-pleasing spot in an evening of conventional quicksteps and foxtrots by the George Edwards Band. It was while they were setting up their gear in the too-familiar surroundings of St Peter’s Church Hall that Ivan Vaughan brought in the schoolfriend he wanted John to meet.

Even at this early time, it seems, Paul knew how to make an entrance of maximum effect. The pop ballad hit of the summer was ‘A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation)’, written by the American country star Marty Robbins but covered in the UK by a briefly burning Elvis clone named Terry Dene. And here was Ivy’s much talked-about schoolfriend, resplendent in just such a white sports jacket—a wide-shouldered, long-lapelled confection, dusted all over with silver flecks, reaching almost to his knees and set off by the narrowest pair of black drainies yet to have been smuggled past a vigilant father.

Introductions were made a little stiffly; this was, after all, a very youthful interloper and a particularly tight-knit group. Paul broke the ice by picking up one of the Quarrymen’s guitars—whether John’s or Eric Griffiths’s no one now remembers—and levitating straight into ‘Twenty Flight Rock’, as played by Eddie Cochran in The Girl Can’t Help It, which he’d learned from the record a few days earlier. The song was a tricky one to sing and strum simultaneously, not just for a left-handed guitarist on a right-handed guitar but also because, thanks to Julia, the instrument was tuned like a banjo, its two bass strings slack and useless. Even so, the combined effect of the backswept hair, the baby face, the high yet robust voice, and the white sports jacket was irresistible.

Years later, in a foreword to John’s first published book, Paul would affectionately recall what a grown-up and dissipated character the Quarrymen’s leader seemed on that day. ‘At Woolton church fête I met him. I was a fat schoolboy and as he leaned an arm on my shoulder, I realised he was drunk…’ Hallowed myth has always stated that, in reaction to his strife with Mimi, and possibly against the oppressive sanctity of the occasion, John had laid hands on a supply of beer and, by late afternoon, was seriously under the influence. Four of the Quarrymen—Davis, Hanton, Garry and Griffiths—have disputed the story. ‘Except for Colin Hanton, we none of us had any money to get tanked up on beer,’ Rod Davis says. ‘John might have managed to sneak a half-pint of bitter, but that would have been it.’

Paul himself is now inclined to revise the degree of John’s intoxication, which he says did not become apparent until after ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ was over. ‘I also knocked around on the backstage piano and that would have been “A Whole Lot of Shakin” by Jerry Lee [Lewis]. That’s when I remember John leaning over, contributing a deft right hand in the upper octaves and surprising me with his beery breath. It’s not that I was shocked, it’s just that I remember this particular detail.’

More desultory conversation followed while church helpers completed preparations for the Grand Dance or emptied dregs from tea urns in the adjacent kitchen, unaware of an encounter that was to rank alongside Gilbert’s first with Sullivan or Rodgers’s with Hart. Paul made himself still more impressive by tuning John’s and Eric’s guitars as guitars, giving them their full six-string span for the very first time. He remembers they did all go out to a pub in Woolton village later that evening, when he and John—and all the others except pint-sized Colin Hanton—had to lie about their ages before being served. The visitor felt himself even more in dangerous adult company when talk arose of an impending raid by Teds from Garston and a mass punch-up in the centre of the village. ‘I was wondering what I’d got myself into. I’d only come over for the afternoon and now I was in Mafia-land.’

As John remembered, he asked Paul to join the Quarrymen when they first met in St Peter’s Church Hall, though Paul did not take it as official until Pete Shotton formally repeated the invitation a couple of weeks later. John realised at the time it was a major step, though how major he could not have dreamed. ‘I thought, half to myself, “He’s as good as me.” I’d been kingpin up to then. Now I thought “If I take him on, what will happen?”…The decision was whether to keep me strong or make the group stronger…It went through my head that I’d have to keep him in line if I let him join. But he was good, so he was worth having. He also looked like Elvis. I dug him.’

Eleven days after the Woolton fête, John reached the end of his final term at Quarry Bank High School. He had sat O-levels in seven subjects and failed every one—though by a margin narrow enough to indicate that he could have passed with a minimum of extra effort. Even in art, his outstanding subject, he could not be bothered to meet the unexacting O-level standard. ‘All they were interested in was neatness,’ he would recall. ‘I was never neat. I used to mix all the colours together. We had one question [in the exampaper] which said do a picture of “travel”. I drew a picture of a hunchback with warts all over him.’

Without O-levels, there was no question of entering Quarry Bank’s sixth form. Since John was not prepared to sit his O-levels again, any more than the school was to let him, he had no choice but to leave.

Had he been born a few months earlier than he was, the period after school-leaving would have been amply occupied. Since 1939, all young males had been subject to compulsory military service, a two-year term that, in the mid-fifties, might find them facing Soviet Russia in the West German nuclear front line, fighting terrorists in Malaya, Kenya or Cyprus, or merely drilling pointlessly on some home base like Catterick or Aldershot. But in 1957, National Service was abolished, saving John in the nick of time from ‘square-bashing’ and sergeant majors. The only time he would ever don a khaki uniform or pick up a gun would be when acting in a film.

He himself had given no thought to his career, other than inwardly vowing never to become the doctor or pharmacist or veterinarian that Aunt Mimi hoped he would. ‘I was always thinking I was going to be a famous artist and possibly I’d have to marry a very rich old lady, or man, to look after me while I did my art…I didn’t really know what I wanted to be, apart from ending up as an eccentric millionaire. I had to be a millionaire. If I couldn’t do it without being crooked, then I’d have to be crooked. I was quite prepared to do that—nobody obviously was going to give me money for my paintings—but I was too much of a coward.’

With seafaring men on both sides of his family, it was natural for his thoughts to turn to the docks that still flourished along the Mersey, and the exotic worlds to which they led. One day, he brought home a slightly older boy who had followed Alf Lennon’s calling of ship’s steward and—so it seemed to John—led a life of dazzling glamour and affluence. ‘His hair [was] in a Tony Curtis, they called it, all smoothed down with grease at the sides,’ Mimi remembered. ‘ “Mimi,” John whispered to me in the kitchen, “this boy’s got pots of money. He goes away to sea.” I said, “Well, he’s no captain and he’s no engineer—what is he?” “He waits at table,” John said. “Ha!” I said. “A fine ambition!”’

Shortly afterward she stumbled on a pact between John and Nigel Walley to enrol together in the training course that would have turned them into junior stewards. ‘We just thought we’d like to see the world while we were still young,’ Walley remembers now. However, when John tried to sign up for the course, he was told that at his age he needed consent of a parent or guardian. ‘I was rung up by this place at the Pier Head—some sort of seamen’s employment office,’ Mimi remembered. ‘“We’ve got a young boy named John Lennon here,” they said. “He’s asking to sign up…” “Don’t you even dream of it,” I told them.’

The main enticement of going to sea for young men those days was the unlimited sex it promised. But that, at least, formed no part of John’s motivation. Alone of his circle, he was known to have lost his virginity (with his curvaceous strawberry-blonde steady, Barbara Baker), and since then had racked up a mounting score with several of the Quarrymen’s followers. ‘Going all the way’, it used to be called, though the term is hardly accurate. In those days, the predominant form of contraception was the sheath, not yet known as the condom but as the ‘French letter’ or ‘rubber Johnny’, and sold only at chemists’ and barber shops amid fandangos of furtiveness and embarrassment that few teenage boys were willing to brave. With the girls who would let him, John therefore used the risky method of coitus interruptus. In Liverpool it was known as ‘getting off at Edge Hill’, that being the last station on the northbound railway line where one could alight before the climactic downhill run into the Lime Street terminus.

Since neither he nor Barbara had a place of their own, there was nowhere to do it but al fresco in the woods or on the grounds of some neighbourhood stately home, or even in a churchyard whose monuments at least provided a relief from damp grass. Years later, he would ungallantly remember ‘a night, or should I say a day…when I was fucking my girlfriend on a gravestone and my arse got covered in greenfly. Where are you now, Barbara? That was a good lesson in karma and/or gardening…’

In 1957, Barbara became pregnant. Despite their long physical relationship and his dangerous habit of getting off at Edge Hill, John was not responsible. Tired of sharing him with the Quarrymen’s embryo groupies, she had chucked him some time before and taken up with one of his friends just to spite him. To avoid the inevitable stigma on her family, she was sent away from Liverpool to have the baby, which was then immediately put up for adoption. John, she says, was almost as mortified as if he’d been the father. ‘He was beside himself…He came round to our house and he went crazy…kicking a panel of the fence in and shouting…He was saying “It should have been mine! It should have been mine!” He said he would marry me. It was typical of John, that. He came to see me and said it would be the best thing if we got married. He would stand by me.’ When Barbara returned home, they began going out again, but things were never the same, and the relationship faded away.

As his final term at Quarry Bank drew to a close, John was the only one among his cronies still to have no idea what came next. Rod Davis was to go into the sixth form to do A-level French, Spanish, history and Latin—and ultimately become head boy. Eric Griffiths was to train as a ship’s navigation officer. Even John’s closest partner in crime, Pete Shotton, had astonished his teachers—not to mention his erstwhile fellow shoplifter and dinner-ticket racketeer—by winning a cadetship at the Police Training College in Mather Avenue.

Since John seemed incapable of formulating any ideas, his future had to be discussed over his head by Mimi and the Quarry Bank headmaster, Mr Pobjoy. ‘Pobjoy asked me what I was going to do with him.’ Mimi recalled. ‘I said, “What are you going to do with him. You’ve had him for five years.”’ The only faint ray of hope his headmaster could see was his unquestioned talent for drawing. If his aunt consented, Mr Pobjoy would put John’s name forward to the Liverpool College of Art, with a special letter pleading for his failed O-level in that subject not to count against him. To Mimi, ‘It was better than nothing; at least he was going to college. Then I found out I would have to go on supporting him for the first year, so I thought if I am paying for his education, then he’s going to go there and learn something.’

Mr Pobjoy made it a condition of recommending John to the art college that his behaviour must be impeccable for the rest of that final term. Not until Quarry Bank actually let out and his teachers all corroborated his good conduct would the letter to the college be sent. John duly sat out his remaining classes with an expression of choirboy innocence, and took pains to avoid overt trouble. However, there was one final act of subversion on his conscience that could have ruined everything.

Summer term’s most sacred ritual was the school photograph, a black-and-white portrait of all 200-odd pupils and staff assembled on the lawn outside the main building. Such wide-angle shots required a tripod-mounted camera with a special panoramic lens that took several seconds to make its exposure, panning from one end of the group to the other. According to school folklore, it was possible for a boy on one side to be snapped by the lens, then run to the opposite side and be snapped again as it completed its arc, so appearing in the picture twice. When Quarry Bank mustered in eight ascending black-blazered rows for the 1957 photograph, John decided to put this theory to the test.

Rather than conduct the experiment in person, he nominated his classmate Harry ‘Goosey’ Gooseman. ‘John had heard it was possible, but rather than do it himself, he got me all fired up and raring to go,’ Gooseman remembers. ‘Anyway, you can see what happened when you look at the photograph…When the camera began its slow move, I ducked down and ran along behind the line and popped up in another place. Sadly for me,…I moved too soon, and so you see this empty space where I should have been standing, right behind John. And then when I tried to race the camera and to get onto a chair or bench further along, there was no way in for me, so you can just see a bit of my head peeping through. Some of the lads didn’t know what was happening, but John did. You have only to look at his face…and the smirks of his gang. I remember him laughing out loud when we were finally presented with the photograph, and he saw the empty space behind him where I should have been.’

Fortunately, Mr Pobjoy never noticed the gap at one end of the school group or the blur of an intruding head at the other. On the last day of term, 17 July, the letter went to Liverpool College of Art, recommending John for entry. The head also supplied a personal reference that generously accentuated the positive: ‘He has been a trouble spot for many years in discipline, but has somewhat mended his ways. Requires the sanction of “losing a job” to keep him on the rails. But I believe he is not beyond redemption and he could really turn out a fairly responsible adult who might go far.’

It was not such a tremendous coup that had been accomplished on John’s behalf. Under the easygoing educational system of late-fifties Britain, virtually anyone showing the faintest glimmer of creative ability could get a place at art college and be assured a generous local authority grant to support them. From this large intake, it was accepted that only a tiny minority would turn into actual artists. Some would become teachers, and a few would gravitate into the undeveloped sphere of design and graphics still mundanely known as commercial art. For the rest, studying art was merely an exotic interlude when they could put on airs and acquire calligraphic handwriting before yielding to the banalities of a business career or marriage.

Becoming an art student introduced John to a part of inner Liverpool that was almost unknown to him. Around the college’s grey Victorian façade in Hope Street lay a raffish area of coffee bars, bric-a-brac shops and student lodgings catacombed among elegant Georgian streets and curving terraces originally built for the city’s shipping aristocracy. On St James’s Mount towered the sandstone bulk of Giles Gilbert Scott’s Anglican cathedral, begun in 1904—and destined not to be fully inaugurated until 1978. Close at hand lay Britain’s oldest West Indian and Chinese communities, the former bubbly with calypso and steel-band music, the latter so well assimilated that some pubs announced closing time in Cantonese as well as English. The mix of period grandeur and bohemian informality reached its apogee in the Philharmonic Dining Rooms—adjacent to the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s recital hall—which boasted wood panelling to rival any first-class saloon on the great transatlantic ships, and men’s urinal stalls carved from rose-coloured marble.

John was to study for a National Diploma in Art and Design, a course intended to occupy him full-time for the next four years. During the first two, he would take a range of subjects, including graphics, art history, architecture, ceramics, lettering, even basic woodworking. An exam would then decide if he had reached a sufficient standard to continue in some specialist field like painting or sculpture. Since he did not qualify for a grant until aged 18, he remained dependent on Mimi, who, as well as providing free board and lodging at Mendips, gave him a weekly allowance of 30 shillings for his bus fares and meals.

For his first day as an art student, he wore his best grey-blue Teddy boy suit, set off by a Slim Jim tie and Elvis-inspired blue suede shoes with fancily stitched uppers. He was a defiant daub of rock-’n’-roll proletarianism set down among middle-class-aspiring jazzers of the very same type who’d stopped the Quarrymen’s show at the Cavern club. An observant girl named Ann Mason, who also started the Intermediate course that day, remembers how painfully he stood out among the Shetland knits and duffle coats, and his dogged air of determination not to care.

He had little idea of what studying art would entail, beyond an ardent hope, fostered by the co-members of his wankers’ circle, that sketching nude women came into it somewhere. In fact, his daily timetable as an Intermediate student proved dispiritingly similar to life at the school from which he thought he had escaped. As at Quarry Bank, an attendance roll was called each morning, then came lessons in classrooms or the steep-tiered lecture theatre, when oldish men in tweed suits, with a war-veteran air, spouted facts about Renaissance painters and pediments that he hadn’t the smallest interest in studying. Before being allowed to draw a real person from life, he had to do hours of tedious groundwork in human anatomy, consisting largely of copying outsized plaster ears or arms or parts of the articulated human skeleton that the college numbered among its teaching aids.

Among the earliest kindred spirits he discovered was Helen Anderson, a beautiful 16-year-old from Fazakerley who had previously attended the college’s junior art school. A precociously talented painter, Helen had been featured in the national press a few months earlier when Lonnie Donegan, the King of Skiffle himself, commissioned her to do his portrait and invited her to stay with him and his family during the sittings. John had read about this at the time, and, as soon as he arrived at college, made a point of seeking her out and demanding to hear the story firsthand. ‘He explained that Lonnie was a bit of a hero to him,’ Helen remembers. ‘He wanted to hear everything that had happened. And I had to tell him again and again.’

Mimi’s hope was that, if nothing else, art college might lessen the influence of Donegan and Elvis over John, and stimulate him to pursuits more elevated than travelling around by bus with a wallpaper-covered tea chest. There certainly was reason enough for the Quarrymen to have disintegrated that summer. Rod Davis, their banjo player, had unrancorously drifted away, feeling of no further use amid the increasingly rock-’n’-roll repertoire—which meant none of their personnel now had any connection with Quarry Bank High School. However, John was determined to keep the group going, however awkwardly it sat with his new student persona, and for the present did not bestir himself to think up an alternative name.

On 18 October, four months after having been invited to become a Quarryman, Paul McCartney finally took his place in the lineup. Though he had attended a few practice sessions back in August, his stage debut had been postponed by a spell at Boy Scout camp and a visit with his father and brother to Butlins Holiday Camp in Filey.

His first appearance with the Quarrymen was at the New Clubmoor Hall, a Conservative club in the Liverpool suburb of Norris Green. The booker was one Charles McBain, aka Charlie Mac, a local impresario best known for presenting strict-tempo ballroom dancing, whose press advertisements used the motto ‘Always Gay’. Paul had been awarded his own instrumental spot using his f-hole Zenith on Arthur Smith’s ‘Guitar Boogie’. But at the crucial moment, as he recalls, he was attacked by ‘nerves leading to sticky fingers. [It] was one of the first gigs I’d ever played, and the sheer terror of it got to me.’ Charlie Mac adjudicated the overall performance much as he would have done a samba competition, scribbling ‘Good and bad’ on one of Nigel Walley’s business cards.

Despite that equivocal judgement, the Quarrymen began to make regular appearances at McBain’s various ‘Rhythm Nights’, chiefly at Wilson Hall opposite the Garston bus depot. Though a step up in prestige from church fêtes and youth clubs, the prospect was a daunting one. Garston was famously the haunt of Liverpool’s toughest Teds outside the docks—velveteen-collared psychopaths who waged gang warfare with weapons that, in some cases, would not have shamed the Spanish Inquisition. A Garston Ted bent on a night’s pleasure first wrapped around his wrist a thick leather belt studded with industrial-size washers, its buckle filed to razor sharpness to increase its efficacy as a flail. Some sewed razor blades into their jacket revers as a surprise for anyone who tried grabbing them by the lapels.

The only sure way not to fall foul of these awesome beings—pulling the thorn from the lion’s paw as it were—was to give them the rock ‘n’ roll they loved. In this endeavour John now had an accomplice who was not only gifted at imitating Eddie Cochran and Jerry Lee Lewis but could also passably simulate the dementia of rock’s ultimate chaos-maker, Little Richard. One night at Wilson Hall while the Quarrymen were in midset, a massive Ted clambered up onstage and went eyeball-to-eyeball with Paul in classic Liverpool ‘look, pal…’ mode. But it was merely to request him, quite politely in Garston terms, to sing ‘Long Tall Sally’.

Paul’s presence had an immediate effect within the Quarrymen, changing what was still essentially a group of mates having a laugh into something altogether less easygoing and more focused. And the mates were not always best pleased by the improvements he suggested. One of these was that as manager Nigel Walley should no longer receive an equal share of the collective earnings because he didn’t actually appear onstage. ‘Walloggs’, however, successfully resisted the idea, pointing to an upswing in the standard of recent gigs, which had included a performance for the social club at Stanley Abattoir. Another of Paul’s concerns was that Colin Hanton’s drumming was not of a high enough standard. In addition to playing guitar, piano and trumpet, Paul was a competent drummer and, as Len Garry remembers, was always beating on tabletops and chairs with his hands or sticks or even pieces of cutlery, as if to demonstrate how much better he would be at the job. But John defended Colin, thinking mainly of what a grievous loss his drum kit would be.

The new McCartney-inspired professionalism was quickly in evidence. When the Quarrymen returned to New Clubmoor Hall to play a further gig for Charlie Mac on 23 November, 1957, they had swapped their former casual mélange of tartan shirts and striped knitwear for matching black jeans, white shirts and Western-style bootlace ties. A historic snapshot taken that night shows John and Paul sharing prominence at the front, each with his own stand microphone. While their sidemen are in shirtsleeves, they wear drapecut jackets, which, Eric Griffiths remembers, were of a creamy or oatmeal shade. Even in that quaint, pseudo-cowboy guise, they are so obviously the only two who matter.

A crucial factor in John’s early relationship with Paul was the concurrent reduction of Pete Shotton’s presence in his life. With the Quarrymen fully weaned to rock ‘n’ roll, Pete’s skiffle washboard was now an embarrassing anachronism. But he knew John thought too much of him to drop him from the group, however much of a passenger he became. Finally, one night at a drunken party in Smithdown Road, the situation was resolved without grief or embarrassment to either side. John picked up the washboard and smashed it over Pete’s head, dislodging the central metal portion and leaving the wooden frame hanging around his neck like a collar. Pete, as he remembers, sank to the floor, weeping tears of laughter mixed with relief. ‘I was finished with playing but I didn’t want to say so, nor did John. This way let me out and it let John out.’ Paul thus stepped neatly into Pete’s shoes as the partner, private audience and sounding-board John could not do without.

A major geographical coincidence also played its part in fostering their friendship. The art college to which John dispiritedly journeyed each day was literally next door to Paul’s school, the Liverpool Institute. The two seats of learning occupied the same L-shaped building whose neo-classical façade extended from Hope Street around the corner into Mount Street. Their respective populations worked in sight and earshot of one another and mingled in the cobbled streets outside during breaks and dinner hours. John was thus free to meet up with Paul privately all through the day as well as on Quarrymen business during the evening.

But rock ‘n’ roll and guitars were only part of what drew them together so immediately and powerfully in those last months of 1957. The affinity was intellectual as much as musical; they were top-of-the-form English literature students as much as would-be Elvises. Paul had read many, if not quite all, of the books that John had; he could quote Chaucer and Shakespeare and was a keen habitué of Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre. To his surprise, he discovered that the self-styled beer-swilling desperado who claimed to have hated all schoolwork secretly devoted hours to composing stories, poems and playlets, all via the disciplining medium of a typewriter. For all Paul’s neat, methodical ways, he shared John’s addiction to nonsense across its full historical spectrum, Lewis Carroll to the Goons. Phrases from Lennon works-in-progress, such as ‘a cup of teeth’ or ‘the early owls of the Morecambe’, produced another instant meeting of minds; the Lennon-McCartney collaboration in its earliest form consisted of sitting around and thinking up further puns for John to type.

Paul was always conscious that John came from a social drawer above his, however much John tried to disown it. ‘We [the McCartneys] were in a posh area, but the council house bit of the posh area. John was actually in one of the almost posh houses in the posh area…in fact, he once told me the family used to own Woolton, the whole village.’ It was also impressive that, whereas Paul and his brother had ‘aunties’, John had more formal and patrician-sounding ‘aunts’, with oddball nicknames like Mater and Harrie rather than plain, cosy Millie or Jin. For Paul, this whole Richmal Crompton, tennis-club atmosphere was summed up in the name Mimi, which he’d previously associated with 1920s flappers brandishing long cigarette holders.

Despite his pleasing appearance, politeness and charm, his reception at Mendips was initially not very cordial. Mimi by this point clearly could not conceive of John bringing home anyone but ‘scruffs’ whose aim could only be to lead him even further astray. Paul later said he found her treatment of him ‘very patronising…she was the kind of woman who would put you down with a glint in her eye, with a smile—but she’d put you down all the same.’ Mimi, for her part, felt suspicious of the way Paul invariably chose to sit on a kitchen stool at teatime as if, she said, ‘he always wants to look down on you.’

At a significantly early stage, John and he began holding guitarpractice sessions away from the other Quarrymen. They tried playing seated side by side on John’s bed, but there was so little room to manoeuvre that the heads of their guitars kept clashing together. Most times they would end up in the covered front porch, to which Mimi often banished John—and where the brickwork gave their tinny guitars an extra resonance. Sharing new chords was complicated by Paul’s left-handedness, which meant that each saw the shape in an inverted form on his companion’s fretboard, then had to change it around on his own. ‘We could read each other’s chords backwards,’ Paul remembers, ‘but it also meant that if either of us needed to borrow the other’s guitar in an emergency we were forced into having to play “upside-down” and this became one of the little skills that each of us developed. The truth is that neither of us would let the other re-string his guitar.’

The McCartneys’ house in Forthlin Road was only a few minutes’ walk from the Springwood estate where John had his secondary and utterly different home. Paul was soon introduced to Julia and told of the arrangement whereby John lived with his aunt even though the mother whom he clearly adored, and who clearly adored him, was only a couple of miles away. Julia was captivated by Paul’s angelic charm and full of sympathy for the loss he’d suffered a few months before. ‘Poor boy,’ she would say to John, with what now seems heartbreaking irony. ‘He’s lost his mother. We must have him round for a meal.’ Paul in turn thought Julia ‘gorgeous’ and was impressed that she could play banjo, an accomplishment which even his highly musical father did not possess. Julia was always suggesting new numbers for the two of them to learn—mostly standards like ‘Ramona’ and ‘Those Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine’, which were to have as much influence on great songs still unwritten as would Elvis or Little Richard.

Despite the aching lack of a mother in Paul’s life, the modest council house where he lived with his cotton salesman father and younger brother seemed to John an enviably uncomplicated place. The result was that he and his guitar spent increasing amounts of time at 20 Forthlin Road, where the parental welcome was at first not a great deal warmer than Paul’s at Mendips. Jim McCartney was too much of a realist to try to ban John from the house, but he gave Paul a warning that was to prove not ill-founded: ‘He’ll get you into trouble, son.’

In his 1997 authorised biography by Barry Miles, Many Years from Now, Paul would describe how the two seeming opposites beheld a mirror image in much more than the chord-shapes on their respective fretboards:

John, because of his upbringing and his unstable family life, had to be hard, witty, always ready for the cover-up, ready for the riposte, ready for the sharp little witticism. Whereas, with my rather comfortable upbringing, a lot of family, lots of people, very northern, ‘Cup of tea, love?’ my surface grew to be easygoing…But we wouldn’t have put up with each other had we each only had that surface. I often used to boss him around, and he must have appreciated the hard side in me or it wouldn’t have worked; conversely, I very much appreciated the soft side in him.

John had a lot to guard against and it formed his personality; he was a very guarded person. I think that was the balance between us: John was caustic and witty out of necessity and, underneath, quite a warm character when you got to know him. I was the opposite, easygoing, friendly, no necessity to be caustic or biting or acerbic but I could be tough if I needed to be…The partnership, the mix was incredible. We both had submerged qualities that we each saw and knew. [We would] never have stood each other for all that time if we’d just been one-dimensional.

The practice sessions at Paul’s generally took place on weekday afternoons when both participants would ‘sag off’ from their respective studies at college and school. At first the sessions were simply to practise the songs they had learned, or were still struggling to learn, from records or the wireless. John in those days had a liking for purely instrumental numbers and, so Paul remembers, did ‘a mean version’ of the Harry Lime Theme, making his Gallotone Champion sound as much like a Viennese zither as it ever possibly could.

Bouts of playing would be punctuated by listening to the radio or to records, pun-making, sex talk and horseplay. The McCartneys had just acquired a telephone—no small thing for a council house in 1957—which Paul and John would use to make anonymous nuisance calls in funny voices to selected victims like John’s former headmaster, Mr Pobjoy. Once they tried writing a play together about ‘a Christ figure named Pilchard’ who was to remain enigmatically offstage throughout in the manner of Samuel Beckett’s Godot. ‘We couldn’t figure out how playwrights did it,’ Paul remembered. ‘Did they work it all out and work through the chapters, or did they just write a stream of consciousness like we were doing?’ Unable to resolve this dilemma, they gave up after page two.

The idea of writing original songs to perform, rather than merely recycling other people’s, was firmly rooted in Paul’s mind well before he met John. He had begun trying it virtually from the moment he acquired a guitar, combining melodic gifts inherited from his father with a talent for mimicking and pastiching the American-accented hits of the moment. His first completed song, ‘I Lost My Little Girl’, had been written in late 1956, partly as a diversion from the trauma of his mother’s death, partly as an expression of it. Around the time he joined the Quarrymen, he had something like a dozen other compositions under his belt, mostly picked out on the family upright piano, including a first draft of what would eventually become ‘When I’m Sixty-four’ (which he thought ‘might come in handy for a musical comedy or something’).

For a 15-year-old Liverpool schoolboy—indeed, for any ordinary mortal—this was breathtaking presumptuousness. In Britain’s first rock-’n’-roll era, as for a century before it, songwriting was considered an art verging on the magical. It could be practised only in London (naturally) by a tiny coterie of music-business insiders, middle-aged men with names like Paddy or Bunny, who alone understood the sacred alchemy of rhyming arms with charms and moon with June.

The writing first appeared on the wall for Paddy and Bunny in November 1957, when ‘That’ll Be the Day’ by the Crickets topped the UK singles chart. It was the most uproariously guitar-driven rock-’n’-roll song yet, with its jangly, wind-chime treble intro and solo and its underlay of thudding bass. The Crickets’ leader, 21-year-old Buddy Holly, was a multi-faceted innovator: the first white rock-’n’-roller to write his own songs, the first to sing and play lead guitar, the first to subsume himself into a four-person group whose name was a whimsical collective noun. Holly’s vocal style was as unique as Presley’s and, if possible, even more acrobatic, veering between manic yells, lovelorn sighs and a hiccuping stutter that could fracture even a word like well into as many as eight syllables.

For British boys struggling to make the leap from skiffle to rock, Holly was less a god than a godsend. Most of the previous American rock-’n’-roll hits, including almost all of Elvis’s, had been far beyond their power to reproduce with their piping little voices and tinny instruments. But the songs that Holly wrote and recorded were built on instantly recognisable chords, Es and Ds and B7s, their familiar changes and sequences rearranged to create a drama and stylishness they’d never seemed remotely capable of before. Equally imitable were the vocal backings, the blurry Ooos, Aahs, and Ba-ba-bas that were presumed (mistakenly) to come from Holly’s three fellow Crickets. With these elementary tools, every fading-from-fashion skiffle group could instantly refashion itself as a top-of-the-range rock combo.

Holly’s most radical departure from established rock-’n’-roll style was an outsized pair of black horn-rimmed glasses. Coincidentally, this was a time when the new beatnik culture, simultaneously emanating from New York and Paris, and the first screen appearances by Anthony Perkins, had led many young men to cultivate just such an earnest, intellectual air. Holly’s glasses, allied to his neat appearance and polymathic talent, made him appear like some star student, sitting exams in each sphere of rock and passing every one with honours.

With Buddy on the charts, John no longer needed to feel his poor sight automatically cast him down among the nerds, drips, weeds and swots. After years of fruitlessly begging him to wear his glasses, Mimi now found herself being pestered to buy him a new pair, with frames far more conspicuous than the ones he had. Mimi, of course, had no idea who Buddy Holly was or why he should have superseded Elvis as John’s mental menu for breakfast, dinner and tea. She bought him the black horn-rims because she could refuse him nothing, in the hope that he’d now spend less of his time walking around half-blind.

She might as well have saved her money. Even Buddy Holly-style frames could not overcome John’s phobia about being seen in glasses. He put them on only when absolutely necessary, for close work at college or his practice sessions with Paul at Forthlin Road. To be allowed to see him wearing them was a mark of intimacy, granted to almost no females and only a select circle of males. Among the latter was Paul’s brother Michael, a keen amateur photographer whose lens sometimes caught the horn-rimmed John studying his guitar fretboard with a librarian’s earnestness. But by the time Mike clicked his shutter again, the horn-rims would have vanished.

That winter of 1957-58 brought a stream of further Buddy Holly songs—‘Oh Boy’, ‘Think It Over’, ‘Maybe Baby’—each intriguingly different from the last yet still as easy to take apart and reassemble as children’s building blocks. For John and Paul in their facing armchairs, it was the most natural step from playing songs Buddy had written to making up ones he might easily have done. Paul would later describe how they’d sit there, strumming Buddyish chordsequences, exchanging Buddyish hiccups—‘Uh-ho! Ah-hey! Ah-hey-hey!’—until inspiration came.