The Beatles (16 page)

The change it caused was stunning. Since entering Liverpool Institute, Paul had been focused almost intransigently on classwork, competing con brio against students in the upper streams, with the intention that one day he would return to his alma mater, awash in prestigious degrees, and teach alongside his tweedy mentors. But now only the guitar mattered, “and so the academic things were forgotten,” as Paul remembered.

Mary tried to stay after him as best she could, her ultimate goal being to groom Paul for medical school. But while Mary spared no effort to further Paul’s future, her own was on the verge of unraveling. “
Physically, she wasn’t able
to handle the load,” says Dill Mohin, citing the rigors of yet another residential move designed to march the McCartneys progressively up the food chain.

This time, Mary wrangled a council house on Forthlin Road in the suburb of Allerton, not far from their previous home but as different from Speke as go-karts are from Cadillacs. Founded as a manor settlement “for families of above-modest means,” Allerton had become an oasis of upward mobility on the clover-groomed pastures of South Liverpool. “
I always thought of the area
as being slightly posh,” says a friend who visited the McCartneys often at 20 Forthlin Road. Built in the 1920s, the quaint three-bedroom cottage in the middle of a terrace row reminded people of a gingerbread house, with its stubby picture window, smokestack chimney, and high-crowned brick facade the color of gravy. Slate-roof effects had been skillfully mimicked in asphalt. A lavender hedge squatted at the bend in a narrow walk. By the time the McCartneys took over the house, in late 1955, a garden budded nicely in the front courtyard. And best of all was the price: an affordable £1 6s. a week, thanks to Mary’s seniority at work.

But this move cost Mary more of her health and energy. In the spring of 1956, those bouts of “indigestion” resurfaced and the harsh reality cast a shadow over her short-lived contentment. There was no denying it this time: the cancer was back. She’d probably known it was there all along but felt too good to deal with it.

Yet, however much she suffered, Mary kept up appearances in an effort to counteract the inevitable. Work remained a perfect distraction.
When midwifery proved too debilitating—which it did often now that the cancer flared up, wiping her out most days by noon—she reclaimed her old job as a health visitor for the Liverpool Corporation, while moonlighting at a clinic in the Dingle, a working-class ghetto. She even maintained an exhaustive regimen of housework: making the beds, washing the laundry, preparing the meals, cleaning the dishes, and vacuuming the rooms. It sometimes seemed as if she were able to defiantly squeeze out the last drops of reserve energy needed to tackle yet another punishing task. But at times the symptoms were too severe to keep hidden. Occasionally, she would yelp and double over, kneading her chest until the spasms passed. One day after school, Mike encountered her in an upstairs bedroom, sobbing, a silver crucifix clutched tightly in her fist.

As the cancer spread unchecked, her stamina faded. Relatives vividly recall how Mary could barely get up the stairs to the bedroom without help. Pain and shortness of breath played havoc with her strength. In an attempt to staunch the metastasis of malignant cells, her doctor, gambling for time, ordered a mastectomy. Relatively assured of a successful outcome, Jim remained at work instead of accompanying Mary to the hospital. Once again, he asked his sister-in-law Dill Mohin to act as a chaperone, planning to visit soon after the Cotton Exchange closed. When on the morning of October, 30, 1956, Dill arrived at Forthlin Road, she found Mary scurrying around, putting the final touches on each room. Dill remembers thinking how the house looked like “a pin in paper,” which was the Scouse equivalent of “impeccably tidy.” The breakfast dishes were drying in the sink; wastebaskets had been emptied. Nothing was out of place. “She had all the boys’ things ready for the next day,” Dill recalls. “Their shirts were ironed, their underwear cleaned.”

Standing back to admire her handiwork, Mary sighed and smiled sadly at her sister-in-law’s disapproving scowl. “Now everything’s ready for them,” she said, “in case I don’t come back.”

By the next afternoon, her words were all too prophetic. The mastectomy had been successful—up to a point—but the cancer was entrenched; there was no hope. “We knew she was dying,” Dill Mohin recalls, explaining how the family now assembled to pay their last respects. “Jim rang me up [that afternoon] and said, ‘I’m bringing the boys to see you, Dill. I’m taking them in to see Mary for the last time. I’ve put clean shirts on them; they’ve got on their best clothes, their school ties. Their fingernails are
clean; so are their teeth. Would you look them over for me? If they pass [inspection] with you, they’re all right.”

The image Mary had cultivated so carefully was intact when Paul and Mike shuffled into her hospital room just after six o’clock on October 31. They had been groomed to perfection, “two little gentlemen,” and stood in sharp contrast to the “ghastly” figure of their bedridden mother that now struggled on an elbow to greet them. The operation had clearly ravaged Mary. Her usually open face was expressionless, rigid, grim; so dark were the circles under her eyes, so demonic and disfiguring, that a relative might have assumed they’d stumbled into the wrong room. Paul remembered that “
there was blood on the sheets
,” an image that never left him.

Dill and Bill Mohin waited anxiously in the reception area “so that she would have a bit of time on her own with the boys.” When they finally joined the family, however, Dill noticed with astonishment that the boys “were romping all over her.” Mary, “putting on a brave face,” seemed not to mind—or was too sick to object. “Oh, leave them alone,” she said in response to her sister-in-law’s remonstrances. “They’re all right.” Jim, silent as a statue, stood stonily in the corner, his eyes flushed with tears, his face so anguished, laboring—fighting hard—to maintain his composure. Inconsolability was not a part of his character. His gift had always been optimism, an extra beacon of light thrown onto the path of adversity; friends and family relied on him to pump up their spirits, and he did, too, always without a qualm. Ever the salesman, he had immense strength and the right words at hand to reverse any dark mood. And yet all of it failed him now.

That night, about 9:30, Jim arrived unannounced at the Eagle Hotel, on Paradise Street, where the Mohins were tending bar in the back room of their half-filled pub. He was physically wasted, empty. All he could manage to say was “She’s gone.” Mary had suffered an embolism and died shortly after the boys left.

Paul reacted to the news with misplaced alarm—it is rumored he blurted out: “What are we going to do without her money?”—but there was no misjudging the depth of his loss. It was a devastating blow. “
The big shock in my teenage years
,” he was to say. Jim may have helped shape Paul’s early attitude toward music, but no one had the impact on him that Mary did. In later years, after he was fabulously wealthy and knighted before the Queen, Paul would often talk about success in terms of his mother’s encouragement “to do better” than her and Jim, to improve his
circumstances. Suddenly, without her stabilizing presence, without her insight and pragmatism, he felt desperate.

For weeks afterward, Paul bumped around the house “like a lost soul,” suffering the symptoms of an emotional free fall. He was aloof, unresponsive; when he spoke, it was through a smoke screen of feints and grunts. No one recalls ever seeing him sink so low. “
I was determined not to let it affect
me,” he said. “I learned to put a shell around me at that age.” For long stretches, sometimes hours, he would retreat into a cloud of silence. In all the upheaval, there was nothing, other than time, to bring him out of this depression.

To fill the gaps, Paul turned to music. He threw himself into playing the guitar, practicing chords and finger positions for hours on end, but not in any way that expressed a sense of pleasure. It was more therapeutic, a release—less musical than remedial. There was never any intention of sharing it with someone else. “He used to lock himself in the toilet and play the guitar,” says Dill, who visited often in order to help Jim around the house. “It was the only place he could disengage himself from the tragedy.”

Jim, who was himself heartbroken and threatening suicide, had nothing left in reserve for Paul. Dazed, in a state of emotional shock, he depended entirely on his sisters, Jin and Millie, to keep the family afloat. Millie arrived regularly to cook and help clean the house, but she was “much more straitlaced” than Jin, with an aversion “to showing her feelings” and “a very dour husband,” Paul’s uncle Albert, who had undergone “a bizarre personality change” in the navy that bordered on hostile. Jin Harris, on the other hand, was “the motherly aunt” whose manner was not dissimilar to that of Mary’s. A big, heavy woman with a cool head and an unchecked liberal philosophy, she knew intuitively that what the McCartney boys needed more than anything else was TLC. She showered them with attention, listened dutifully to them, indulged them, held and consoled them, devoting a lot of time and energy to the healing process. “
There was no one better suited
to picking up the pieces in Paul’s life,” according to her great-niece Kate Robbins. “She lived entirely through her heart.”

But Paul’s and Mike’s anguish spilled out in other, more detrimental ways. Paul’s grades, which had already been compromised to a degree, slipped even further. Grudgingly, he put in the necessary effort—but barely. He “skivved off” classes with alarming regularity, paid little attention to homework, and basically ignored the requirements necessary to prepare him for O-level exams, which were critical to his future.

In the midst of so much emotional turbulence, Paul quickly reached out for the one lifeline that held him in thrall: rock ’n roll. Listening to it for long stretches, escaping into its defiant tone and fanciful lyrics, took him away from the painful memories. Paul loved the improvisational aspect of it, and he loved mimicking its exaggerated nuances. Thanks to his ear for languages, it was easy to pick up the subtle inflections and shadings in the performances. Buddy Holly and Elvis, Chuck Berry, and even Carl Perkins—they had the magic, all right. He wanted to sound how they sounded, look how they looked, play how they played. Stretched across his bed, he would sink into a kind of reverie, staring out the window, not looking at anything in particular, not even thinking, but lulled by the music’s alchemy, hour after hour. There was nothing he could point to that supported a claim that music was anything more than a hobby, especially
this
music. His talent was at the service of some hidden energy. And yet at the center of this vortex was the desire to do something more with it. What or with whom, he wasn’t sure. But he sensed it was only a matter of time until it all came together and he put his own stamp on it.

Eight months later, he met John Lennon.

Chapter 5
A Simple Twist of Fete

T
he only real surprise about the 1957 St. Peter’s Church garden fete was that the Quarry Men were part of it.

In the more than forty years that Woolton’s villagers had celebrated an event they commonly referred to as “the Rose Queen,” only marching bands had ever entertained. There was still a heroic glow, a natural emotional response, to all those ruddy-faced men in uniform playing stilted pop standards arranged as though they were meant to accompany the retreat at Dunkirk. The crowds who lined the church field each July cheered as a featured band pumped out all the good old songs, the melodies born in some distant smoke when husbands and fathers trooped off to defend the empire’s honor. But something had changed. The steady song of the men in blue failed to enchant their children, whose expanding world held little glamour for tradition. Bessie Shotton, Pete’s mother, convinced the church fete committee that a skiffle band would bridge the divide between young and old and proposed the Quarry Men—all but one of whom, she assured them, had been confirmed at St. Peter’s—as the obvious choice.

The boys were understandably ecstatic
. The garden fete (Scousers pronounced it
fate
) was “
the biggest social event
on the village calendar,” a church fund-raiser that coincided with the feast of St. Peter, for which the entire community turned out. In addition to performing, the Quarry Men were offered another distinction: riding in the annual procession, a parade of decorative floats presenting the Rose Queen and her entourage that threaded lazily through the village streets while members of the Discoverers, as the church youth club was known, worked the pliant crowd for contributions.

The band clambered onto a flatbed truck
that departed the church slightly after two o’clock on the afternoon of July 6. They were
conveniently positioned at the rear end of the cavalcade, so far from the front car that they barely even heard the Band of the Cheshire Yeomanry, which led the procession. With a stretch, they could see the young queen herself, a sunstruck rosebud named
Sally Wright
, whose pink crinoline dress had wilted like gardenia petals in the sticky heat. Behind her,
Susan Dixon
, fourteen, whose reign was ending, waved at the crowd with the poise of a forty-year-old. Children in elaborate costumes, along with groups of Boy Scouts, Brownies, Girl Guides, and Cubs, perched gaily atop the floats, dangling their legs over the sides like fringe.