Beatles (46 page)

Mimi moved in in October 1965. She sold her old house in Liverpool for £6,000, a good price, though, as she says, it was a good house in a good area.

The Bournemouth house is still in John’s name, but it is Mimi’s for as long as she wants it. He pays all the bills. He told her just to spend her £6,000, but she told him not to be so stupid.

‘It’s lovely down here. I had always vaguely thought of moving to the south coast when George retired. I haven’t felt a winter since I arrived. I’ve had drinks with people, but that’s about all. I’ve never tended to make many friends outside the family. I do a lot of walking and reading. The days are too short really.’

All the Beatle parents have had their material lives completely changed by their sons, and all of them have reacted to it in slightly different ways. But Mimi is probably the only one whose relationship has not really changed. She still, in many ways, treats John as she’s always done, whereas with the others there is a hint of hero worship, almost reverence. Mimi still criticizes John’s clothes and how he looks, as she did when he was a teenager. She tells him when he’s looking fat and not to spend too much. ‘He’s too soft over money. He’s an easy touch. Generous beyond belief. I’m always telling him.’ The other parents never voice any criticism of their sons.

Mimi doesn’t care for the way John speaks. She says he won’t speak properly, never finishing sentences. ‘And he’s getting worse all the time. I often can’t understand what he’s talking about. His mind’s jumping all over the place.’

She doesn’t see him very regularly, but he always sends her funny letters when he’s abroad, with a little drawing on the envelope, specially for her. She keeps them all carefully arranged in a bureau. When John visits her, he rakes through all her belongings, just to see what she’s been doing while he’s been away. She still has the old childhood books he used to write. She reads them now and again.

‘It’s just the same stuff that he’s had published. Just his scribble, as I call it, which he’s been doing for years. I think the first book was better, but I still burst out laughing at some of his poems.’

Her way of life isn’t that different, despite the luxury of her setting. She says she would give up everything, her house and all their success, just to have John as her little boy again.

‘I’d give up £2 million to be back again. It’s very selfish, I know. I always think of him as a little boy. I know it’s stupid.
But nothing could compensate for the pleasure he gave me as a boy.’

She obviously would like to see him a lot more, but would never, in any way, let this be known, or hang on to him at all. ‘It’s not his fault I’m a widow. There’s nothing worse for a boy to feel than that anyone’s hanging on to him. He’s got his own wife and family to think about. He knows I’m here. He comes to see me as often as he can. He sat up on the roof for four days in the summer. I ran up and down getting drinks for him. He never shows much emotion. He finds it hard to say sorry.

‘But one night he said that even if he didn’t come down to see me every day, or every month, he always thought about me at some time every day, wherever he was. That meant a great deal to me.’

The happiest day in Jim McCartney’s life, so he says, occurred in 1964, when Paul told him he could give up work. Unlike some of the other parents, he needed no second telling. He was 62 at the time, with another three years before retiring. He’d worked for the same cotton firm since he was 14, and he’d had enough. His wage, despite all his years and his experience, was only £10 a week. The recession in the cotton trade had made his last years very uncomfortable. For years he’d had the fear that they would pay him off in favour of a younger man.

Paul found him a house, an £8,750 detached house in the Wirral in Cheshire. About a year after that, Jim found himself a new wife, after almost ten years of being a widower.

He’d met Angela only three times when he asked her to marry him. She was a widow, a good few years younger than himself, with a daughter, Ruth, aged five. She’d been living in one room in Kirby since the death of her husband in a road accident. ‘We were two lonely people.’

They are obviously very happy. He dotes on Ruth, a highly intelligent young lady, who thinks the girls in her school who try to chat her up about her famous stepbrother are really rather silly. Angie is very bouncy, witty and high-spirited. She runs the large
house with great efficiency and drives Jim’s car, as he can’t. She’s given him a second youth. He now wears very fashionable, clinging polo-neck sweaters and well-tapered trousers, the type he used to shout at Paul for wearing not so long ago.

Michael, Paul’s brother, is still living at home.

‘I’ve just taken Mike up a lilo and three sheets of carbon paper,’ says Angie.

‘That’s very sanitary of you,’ said Jim.

‘He now wants some more three-pound bags of flour. He’s dropping the flour onto a bread board and tape-recording it. A gear bedroom, but what a mess. What do you think he’s after?’

‘The sound of three-pound bags of flour dropping onto a bread board,’ said Jim.

Another £8,000 was spent on the house, after Paul had bought it, putting in central heating and completely furnishing and decorating it. The house has large grounds, with a view at the back towards the Dee estuary. Despite the newness of all the fittings, it has a homely, lived-in feeling. They’re not scared to enjoy all the new luxury.

‘I do miss Liverpool and some of my old friends, but not all that much. I was getting a bit fed up with people saying, “You must be very proud, what’s it like?” That’s all they ever asked, over and over again. I’ve cut myself off from people like that. But close friends and relations I often ring up and ask to come out here.’

Jim is on Christian-name terms with his doctor – even using his nickname, Pip. Not in an affected, putting-it-on way, but perfectly naturally. He gets out the malt whisky the minute Pip calls. He has two part-time gardeners, but he looks after his vines in the large heated greenhouse himself. He’s laid down his own wine, and always has a plentiful supply of drinks. He gets books out of the library on ornithology and knows exactly which birds are in his garden. He’s also an expert on squirrels.

Apart from his slight Liverpool accent, to see his life, his clothes and his pleasures, it’s impossible to imagine he’s spent over 40 years in rooms or a council house, earning under £10 a
week. Most of all when you see him at a racecourse. That’s when he really looks one of nature’s gents.

Leaving work, getting the house and, most of all, getting married again have all made him very happy. But his next biggest kick came on his 62nd birthday. It was the same night, 6 July 1964, as the premiere of the Beatles’ first film.

‘We all went to the Dorchester afterwards. Princess Margaret was there. I could see Paul signalling to somebody and he was handed a parcel. He gave it to me and said, “Here you are, all the best, Dad.”

‘I opened it and it was a picture of a horse. I said, “Very nice,” but I was thinking, what the hell do I want with a picture of a horse?

‘Paul must have seen my face. He said, “It’s not just a picture. I’ve bought the bloody horse. It’s yours and it’s running at Chester on Saturday.”’

The horse, Drake’s Drum, a well-known gelding, cost £1,050. Paul also pays for its training fees, which come to around £60 a month. In the 1966 season, it won over £3,000 in prize money, including a £1,000 race at Newbury and the race before the Grand National at Aintree.

Jim wants for nothing now. Like all the Beatle parents, he has an account from which he can take anything he likes. He doesn’t go in for any ostentation, but he seems to enjoy and savour the middle-class life even more than the others.

‘The change was a bit sudden, coming as it did when I was 62. It took a while to get used to it. Now I’ve taken to it like a duck to water. I haven’t started saying “glaas” or “baath”, but I’m enjoying everything. It’s as if I’ve always been used to it.’

Michael McCartney, Paul’s brother, took longer to get used to the changes he’s had imposed on his life. Paul has always been very close to his brother, in age and in taste, more than George has been with his brothers, which made it worse for Michael. ‘I suppose I couldn’t help being affected by our kid. He’s always had success. He was the first boy, the best-looking one, the one who got all the girls and then all the fame.’

He has been asked for some years for his autograph around Liverpool, being Paul’s brother. He resolutely signs ‘Michael McGear’, much to their disappointment. He usually also denies any relationship. ‘No, love, wish I was his brother. I’d be in the money then, wouldn’t I?’

He’s now making Michael McGear better known, though it’s taken a long time and long spells out of work. He became Michael McGear when he joined the Scaffold group in 1962. They started off well, with a 27-week TV series, then nothing much happened, apart from local theatre shows, until 1967, when they got a record ‘Thank U Very Much’ in the Top Ten. This has led to other shows and records. He is a good singer and he can compose, but he’s always played that down, preferring to try something different.

‘I don’t want to be famous. I just want to be a success at my job, as long as I’m making it on my own. What I always worried about was being like Sean Connery’s brother, or Tommy Steele’s brother, just trying to follow in their brothers’ footsteps.’

The Harrisons now live just outside Warrington. They moved from Liverpool in 1965, when Mr Harrison stopped being a bus driver. Warrington isn’t the sort of place Liverpool people usually move to when they make good. They prefer to move across the water, to the posh part of Cheshire, as Jim McCartney has done. Warrington is 15 miles from Liverpool and about the same distance from Manchester, one of Lancashire’s endless industrial towns, where, on the sunniest day, the prevailing colour is always grey.

The Harrisons, however, don’t live in Warrington itself, but in a village called Appleton, three or four miles out. Their house is in a forgotten rural oasis, surrounded completely by fields, with no other houses in sight. Of all the parents’ houses, the Harrisons’ is the most isolated and the hardest to find.

It’s a large L-shaped bungalow, with three acres of garden, which until fairly recently was a farmer’s field. A gardener works two days a week knocking it into shape. They call it a bungalow,
but it does have one upstairs room. They call it a room, but it is, in fact, 32 feet long, stretching the length of the house. They use it for parties or cinema shows.

The house cost George £10,000. With all the additions and improvements, such as a new open-plan staircase and a sun room, it’s easily worth £20,000. The same house, in Bournemouth, near Mimi, would probably fetch £40,000.

Inside it is full of brand new modern furniture, deep-pile carpets and bright knick-knacks from all over the world. Most of these presents from around the world have been sent not from their son, as in the other parents’ homes, but personally to the Harrisons from fans. And unlike the other homes, you aren’t too dazzled by the number of gold and silver discs inscribed to the Beatles. Their walls are hung instead with presentations inscribed to Harold and Louise Harrison.

On one wall is an enormous gold plaque with the inscription: ‘Presented to Harold and Louise Harrison for the time and effort they have shown towards Beatle people everywhere. United Beatles Fans. Pomona, California, 1965.’

The other Beatle parents think that Mrs Harrison must be a little bit daft, at least they can’t understand why she spends so much of her time being so kind to fans when she doesn’t have to. Mrs Harrison just happens to be fanatical about fans. She’s a fans’ fan.

Every spare minute of the day she’s answering fan letters. Most evenings she sits up till two o’clock, writing away. She personally writes 200 letters a week. Not notes, but proper letters of about two pages each. This is apart from signing and sending photographs. Their stamp bill is enormous.

‘I’ve always personally answered all letters, except from obvious cranks. If it’s in a foreign language, like Spanish, say, I read through it carefully and pick out words like “admiro”. I can then roughly tell what it’s about, so I send them a signed photograph.’ Mr Harrison travels to the Fan Club HQ in Liverpool each month to pick up a new load of photographs. They get through 2,000 a month.

‘From the beginning I used to get such lovely letters from fans, or more often the fan’s mum. “Dear Mrs Harrison, you’ll never realize what your letter has meant. After years of writing to phoney fan club addresses and never hearing anything back, a personal letter from George’s mum! My daughter went through the roof.” So you see, I just have to go on.

‘Of course, at one time it was just physically impossible to answer all letters. In 1963 and ’64, we were getting 450 a day from all over the world. On George’s 21st birthday we had 30,000 cards and scores of screaming fans. They had to put a policeman on duty outside. He couldn’t get over the kids kissing the door knob. “Have you got to put up with this all the time?” the policeman said. “I’d go mad.” For years the post office always sent a special van with our mail, but things have settled down a lot now. I find 200 letters a week enough to cope with, if I don’t slack.’

Fans she has corresponded with have a habit of suddenly turning up. She’d just had a family of Americans, who had come specially to see her. ‘They were doing Europe and the Holy City in a fortnight. They were missing out Britain, but they decided to fly from Paris to Manchester, then get a taxi from Manchester, just to see us. It’s a good job we were in.’

Mrs Harrison has always been a keen letter writer, long before George became a Beatle. She’s got two pen pals she’s corresponded with for 30 years. She got their names through the
Woman’s Companion
. One lives in Barnsley, the other lives in Australia. With both these pen pals, she’s swapped all family gossip since 1936. When the Beatles went to Australia, pictures of George as a little boy started appearing in the Australian press. Nobody could work out where they had come from. George himself had never seen them before. It was Mrs Harrison’s pen pal, who had dug out the snaps she’d been sent many years ago.