Beatles (18 page)

John agrees with most of Thelma’s memories of him at Art College. But he remembers it all flatly, with little nostalgia or amusement. That was just how it was. ‘I had to borrow or pinch as I had no money at college,’ he says. Mimi says she gave him 30s. a week pocket money and can’t understand how he spent it. ‘I used to cadge all the time from spaniels like Thelma.

‘I suppose I did have a cruel humour. It was at school that it had first started. We were once coming home from a school speech day and we’d had a few bevvies.

‘Liverpool is full of deformed people, the way you have them in Glasgow, three-foot-high men selling newspapers. I’d never really noticed them before, but all the way home that day they seemed to be everywhere. It got funnier and funnier and we couldn’t stop laughing. I suppose it was a way of hiding your emotions, or covering it up. I would never hurt a cripple. It was just part of our jokes, our way of life.’

Two new people came into John’s life at Art College. The first was Stuart Sutcliffe. He was in the same year but unlike John showed genuine promise, and keenness, as an artist. He was slight and slender, artistic and highly strung, but very fierce and individualist in his views. He and John became immediate friends. Stu admired John’s clothes and his presence, the way he created an atmosphere round him with his strong dominant personality. John in turn admired Stu’s talent for art, which
was better than his, and also Stu’s greater knowledge and artistic feeling.

Stu couldn’t play any instrument and knew little about pop music, but he was completely bowled over when he heard John and his group play in the Art College at lunchtimes. He was always saying how good they were, when nobody else was very impressed.

George and Paul appear to have been slightly jealous of Stu and his influence with John, not that outsiders could see how much John admired Stu. John picked on Stu all the time and hurt him when he could. Paul, following John’s lead, also began to pick on Stu, even though he was interested in art and, like John, was getting from Stu a lot of new ideas and fashions.

The other important friend John made at Art College was Cynthia Powell, now his wife.

‘Cynthia was so quiet,’ says Thelma. ‘A completely different type from us. She came from over the water, the posh part, from a middle-class area. She wore a twin set. She was very nice, but I just couldn’t see her suiting John. He used to go on about her, telling us how marvellous she was. I just couldn’t see it.

‘I left college for a year, and when I was away I heard they were going strong. I thought that would settle him, calm him down a bit, but it didn’t turn out that way at all.’

Cynthia Powell was in the same year as John from the beginning, and in the same lettering class. But for well over the first year they took no notice of each other and moved in completely different circles, she the rather shy and refined girl from over the water, he the loud-mouthed Liverpool Teddy Boy.

‘I just thought he was horrible. My first memory of looking at him properly was in a lecture theatre when I saw Helen Anderson sitting behind him stroking his hair. It awoke something in me. I thought it was dislike at first. Then I realized it was jealousy. But I never had any contact with him, apart from him stealing things from me, like rulers and brushes.

‘He looked awful in those days. He had this long tweed overcoat which had belonged to his Uncle George and his hair all
greased back. I didn’t fancy him at all. He was scruffy. But I didn’t get a chance to know him anyway. I wasn’t one of his crowd. I was so respectable, or I thought I was.’

‘She was a right Hoylake runt,’ says John. ‘Dead snobby. We used to poke fun at her and mock her, me and my mate Jeff Mohamed. “Quiet please,” we’d shout. “No dirty jokes. It’s Cynthia.”’

They had their first proper conversation in a lettering class one day. ‘It came out that we were both short-sighted. We talked a bit about it. John doesn’t remember that at all. Very disheartening. But I do. After that I found myself getting into the class early, so that I could sit next to him. I used to hang around outside afterwards, hoping to bump into him.

‘I didn’t make any advances. It was just something I felt which John didn’t know. I wasn’t seeming to push. I couldn’t do that. I don’t think even now he realizes how often I used to hang around, on the off chance of seeing him.’

They met, properly, at Christmas time in their second year, in 1958.

‘We had a class dance,’ says John. ‘I was pissed and asked her to dance. Jeff Mohamed had been having me on, saying “Cynthia likes you, you know.”

‘As we danced I asked her to come to a party the next day. She said she couldn’t. She was engaged.’

‘I was,’ says Cynthia. ‘Well almost. I’d been going out with the same boy for three years and was about to get engaged. John got annoyed when I said no. So he said come and have a drink afterwards at the Crack. I said no at first, then I went. I wanted to really, all the time.’

‘I was triumphant,’ says John, ‘at having picked her up. We had a drink, then went back to Stu’s flat, buying fish and chips on the way.’

They went out every night after that and usually in the afternoon as well, going to the pictures instead of lectures.

‘I was frightened of him. He was so rough. He wouldn’t give in. We fought all the time. I thought if I give in now, that’ll be
it. He was really just testing me out. I don’t mean sexually, just to see if I could be trusted, to prove to him that I could be.’

‘I was just hysterical,’ says John. ‘That was the trouble. I was jealous of anyone she had anything to do with. I demanded absolute trust from her, just because I wasn’t trustworthy myself. I was neurotic, taking out all my frustrations on her.

‘She did leave me once. That was terrible.’

‘I’d had enough,’ says Cynthia. ‘It was getting on my nerves. He just went off and kissed another girl.’

‘But I couldn’t stand being without her. So I rang her up.’

‘I was sitting by the phone, waiting for him.’

Cynthia wasn’t in a hurry to introduce John to her mother. She wanted to prepare her for the shock. ‘He was never over-polite and he looked so scruffy. My mother played it cool. She was good really, though I’m sure she was hoping for it to peter out. But she never tried to stop it.

‘The teachers warned me about going out with him, that my work was beginning to suffer. My work did go to pot and they were always on at me. Molly, the cleaning woman, once caught John hitting me, really clouting me. She said I was a silly girl, to get mixed up with someone like that.’

‘I was in a sort of blind rage for two years,’ says John. ‘I was either drunk or fighting. It had been the same with other girlfriends I’d had. There was something the matter with me.’

‘I just kept hoping he’d get over it, but I wondered if I could stick it long enough to find out. I blamed his background, his home, Mimi and the College. College just wasn’t the place for him. Institutions aren’t made for John.’

The name Quarrymen had gone by the end of 1959. Paul and George were at the Institute, and had nothing to do with Quarry Bank High School, and John was now at the Art College. They had a succession of names after that, often made up on the spur of the moment. One night they called themselves The Rainbows because they all turned up in different coloured shirts.

The group had made no real progress for about the year after George had joined it, as far as George himself can remember, though his guitar playing was improving all the time.

‘I can’t remember even getting paid in the first year I was with them. We played mainly at fellows’ parties. We’d go along with our guitars and get invited in. We either got free cokes or plates of beans, that was about all.

‘The only times we got anywhere near real money was when we started entering for skiffle competitions. We’d get through the early rounds, keeping going to try and win something. But you never got paid for entering, just winning, and the rounds seemed to go on for ever. It was pretty daft of course, having no proper drummer and about 18 guitarists.’

Mrs Harrison was keen on George and his group, but Mr Harrison was very worried. He’d fought a losing battle over George’s clothes and his long hair, mainly because Mrs Harrison sided with George. ‘It’s his own hair,’ I used to say. ‘Why should anyone tell you what to do with what’s your own?’

‘But I wanted him to stick in at school and get a good job,’ says Mr Harrison. ‘I was very upset when I saw he was so mad on the group. I realized you had to be good in show business to get to the top and even better to stay there. I couldn’t see how they were going to get anywhere. My other two boys were well set up, Harry as a fitter and Peter as a panel beater. I wanted George to do as well.

‘But George said he wanted to leave school. He didn’t want to be any sort of pen-pusher.

He wanted to work with his hands. He decided with his mother he wanted to leave, unknown to me. He never took his school cert. He just left.’

George started work in the summer of 1959 when he was 16.

‘It became obvious I wasn’t going to get any qualifications. The most I could have got, pushing it, would have been two O levels. But you need two O levels before they even let you dig shit. So what good would that have been?

‘I stayed till the end of term, sagging off school most of the time to be with John at the Art College. Paul and I used to hang round there a lot.

‘I hadn’t a job for a long time when I left school. I hadn’t a clue. My dad was all keen on the apprenticeship thing, so I tried the apprentice’s exam for the Liverpool Corporation, but failed it. Eventually the youth employment officer came up with a job of being a window-dresser at Blacklers, the big department store. I went along, but it had gone. They offered me an apprenticeship as an electrician instead.

‘I enjoyed it. It was better than school. And with winter coming on, it was nice to be in a big warm shop. We used to play darts most of the time.

‘But I began to think at the time about emigrating to Australia. At least I tried to get my dad interested in us all going, as I was too young. Then I thought of Malta as I’d seen some travel brochures. Then I thought of Canada. I got the papers to fill in, but when I found my parents had to sign them for me, I didn’t bother. I felt something would turn up.’

Over at the McCartney household, Jim was struggling to bring up two teenage boys on the right lines. At least Paul was still at school, much to Jim’s pleasure. But with spending all his spare time with John and George, messing around with a beat group, it didn’t leave much time for school work.

Paul had still managed to stay in 5B, which was looked upon as the main English and languages stream, but he didn’t do very well in O levels. He managed to pass only one, Art.

He then thought about leaving, but couldn’t think of what job to do. His father was still keen for him to stay on. It seemed easier
not
to leave. School still gave him lots of time for playing. So he stayed on and went into the remove form, as he hadn’t enough O levels to get immediately into the sixth. He sat O levels again and got four more this time and so went into the sixth form.

‘School was still a complete drag, but there was an English master called Dusty Durband I liked, the only one I did. He was great. He liked modern poetry and used to tell us about
Lady Chatterley
, long before we’d heard of it, and
The Miller’s Tale
. He said they were considered dirty books, though they weren’t.’

This spark of interest kept him in the sixth form, although he did no work. Officially he was preparing two subjects, English and Art, for A level, as he was supposed to be going to go to a training college and become a teacher. Everybody knew he was more than capable of it. It kept Jim happy anyway.

‘I never thought much of the music Paul was interested in,’ says Jim. ‘That Bill Haley, I never liked him. There was no tune to it at all.

‘But one day I came home at 5.30 and heard them in the house playing. I realized then that they were getting good, not just bashing about. They were making some nice chords.’

Jim began to want to sit in with them, offering advice and hints about how
he
used to do it in the good old days of Jim Mac’s Band. Why didn’t they play some really
good
tunes? Like ‘Stairway to Paradise’? He’d always thought that was a really lovely number. He told them about how he used to run his band and how they should present their numbers.

They said no thanks, very much, just make some tea, eh, Dad? He said all right. But if they didn’t like ‘Stairway to Paradise’ how about some really jazzy numbers, like ‘When the Saints’? He could tell them a good way to do that. They said no, more firmly this time.

In the end, Jim restricted himself to making them food. He’d had to take up cooking, after a fashion, when his wife died. He found to his delight that although his own two, Paul and Michael, were very choosy about their food and were poor eaters – and when Paul was busy, he wouldn’t eat at all – John and George turned out to be gluttons who would eat anything at any time. ‘I used to work off all the stuff on to them that Paul and Michael had left. In the end, I didn’t have to disguise it but just say there was some leftovers here, would they like it. To this day I always have to make George some custard when he comes. He says my custard’s the best in the world.’

The group was improving, getting some primitive amps together and creating a louder beat, compared with the soft patterings of skiffle. ‘But each year seemed five years,’ says Paul.

They were now mainly playing at working men’s social clubs or church functions and had given up parties. They played at places like the Wilson Hall and the Finch Lane Bus Depot.

They went in for more and more competitions, like all the embryo groups. ‘There was this woman who played the spoons who kept on beating us,’ says Paul. ‘Then there was the Sunny Siders. This group had a great gimmick. They had a midget.’

The members of the group were still constantly changing. As nobody knew them, they could turn up on dates with anyone they could get. ‘We had a bloke called Duff as pianist for some time, but his dad wouldn’t let him stay out late. He’d be playing
away one minute, and the next he would have disappeared, gone home in the middle of a number.’