The Beatles (14 page)

Jim often put the boys to bed while his wife was on call, never complaining, taking great pleasure in raising his sons. During the spring, Mary would be called out nearly every night, leaving the house during dinner and not returning until after breakfast, while still finding time to lavish attention on Paul and Mike and produce “sumptuous casseroles” in her tiny kitchen.

In 1946, to everyone’s great delight, cotton was returned to the private sector and Jim found his old job waiting at A. Hannay & Co. No doubt this turn of events ended a grave personal crisis. It was a relief to be back doing the work he knew and loved. But almost immediately there was evidence that the once-vital industry lay in shambles; nothing stood up to five years of bureaucratic fumbling. The boom trade, when Lancashire imported 4.5 million bales of cotton annually, had dwindled to a lowly fraction of that bounty. Mills were encouraged to close, their machinery
exported, along with jobs and taxable income. As one veteran of the cotton trenches described it: “
The rot had set in
.”

Still, Jim pushed on. The salary wasn’t commensurate with his experience, but his weekly take of £6 to £10 was enough to supplement Mary’s income.
They’d “never be wealthy
,” in the estimation of a relative, “but with two wages coming in, it wasn’t difficult” to make ends meet. And while not as comfortable, perhaps, as they had dreamed of becoming, the McCartneys were better off than the run of Scousers living in Liverpool center. Mary even mustered her courage and “
asked [her bosses] for a move
to Speke.”

Lured by the prospect of wide-open space, Liverpool families had begun migrating south a few miles, to where new settlements rose from lush glades and pastures, in pursuit of the middle-class dream. But Speke was the sort of culturally deprived suburb only the British could refer to as an “estate.” The area had existed since the sixteenth century as an old Elizabethan manor house that was rashly redesigned in the mid-1930s as “
a new model town
” for the masses. Street after street, row after row, the layout was a grid of numbing monotony superimposed on the landscape’s windswept fields. There were churches, clinics, and schools, but not the pubs and little shops that encouraged social interaction. Moreover, there was no social or economic diversity:
Speke functioned as a one-class
town of laborers, without any middle class aside from priests and doctors.

To many people, the eight-mile distance to Liverpool center seemed “half a universe away.” Cars and trains would one day bridge that gap, but when the McCartneys moved to Speke, few people in their financial bracket owned automobiles despite Ford and Vauxhall being the estate’s largest employers. And the bus routes were hopeless; necessitating a devious maze of transfers, it often took an hour or more to make the fifteen-minute trip into the city. Geographically, Speke had the forlornness and seclusion of a military installation, its residents’ sense of isolation—of being cut off from the rest of the city—overwhelming.

Still, there was something delicious about leaving all that inner-city congestion behind. The streets, though too close together, were spectacularly clean. Most houses had stopped burning coke and coal in favor of gas, “smokeless fuel,” providing an immediate sense of wholesomeness, and as a result Mary’s boys could play outside in a pillow of crisp, fresh air.

The house the McCartneys got at 72 Western Avenue on the edge of a flat, featureless field was comfortable by council standards: a living room with a generous bay window, a kitchen more spacious than Mary was accustomed to, and two snug bedrooms on a sooty lot that stood tangent to
a neighboring orchard. Inside, it was roughly the same size as the flat in Everton, but thanks to the location and the promise of better things, Jim and Mary’s modest Scouse sense of how much of the world they deserved to call their own was satisfied. Paul was four when they arrived, and to this inquisitive city child, Speke was a magical, imaginary kingdom—unbounded by horizons and gaping with wide-open spaces—a kingdom that was at least as enchanting and magical as those in the stories his mother read at night. In summer, the bluebells that feasted on the sandy northern soil turned the estate from an undernourished tract into a picture postcard.

Within a year, however, the Corporation moved the family to another part of Speke, in an expansion that stretched a mile farther east, on Ardwick Road. This site was even more rudimentary than the last, just neat rows of brick buildings on either side of a muddy pudding of road gouged with irrigation ditches. It had a huge view of the fields opposite the house and a wind exposure that defied insulation. Only a handful of families had moved into this section of the development, and to young Paul it seemed particularly isolated, as though “
we were always on the edge
of the world.”

Soon after they unpacked, in early 1948, Mary began complaining to Jim about stomach pains. She had probably been experiencing discomfort, if moderately and privately, since returning to work. “
Oh, I’ve been poorly
today,” she complained to a relative at tea one afternoon after a comment about her low spirits. “I had terrible indigestion.” On another occasion she declined a plate of cucumber sandwiches, blaming them as the source of lingering “indigestion.”

But the distress wasn’t easily shrugged off. Eventually, Mary’s pains grew more severe. She tired easily from bicycling and early in the day. At first it was attributed to stress caused by her erratic work schedule, which seemed logical. Hastily eaten meals and extreme lack of sleep were enough to cause anyone nagging indigestion. But in Dill Mohin’s eyes, Mary hadn’t looked well for a long time. “Why don’t you go to the doctor?” she argued.

Mary dismissed her sister-in-law’s suggestion with a wave. “Oh, you don’t go to the doctor with
indigestion,
Dill,” she scolded her.

“I think, for the most part, she was afraid to go, she was afraid to know,” says Dill, who suspected that something more serious was involved. “I could see doubt and fear in her eyes. She was such a clever nurse, she must have known what was wrong.”

Finally, Jim persuaded her to have a thorough examination. It was scheduled for a Tuesday afternoon, but as he was due in Manchester that
morning, his sister-in-law accompanied Mary to Northern Hospital, where she was to undergo an upper GI series. “I left her in the waiting room,” Dill recalls. “She wouldn’t have me stay. ‘I’ll catch the bus,’ she said, ‘and be home in time to get the boys from school.’ ”

However, by the time she was released later in the day, Mary was too shaken to go straight home. She found a telephone booth on the corner, just outside the hospital, and phoned Jim’s office. He could barely understand what she said through the tears. “Jim, oh,
Jim,
” she sobbed, “I’ve got cancer!”

“Don’t move—stay where you are,” he instructed her. “I’ll come get you.”

Within minutes, Jim had run several blocks to the telephone booth and found his wife curled up inside. It unnerved him to see her, always the unflappable nurse, in such a state of emotional distress. He was determined to console her, trying everything he knew to lessen her foreboding, but the doctor hadn’t minced words. The mastitis he diagnosed was already in an advanced stage; cases like these, as she knew, were almost always fatal.

Practical as ever, Mary put a good face on misfortune. The diagnosis passed as something instantly forgotten, like a fascination or a mistake. She could find no incentive in it, and that challenged her, touched off her stubborn Irish defiance to seek comfort where she could find it—in her family. The boys, especially, distracted her, demanding constant supervision.

There are numerous accounts of how Jim occasionally walloped his sons when provoked—Mike McCartney even claims they were “
duly bashed
”—but his sister-in-law maintains they are untrue. “
Jim and Mary never smacked the boys
,” she says. “They took them to their room and gave them a good talking-to, but they never hit them. Never.” Whatever the case, Paul and Mike remained a handful.

“
The McCartney boys were like a circus
all on their own,” says a cousin who was an occasional playmate. They were as rambunctious as any two brothers who depended on each other for entertainment. Paul, as ringmaster, set a ferocious pace for Mike, a full head shorter, who “
followed him like a puppy
down every street.” He could read, shoot conkers and ollies (Scouser for chestnuts and marbles), swim, chew gum, and whistle. Best of all, Paul was canny; even at an early age, he could “
charm the skin off a snake
” just by pulling that angelic face. A fleshy, rather pretty
boy with dark brown hair and huge, expressive eyes accentuated by unusually long silky lashes and a tiny rosebud mouth, he developed a smooth, winning profile that was effective in any variety of situations.
In photographs
taken when he was a toddler, his face is a mask of bluff innocence, the lower lip carefully retracted while his mouth betrays the flicker of a smirk. These same pictures indicate another revealing pose: puffing out his chest and folding his arms across it in an expression of utter satisfaction. It was apparent that, more than anything, Paul had a real sense of himself. Of all the kids in the neighborhood, he was the most polite and well-spoken, ingratiating, eager to please and self-deprecating, which came in handy when denying a piece of infantile mischief. Hunter Davies referred to this style of Paul’s as “
quiet diplomacy
,” but it was more like a hustle. Already a song-and-dance man, he’d perfected this little shuffle that accommodated him for years to come. “Saint” Paul and his disciple, Mike, kept Mary on her toes.

Indeed, Mary would run herself ragged trying to keep up with those boys. They were always off on a rousing bicycle adventure whose itinerary rounded downhill through the lacy arc of nearby countryside. Beyond Speke itself the topography changed and the road fed into the green-striped fields that converged on Dungeon Lane. On those occasions when Michael was allowed to tag along, the brothers left the estate by that route and traversed the steep embankment that bordered the Mersey. From the top of the rise, they could see the entire northern coast: the unkempt sliver of beach that limned the shore to Hale Head, where an old lighthouse stood sentry to ships navigating around the yawning channel. On the Wirral side of the river, in dizzying perspective, was Ellesmere Port, glinting, turned into the wind, and beyond it the crenellated horizon of Wales, the gateway to other worlds unto themselves. A steady parade of ships wreaked havoc with the ledgy mud banks, but periodic lulls in traffic, at hours the boys knew by heart, enabled them to scramble down the forbidding incline and swim in the icy, graphite water. Other times, they bypassed the river entirely en route to Tabletop Bridge, where, lying in wait like a “
super spy
,” they would pelt onrushing trains with turnips scavenged from an adjacent field. “
This is where my love
of country came from,” Paul later recalled. Too young to travel long distances by himself, he would retreat to a secluded glade of the woods, entertained by a local cricket ensemble while he read book after book—a practice he repeated often over the years, albeit in cushier environs.

Even in Speke, where most families were blue-collar workers, parents
chased the middle-class dream: that higher education would lead to advancement for their children. Jim and Mary were perhaps more aggressive than others in that regard. It became a passion for them, as they steered their sons toward the right venues. In addition to Stockton Wood Road Primary, not far from the house, Paul attended the Joseph Williams Primary School. Both were well regarded for their standards of academic achievement.

Jim and Mary also challenged the boys in their own ways. Jim was an armchair philosopher who rattled on incessantly about conventional “principles” such as self-respect, perseverance, a relentless work ethic, fairness. “
He was a great conversationalist
, very opinionated, an impassioned talker,” says a nephew who recalled Jim’s ritual of “matching wits” with everyone—and Paul, especially—in an effort to provoke an animated discussion. He devoured the newspaper each day, which provided fresh fodder for his observations—as well as an onslaught of information for his sons. In the evenings, with logs crackling in the fireplace, Jim would settle comfortably into an armchair in the front parlor, fold back a section of the
Liverpool Echo
or the
Express,
and scrutinize the crossword puzzle, inviting the boys to “solve clues” for him while explaining the meaning of new and uncommon words. “
He was very into crosswords
,” Paul recalled. “ ‘Learn crosswords, they’re good for your word power.’… If you didn’t know what a word meant or how it was spelled, my dad would say, ‘Look it up.’ ” Mary read poetry to them and insisted that her sons cultivate an interest in books and ideas that would carry them far beyond the limitations of their parents. “
Mary was very keen
on the boys’ schooling—
very
keen,” says Dill Mohin. “She knew Paul was clever and pledged to facilitate that in any way she could. No lazy Scouse accent was permitted. To her credit, he spoke right up, articulately, without sounding precocious. The boys weren’t allowed to go out to play until they’d done their [homework],” which Mary inspected as scrupulously as she did their appearance.