by Bob Spitz
Jim and Mary began dating that summer, an otherwise fearful, desultory period marked by the staggered advance of war. Hardly a day passed that prevented them from enjoying each other’s company. They were like a pair of mismatched bookends: Jim, frisky and unserious, a man of modest dreams; Mary, an earnest, resourceful nurse on the front lines of a dangerous world. Despite the depth of their love, it wasn’t an easy business. They faced turmoil head-on as a function of the war. The government formed the Royal Cotton Commission, becoming, in essence, the central body for importing the crop—as well as its rationing—which meant that after twenty-four years at A. Hannay & Co., Jim was chucked out of work. Mary’s job, too, was in turmoil, owing to the scarcity of experienced nurses at the front; rumor circulated that she faced imminent military conscription. “Medical personnel were being recruited for emergency posts as far off as Egypt and Ethiopia,” says one local historian. Jim, whose age and boyhood injury exempted him from national service, feared abandonment—and worse.* At forty, he was disconsolate, afraid of drifting into uselessness.
It was the “austere side” of Jim McCartney that regained its bearings in a temporary job designed to aid and expand the war effort. Everywhere in Liverpool, businesses had hastily retooled their facilities, becoming functional military providers. The Bear Brand Stocking factory was a perfect example, abandoning production of silk tights in favor of parachutes. Clothing factories in Litherland churned out infantry uniforms, auto assembly lines built tanks, warehouses were appropriated and conveyed to the Royal Ordnance Factory, churches were converted to mortuaries. The Napier plant, which had flourished making plane parts, was commissioned by the Air Ministry to produce engines for the streamlined Typhoons that strafed enemy skies. Ungrudgingly, Jim labored there for the duration of the war, turning a lathe that made shell casings for explosives.
There were other perks that rendered his job more agreeable. To good, solid citizens like Jim McCartney who did “war work,” the government made subsidized housing available. Tiny terrace dwellings, referred to as “half houses” inasmuch as they resembled sheds, were authorized on the outskirts of the city. That was all the incentive necessary to hasten Jim and Mary’s plans. They had been dancing around the issue of marriage for several months, postponing decisions on the pretext of Jim’s job loss or Mary’s possible transfer. Finally, unwilling to wait out the war, they took out a license at Town Hall on April 8, 1941, and got married a week later at St. Swithins Chapel, in a Roman Catholic ceremony that was undoubtedly a concession to Mary’s traditional Irish family.
[II]
On June 18, 1942, a boy was born in a private ward at Walton Hospital, coincidentally on the same floor where, twelve years earlier, Mary had satisfied her state registry requirements. As was customary with the practice of midwifery, no doctor was present during the delivery. Instead, Mary was attended by a team of maternity nurses, dressed in a spectrum of colored uniforms that determined their rank, most of whom the mother-to-be knew by name. Because of his volunteer service in the local war effort, Jim was detained fighting a blaze behind the Martin’s Bank Building, where German bombs had incinerated a warehouse, and arrived later that night after visiting hours were over and was granted a special dispensation to see his son.
There was never any doubt what the baby would be named. With the “teardrop eyes, high forehead and raised eyebrow—the famous McCartney eyebrow”—that were unmistakable characteristics, the firstborn would be James, after his father and great-grandfather, who brought the clan to Liverpool. As no one on Jim’s side had a middle name and in keeping with tradition, it was simply James McCartney IV. But before it was registered on the birth certificate, Mary, thoughtful and scrupulous as always, wondered how she would distinguish the men from each other. To solve the problem, it was decided that her son would be James Paul. Exactly when James was dropped in favor of the more familiar middle name has been a source of some speculation among family members. Some believe that during the hospital stay both parents referred to the baby as Jimmy; others swear that was never a factor. Given the circumstances, an explanation seems immaterial because by the time they brought their son home he was acknowledged only—and forevermore—as Paul.
The first few years of Paul McCartney’s life were marked by a blur of consecutive moves.
It was evident from the start that Jim and Mary’s flat in Anfield was hopelessly inadequate to shelter their little family. In addition, Everton was growing increasingly popular as a German bombing target, the district frequently a mottle of smoldering frames where houses once stood, the air heavy with lime from nearby mass graves where war casualties were buried. “Everton,” as a longtime resident put it, “was a place to leave.”
Wrapped snugly in Mary’s arms, Paul adjusted to the extreme northern weather as his parents hopscotched around Liverpool, scaling each rung up the Corporation housing ladder in measured stride. Initially, they commuted by ferry, relocating in Wallasey, across the Mersey and an ostensibly safer district by comparison. Then, in 1944, after the birth of another son, Peter Michael (he, too, known by his middle name), they moved back to the mainland, to a “drab part” of the city called Knowsley Estates, whose condition was typified by its street name: Roach Avenue. The building, called Sir Thomas White Gardens, was part of a semicircular complex and decent enough, according to a relative who visited often. They “had a [ground-floor] flat in a well-built tenement, a big block of concrete with kids everywhere. But the [neighbors] were very much to be desired.”
Jim, by this time, was beyond the restless stage, waiting for the Cotton Exchange to reopen. His job at Napier’s was eliminated, and a temporary position with the Liverpool Corporation’s sanitation department proved debilitating. Mary bore the brunt of his frustration. She returned to work part-time, in order to supplement their income—and get out of the house. Fortunately, the Corporation had been signing up state-registered nurses to canvass each district, inspecting the hygienic conditions in places where women elected to give birth at home. Such deliveries had grown common in the forties, in no small part because travel was severely restricted during the war. To meet the demand, district midwives took on great local importance, “much like the parish priest or the beat policeman.” People came to her door for advice. “Is the nurse in? I need to talk to the nurse,” they’d inquire, then anguish “about the sister-in-law who’d run off with the postman.”
But mostly Paul watched his mother depart at all hours of the day—or night—to assist in the home delivery of babies. The usually mellow Mary switched over to automatic pilot when pressed into action. Her transformation never failed to astound Paul. Double-time, she’d inventory her equipment, checking the contents of the black leather delivery bag for thoroughness. Her cases were thrown over a bicycle, whose front and rear lights were tested, as were the batteries in her headlamp. When everything was approved for takeoff, Mary straddled the bike, threw her purse into a brown wicker basket attached to the handlebars, and sped into the dark like Bruce Wayne, often not returning home in time for sleep.
Cycling around Liverpool was no waltz in the park. The hills surrounding the McCartneys’ residence were steep and unforgiving. Incredibly, Mary never surrendered to them, despite the effects of a deadly cigarette habit that left her gasping for breath. One road in particular, Fairway Street, was the steepest in all of Liverpool, but Mary routinely scaled it at all hours of the night, rain or shine.
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 bluf
f 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.