Beatles (17 page)

‘Paul came round to my house one evening to look at the guitar manual I had, which I could never work out. It was still in the cupboard. We learned a couple of chords from it and managed to play “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy O”, with two chords. We just used to play on our own, not in any group, just listening to each other and pinching anything from any other lad who could do better.’

They began to spend most of their spare time together, even during the holidays. This started long before Paul had met John and the Quarrymen.

Paul appears to have been with the Quarrymen for at least a year before George joined them, probably not until early 1958. No one remembers the exact date, but the joining probably didn’t happen immediately. George, after all, was very young, even though he was getting better all the time as a guitarist and getting numerous stand-in dates.

‘I first saw the Quarrymen when they were playing at the Wilson Hall at Garston. Paul was playing with them and said I should come and see them. I’d probably have gone anyway, just for the night out and to see if I could get in any groups. With knowing Paul, I got introduced to John.

‘There was this other guitarist in another group that night, Eddie Clayton. He was great. John said if I could play like that, I could join them. I played “Raunchy” for them and John said I could join. I was always playing “Raunchy” for them. We’d be going somewhere on the top of a bus with our guitars and John would shout out, “Give us ‘Raunchy’, George.”’

‘But George never thought he was any good,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘He was always saying that, telling me about all the people who were so much better than he was. I told him he could be, if he stuck in.’

John remembers that it was George’s youth that made him take some time before asking him to join.

‘It was too much, too much. George was just too young. I didn’t want to know at first. He was doing a delivery round and
just seemed a kid. He came round once and asked me to go to the pictures with him but I pretended I was busy. I didn’t dig him on first sight, till I got to know him.

‘Mimi always said he had a low Liverpool voice, a real whacker. She said, “You always seem to like lower-class types, don’t you, John?”

‘We asked George to join us because he knew more chords, a lot more than we knew. So we got a lot from him. Every time we learned a new chord, we’d write a song round it.

‘We used to sag off school and go to George’s house for the afternoon. George looked even younger than Paul and Paul looked about ten, with his baby face.’

George says he probably did deliberately hang round John a lot. John was by this time about to start at Art College, but was as deliberately aggressive and working class as ever, despite all Mimi’s upbringing.

‘I was very impressed by John,’ says George. ‘Probably more than Paul, or I showed it more. I loved John’s blue jeans and lilac shirt and sidies. But I suppose I was impressed by all the Art College crowd. John was very sarcastic, always trying to bring you down, but I either took no notice or gave him the same back, and it worked.’

‘Meeting Paul was just like two people meeting,’ says John. ‘Not falling in love or anything. Just us. It went on. It worked. Now there were three of us who thought the same.’

There were still other members of the Quarrymen who came and went, either because they couldn’t put up with John’s tongue or got bored. They needed other people, when they got their occasional dates, as three guitars don’t make a group, even in those days. They desperately needed a drummer but no one they picked up, however useless, ever seemed to stay.

They were moving out of the skiffle era as a group. Tea chests and washboards were just a bit amateurish. All of them anyway preferred rock’n’roll and Elvis in particular and this was the style they were trying to copy, listening to new records on the
radio and trying to reproduce the same chords or sounds at home.

John, as the leader, tried to get bookings from all the little one-man managements who were cashing in on the group craze. But he was finding it very difficult to get regular bookings. There were so many groups, and most of them were far better than the Quarrymen.

But they now had two homes to go to – George’s almost any time they liked, and Paul’s, especially when his dad was out – where they could practise, write music or just draw and mess around. But Mimi was certainly not going to have any Teddy Boys from a rock group coming to her house.

‘Paul used to come to my front door,’ says Mimi. ‘He’d lean his bike against the fence and look over at me with his sheep eyes and say “Hello, Mimi. Can I come in?” “No, you certainly cannot,” I’d say.’

Mimi wasn’t very keen on George, when she first heard about him.

‘John used to go on and on about George, what a nice boy he was and how I’d like him. He went to great lengths to impress me with George. “Give you anything, George,” he’d say.

‘I eventually said he could come in one day. He arrived with a crew cut and a pink shirt. Well, it wasn’t done. I might have been a bit old-fashioned, but schoolboys dressing like that. Up till John was 16 I always made sure he wore his regulation school blazer and shirt.’

So a lot of the practising was done at George’s house in Upton Green. The Harrisons came in one day to find George in the tightest pair of jeans they’d ever seen.

‘Harold went spare,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘When he saw them, he went over the moon. George said John had just given them to him. Then he jumped up and pranced round the room. “How can I do my ballet without tight jeans?” he said, dancing all over the place. We had to laugh at him in the end. George never gave any cheek, but he always got round us.’

The first time Mrs Harrison met John Lennon she was in the kitchen when George brought him home. ‘“Here’s John,” George shouted. “Hello, Mrs Harrison,” John said, coming forward to shake my hand. Well, I don’t know what happened next. He somehow fell and as he did so, he fell on top of me and we both landed on the settee. Dad came in at that moment. You should have seen his face when he saw John on top of me! “What the devil’s going on here?” George said, “It’s OK, Dad. It’s only John.”

‘John was always a bit of a fool. He was never miserable, just like me.’

John had started at the Art College in the autumn of 1957, turning up in his tightest jeans and longest black jacket. His way of getting them past Mimi was to put on old conventional trousers over his jeans, then take them off at the bus stop when he’d got safely away from the house.

‘They all thought I was a Ted at Art College when I arrived. Then I became a bit artier, as they all do, but I still dressed like a Ted, in black with tight drainies. Arthur Ballard, one of the lecturers, said I should change a bit, not wear them as tight. He was good, Arthur Ballard, he helped me, kept me on when others wanted to chuck me out.

‘But I wasn’t really a Ted, just a Rocker. I was only pretending to be one. If I’d met a proper Ted, with chains and a real gang, I’d have been shit scared.

‘I got more confidence and just used to ignore Mimi. I went away for longer spells. Wore what clothes I wanted. I was always on at Paul to ignore his dad and just wear what he wanted.

‘I never liked the work. I should have been an illustrator or in the painting school because it seemed groovy. But I found myself in lettering. I didn’t turn up for something, so they had just put me in that. They were all neat fuckers in lettering. They
might as well have put me in sky-diving for the use I was at lettering. I failed all the exams.

‘I stayed on because it was better than working. I was there instead of going to work.

‘I always felt I’d make it, though. There were some moments of doubt, but I knew something would eventually happen. When Mimi used to throw away things I’d written or drawn, I used to say, “You’ll regret that when I’m famous,” and meant it.

‘I didn’t really know what I wanted to be, apart from ending up an eccentric millionaire. I fancied marrying a millionairess, and doing it that way.

‘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 to be a crook. I’d never have made it. I did plan to knock off a shop with another bloke, do it properly for a change, not just shoplifting. We used to look at shops at night, but we never got round to doing it.’

Julia, his mother, with whom he was spending more and more time, still approved of the life he was leading. She had now almost taken over from Mimi in his life. He relied on her, because she spoke the same language, liked the same things, hated the same sort of people.

‘I was staying with Julia and Twitchy this weekend,’ says John. ‘The copper came to the door, to tell us about the accident. It was just like it’s supposed to be, the way it is in the films. Asking if I was her son, and all that. Then he told us, and we both went white.

‘It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. We’d caught up so much, me and Julia, in just a few years. We could communicate. We got on. She was great.

‘I thought, fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. That’s really fucked everything. I’ve no responsibilities to anyone now.

‘Twitchy took it worse than me. Then he said, “Who’s going to look after the kids?” And I hated him. Bloody selfishness.

‘We got a taxi over to Sefton General where she was lying
dead. I didn’t want to see her. I talked hysterically to the taxi driver all the way, ranted on and on, the way you do. The taxi driver just grunted now and again. I refused to go in and see her. But Twitchy did. He broke down.’

Julia died on 15 July 1958. The accident had happened very near Mimi’s house.

‘I always went out with her to the bus stop,’ says Mimi. ‘But this night she left early, at twenty to ten. She went out on her own. A minute later there was a terrible screeching. I flew out and she was dead, knocked down by a car outside my house. I never told the rest of the family the exact spot. They all went past it so often, it would have hurt them too much.

‘But Julia isn’t dead to me. She’s alive as ever. I’ve never been near her grave, nor mother’s. They’re both alive to me. I loved them so dearly. Julia was a beautiful person.’

When Julia died it must obviously have been a terrible tragedy for John. ‘But he never showed it,’ says Pete Shotton. ‘It was like when masters beat him up. He never gave anything away. His exterior never showed his feelings.’

All John’s friends knew about the road accident as soon as it happened. Another friend, Nigel Whalley, had been the last to speak to her as she came out of Mimi’s house to cross the road for the bus to go home.

‘John never talked about Julia or how he felt,’ says Pete. ‘But he took it out of his girls. He gave them hell. I remember one of them shouting at him, “Don’t take it out of me just ‘cos your mother’s dead.”’

Mrs Harrison, George’s mother, remembers the effect it had on John. They were still practising a lot at George’s house, the house where they got endless hospitality and encouragement.

‘I’d given them all beans and toast this evening. It was several months before John’s mother died and he was just getting really close to her. I overheard him say to Paul, “I don’t know how you can sit there and act normal with your mother dead. If anything like that happened to me, I’d go off me head.”’

‘When John’s mother did die, he didn’t appear to go off his
head, but he wouldn’t come out. I forced George to go round and see him, to make sure he still went off playing in their group and just didn’t sit at home and brood.

‘They all went through a lot together, even in those early days, and they always helped each other. George was terrified that I was going to die next. He’d watch me carefully all the time. I told him not to be so silly. I wasn’t going to die.’

The death of John’s mother brought him even closer to Paul. It was something else they now shared. But other students at the Art College say Julia’s death made him outwardly worse, less interested in other people’s feelings, more cruel in his humour.

Thelma Pickles was one of his girlfriends at the time, though nothing serious, just one of the people who were in his crowd. She says most of them were in awe of him, amazed by his attitude to life as they’d never come across such a personality before.

‘John never had any money. He was a real burn, borrowing from everybody all the time, getting people to buy him chips or drinks, or cadging ciggies. He must still owe people pounds. But he has a sort of magnetic personality and could always get money out of people. He was outrageous, and said things people would be scared to say. He could be very cruel. Walking down the street he would go “Boo” in front of old people. And if he saw anyone who was crippled or deformed, he’d make loud remarks, like “Some people will do anything to get out of the army.”

‘He used to do a lot of cruel drawings. I thought they were marvellous. He did one of some women cooing over some babies, saying weren’t they lovely. All the babies were deformed, with hideous faces. It was really very cruel. The day the pope died he did lots of cartoons of him looking really awful. He did one of the pope standing outside some big pillars outside heaven, shaking the gates and trying to get in. Underneath it said, “But I’m the pope, I tell you.”

‘John had a complete disrespect for everything. But he always had an audience round him. There was one girl who was crazy about him. She used to cry over him.

‘He was very self-conscious about his glasses and would
never wear them even at the pictures. We went to see
King Creole
, an Elvis film, but he still wouldn’t put them on. There was a big sexy advert on for nylons, and he couldn’t see that either and I had to tell him what it was.

‘I never took his music seriously. He would say he’d written this new tune and I would think that was pretty fantastic, someone writing a tune, but I couldn’t see what good it was. I knew it took miracles to get anywhere writing bits of tunes, so what was the point.

‘I knew he
could
be famous, at something, but I didn’t know what. He was so different and original. But I just couldn’t see what he could be famous at. Perhaps a comedian, I thought.’