Shout! (8 page)

Among hundreds of boys, swarming through the green-distempered school thoroughfares, Paul McCartney was not conspicuous, nor wished to be. His black blazer was neat and his hair slicked flat with Brylcreem; he belonged to that cooperative species from which are recruited the collectors of exercise books and operators of window poles; he was, more or less permanently, head boy in his grade. With his classmates he was popular, if a little reserved. They called him not by his surname or a nickname—just Paul. His close friend Ivan Vaughan was an exception to this attitude of noticeable deference.

He had been put into the A stream, tending as he moved higher to specialize in history and languages. He found most lessons easy, and could get high marks even in Latin if he bothered to apply his mind. He was nonchalant about homework, an embarrassing obligation in a housing project where other boys could do what they pleased at night. On the morning bus into Liverpool, he could churn out an essay still impressive enough to receive commendation from his English master, “Dusty” Durband. Mr. Durband, even so, was aware of the extent to which Paul relied on facility and bluff to see him through. It sometimes failed him, as when he had been given the task of preparing a talk about the Bodley Head edition of Stephen Leacock’s works. Paul delivered an impromptu stream of nonsense about the Bodley Head’s Elizabethan logo.

He knew what he wanted and even then would be satisfied with nothing less. When the institute put on Shaw’s
St. Joan
as its end-of-term play, Paul auditioned keenly for the part of Warwick. He did not
get it, and had to be content with the minor role of an inquisitor in the trial scene. The disappointment made him unusually fractious: Mr. Durband, the play’s producer, remembers shouting in exasperation at the medievally hooded figure that persisted in disrupting rehearsals.

In 1955, when Paul was thirteen, the McCartneys left Speke and its pallid factory smog. Jim had managed to get a council house in Allerton, one of Liverpool’s nearer and better suburbs. It was a definite step up for the family to move into 20 Forthlin Road, a double row of semidetached houses small and neat enough to pass for privately owned villas. Mimi Smith’s home in Woolton was only a mile or so away, if you cut across the golf course.

For some time, Mary had been troubled by a slight pain in her breast. She did not like to trouble the doctor for fear he would dismiss it as nurse’s hypochondria. As she was now in her mid-forties, she and Jim philosophically concluded that “the change” must be to blame for the small lump that had appeared. The pain was not great but would not seem to go away.

Paul and Michael were camping with the Boy Scouts that summer. The weather was very wet and cold, and Mary told Bella Johnson, her friend at the school clinic, that she was worried about the boys sleeping under canvas. So one afternoon, Olive took Mary and Jim in her car to visit them. On the way home Mary was in such pain that she had to lie down on the back seat.

“When she got home, she went straight to bed,” Olive says. “I went up later and found her crying. ‘Oh, Olive,’ she said to me, ‘I don’t want to leave the boys
just
yet.’”

After a few days’ rest she felt so much better that she began to think that, after all, the trouble was simply overwork. Then the pain returned so severely that, at last, she consulted a specialist. He sent her at once into hospital—not Walton General but the old city Northern, so that he could keep a close eye on her. Breast cancer was diagnosed. She went into surgery for a mastectomy, which was not carried out: The cancer had already spread too far. A few hours later Bella and Olive Johnson received the news that Mary had died.

Jim McCartney’s predicament was one calculated to crush a younger as well as wealthier man. At the age of fifty-three he found himself bereft of a loving, capable wife and faced with the task of caring for two adolescent boys, all on a wage that still had need of the extra Mary had
earned. That, indeed, was the first thing fourteen-year-old Paul blurted out in the shock of his mother’s loss: “What are we going to do without her money?”

Mary was buried as a Catholic—the wish she had expressed to Jim on her deathbed. Paul and Michael were taken to stay with their auntie Jin at Huyton to spare them the funeral and the sight of their father’s devastation. Mrs. Johnson and Olive moved in to Forthlin Road to be with Jim and to prepare him for the boys’ return. Their task, at first, seemed hopeless. All he wanted, he kept saying, was to be with Mary.

TWO

“QUARRY MEN, STRONG BEFORE OUR BIRTH”

N
ineteen fifty-six was a worrying year for English parents. It seemed that something had gone seriously wrong with the Victorian age. The generation born before 1941, despite exterior differences, lived by much the same rules and values as their parents and their grandparents. It boiled down to a single phrase, the base of Victorianism: They “had respect.” They had respect for their elders and their betters. They had respect for their country with its Empire, now Commonwealth, its God-given right to be called “Great” Britain. Having just survived a world war, they had respect for politicians and soldiers. They had respect also for clergymen, policemen, schoolteachers, and the Queen. And suddenly, in 1956, they realized that their children did not have respect for them.

The year was one of unparalleled national humiliation. It was the year that the British engaged with France in a ludicrous plan to invade Egypt and were foiled by, of all people, the Egyptians. After Suez, the world would never again function at the behest of British gunboats. We had become overnight a second-class power, barely noticed in the new, harsh glare of America and Russia’s nuclear cohabitation.

The British language, meanwhile, had been invaded by certain bewildering new words. Of these, the most bewildering was “teenager.” In Britain before 1956 there were no such things as teenagers. There were only children and grown-ups. Transition took place at sixteen when boys put on tweed jackets like their fathers’ and girls turned into matrons with “twinsets” and “perms.” Conscription, or national service, for two years completed the male maturing process. The only remission was given to university students, a minority, who were still largely upper class and thus permitted to behave like hooligans on boat race night and other fixed ceremonial occasions.

But there now stalked the streets of Britain young men in clothes as
outlandish as they were sinister. The costume, of velvet-trimmed drape jackets, frilled shirts, and narrow trousers, was inspired partly by Edwardian fashion—hence the name “Teddy Boy”—and partly by gunslingers and riverboat gamblers in Hollywood movies. Amid the drab uniformity of postwar Britain they seemed utterly freakish. Their hair, in a land still army-cropped, was scarcely believable. A greasy cockade flopped over the forehead, swept back past the ears with constant combing to form two flaps like the posterior of a duck. Their socks were luminous pink or orange. Their shoes had soles three inches thick. They were believed to carry weapons such as switchblades, razors, and bicycle chains. Their other, scarcely less threatening, predilection was for coffee bars and “rock ’n’ roll.”

Coffee bars, to the British of 1956, might just as well have been opium dens. They had sprung up all at once out of the country’s Italian population, and also the sudden fifties’ craze for “contemporary” design. They were dark and filled with basket chairs and foliage; they had names like La Lanterna or La Fiesta; they dispensed, from huge silver machines, a frothy fluid barely recognizable as the stuff which the British were accustomed to boiling with milk in saucepans. They were the haunt of Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls, and of jukeboxes. Their jukeboxes united the Teddy-Boy contagion with that of rock ’n’ roll.

Rock ’n’ roll, as every sensible Briton knew, was American madness such as one saw as a novelty item at the end of the weekly cinema newsreel. Sometimes it was flagpole sitting, sometimes dance marathons, sometimes pie-eating contests. Now it was a young singer who did not sing but merely writhed about, pretending to play a guitar, and yet who aroused American female audiences to transports of ecstasy greater even than had Valentino, the screen lover, or Frank Sinatra, the crooner. His songs, or lack of them, and his suggestive movements, had scandalized America. When he appeared on American television he was shown only from the waist up. His name was Elvis Presley. That, too, the British thought, could only happen in America.

Yet the madness seemed to be drifting this way. In 1955, a song called “Rock Around the Clock” had caused riots in several British cinemas during shows of a film called
The Blackboard Jungle
—significantly, a study of juvenile crime. The singer, Bill Haley, and his group, the Comets, had afterward visited Britain, arriving in London by boat train amid mob scenes unequaled since VE night or the coronation.

That had seemed to be a freak occurrence. The country settled back again to its former dull diet of Anglicized American dance-band music—of “light orchestras,” crooners named Dennis Lotis and Dickie Valentine, and novelty songs about Italy or little Dutch dolls. Here, at least, there was a powerful guardian of morality and taste. The British Broadcasting Corporation, with its monopoly of all radio, continued to ensure that nothing was played save that in its own image and of its own cold custard consistency.

In February 1956, an Elvis Presley record called “Heartbreak Hotel” was released in Britain, on the hitherto respectable HMV label. Within days, it had smashed through the crooners and light orchestras and little Dutch dolls to first place in the Top Twenty records chart. It remained there for eighteen weeks. Another by the same singer followed it, bearing the ludicrous title “Blue Suede Shoes”; then another, even surpassing that in ludicrousness, called “Hound Dog.”

Britain’s parents listened, so far as they were able, to the lyric, so far as it could be understood. The vocalist was exhorting some bystander, endlessly and incoherently, not to tread on his blue suède shoes. He was accusing the same bystander, with equal, mumbling persistence, of being a “hound dog.” A few people over twenty enjoyed the music, and even recognized it for what it was: an adaptation of American blues, sharing the same honorable origins as jazz. Presley was simply applying blues intonation and phrasing to songs in the white cowboy, or country and western, idiom. He was, in other words, a white man who sang like a black man. The charges of obscenity were ironic. All Presley’s blues songs had been purged of their sexual and social content for the white audience’s sensitive ears.

To Britain, as to America, the idea that a white man could sing like a black man was intrinsically lewd. It confirmed the malignant power of rock ’n’ roll music to incite young people, as jungle drums incited primitive peoples, to their newly evidenced violence, promiscuity, disobedience, and disrespect. To Britain, as to America, there was only one consolation. A thing so grotesque as Elvis Presley could not possibly last. They said of rock ’n’ roll what was said in 1914, when the Great War started: In six months, it would all be over.

The headmaster of Quarry Bank High School, Liverpool, considered John Lennon and Peter Shotton to be the worst Teddy Boys among the
pupils in his charge. Detentions, canings, even temporary expulsion seemed to have no effect on the insolent-faced, bespectacled boy and his fuzzy-haired companion, whose clothes conformed less and less to school regulation, and who now overtly gloried in their power to cause disturbance. A typical Lennon–Shotton incident occurred when the whole school went into Liverpool to see the film
Henry V
at the Philharmonic Hall. By ill luck, this had been preceded by a Donald Duck cartoon. One did not have to guess from whom, in the tittering auditorium, had come those cries of, “There he is! There’s old King Henry!”

For John, as for most fifteen-year-olds, rock ’n’ roll began as a curiosity manifest among slightly older boys. Pete Shotton and he, on their truant-playing days, would often hang around Liverpool gaping at the full-dress Teddy Boys—mostly seamen on leave from the big ships—whose disregard for authority was on a scale far more gorgeous than theirs. When
Rock Around the Clock
, the first Bill Haley film, reached Liverpool, John went to see it, but to his disappointment, no riot happened. There was just this fat man in a tartan jacket with a kiss curl on his forehead, and saxophones and double basses just like any dance band.

Then, at the beginning of 1956, a friend played “Heartbreak Hotel” for him. “From then on,” his Aunt Mimi said, “I never got a minute’s peace. It was Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley. In the end I said, ‘Elvis Presley’s all very well, John, but I don’t want him for breakfast, dinner,
and
tea.’”

Mimi had been struggling for months to keep her charge from turning into a Teddy Boy. She still sent John to school in blazers that were tailor-made, and saw no reason why these should not do for all social occasions. “Drainpipe” trousers and drape jackets were, as Mimi constantly affirmed, no kind of dress for a boy who went to Quarry Bank. The trouble was that John now spent more and more time out of Mimi’s sight with her sister, Julia, his real mother. Julia, as Mimi knew, was too easygoing to worry what John wore. Julia bought him colored shirts and gave him money to have school trousers “taken in.” He would leave Menlove Avenue a nice Quarry Bank schoolboy and then, at Julia’s, turn into a Teddy Boy as bad as any to be seen around the docks.

The stunning music that went with the clothes was available only
with equal deviousness. John listened to it, as thousands did, under the bedclothes, late at night. Since the BBC would not broadcast rock ’n’ roll, the only source was Radio Luxembourg, a commercial station, beamed from the Continent with an English service after 8:00
P.M
. The Elvis records came through, fading and blurred with static, like coded messages to an occupied country. Now there were other names and other songs that split open the consciousness with disbelieving joy. There was Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”; Bill Haley’s “Razzle Dazzle”; Freddy Bell and the Bellboys’ “Giddy-up-a-Ding-Dong.” The sound came from beyond comprehension; it played, then died out again. You could not catch it, nor sing it nor write it down.