Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Though he could make the best of not very much, Richy had experienced little real joy for a long time, so it was a great relief when, perhaps toward the end of 1951, Elsie suddenly had a man in her life again and the boy gained a father figure, a dad like he’d never had. He was Harry Arthur Graves, born in Romford in 1913—a year older than Elsie. Harry was a cockney, a West Ham supporter from the East End of London who, fantastically, forsook the slightly warmer climes and better living conditions of Romford to go and live in Liverpool 8. His explanation for the move—that he was ill and his doctor had suggested a change of air—warrants more questions than answers.41 More likely he was getting away from a failed marriage: Harry was hitched in 1937 to a Romford girl and it hadn’t worked, then in 1946 he arrived in the Dingle and rented a house on Jacob Street. (Harry and Elsie themselves couldn’t marry yet because she was only separated from Richard Starkey, not divorced.)

  Harry made friends fast. Liverpudlians never ceased to remind him he was “a bloody soft southerner” and “a cockney bastard,” but most accepted him because he was a nice man, a sweet and gentle soul, softly spoken. Everybody liked Harry. “All animals and children loved him,” Richy would say, adding, with touching respect, “I learned gentleness from Harry.”42 He was certainly a great and welcome ally for the lad. Employed as a painter and decorator for Liverpool Corporation, he was part of a team of men maintaining public buildings—respectable manual work; one job they had was out at the US Air Force base at Burtonwood, and Harry delighted Richy by bringing him back some highly desirable DC comics. They also went to the pictures together two or three times a week. Harry indulged the boy: when Elsie said he’d been giving her cheek and needed disciplining, he’d just shrug his shoulders and smile conspiratorially. Richy needed and welcomed such a man in his life.

  Dingle people actually had much in common with cockneys. Both were poor and working-class, both were predominantly English/Protestant, both suffered terrible bombing at the hands of the Germans, and both liked a good drink and boozy sing-song. One big reason Harry fit right at home in Liverpool 8 was because he liked nothing better than to go to the pubs and clubs, get a few ales inside him and sing. He had a good voice and music in his ancestry. Harry’s favorite songs, for which he earned a decent local reputation, were “Night and Day,” “Star Dust,” “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Dream,” “That Old Black Magic” and “Moonglow.” His musical tastes, and the gentle way he exposed Richy to singers such as Sarah Vaughan, Billy Daniels and Billy Eckstine, were a tremendous influence on the boy.43

  The scene would be a pub—perhaps the Empress, yards from the house at the end of Admiral Grove. Elsie, Harry, relations, friends and workmates would drink and sing through the evening until closing time, and then, well bevvied, tumble into Elsie and Richy’s tiny terraced house where the party carried on—more singing, more drinking, more swearing, Johnny and Annie Starkey on banjo and mandolin, the steam rising ever higher into the night. Most people in Liverpool had a “turn,” a party piece, and Richy had two. One was a song he sang in duet with his mum, the swing-jazzy “Someone Like You.” The other, sung solo, was “Nobody’s Child,” a maudlin country tearjerker about a lonesome blind orphaned boy. Elsie’s young Lazarus would look her square in the eye as he sang it, adding to the chorus line so it went “I’m nobody’s child, Mum,” and she’d laugh or cry or both and affectionately instruct him to “bugger off” or “piss off.” The boy would always remember singing at home “not in front of a coal fire but in front of a bottle of gin and a large bottle of brown,” emphasizing the point that, as many children have experienced down the years, the bond of good-time music and booze was significant. Years later, he would admit, “My parents were alcoholics and I didn’t realize it.”44

  Many a Liverpool party included a punch-up—without one, people said, it just wasn’t memorable—but an exception was the McCartney family’s annual New Year’s Eve knees-up, held usually at the Aintree house of Paul’s Uncle Joe and Auntie Joan. These were great musical landmarks in his life—chaotic and raucous gatherings of uncles, aunties and cousins of every remove, with the adults getting bevvied and everyone singing happily. Jim played the piano, which showed Paul that a pianist would always get invited to parties, be the center of the action and never have to buy a drink; glasses were lined up for him on the lid. Paul’s much-loved aunties—Edie, Mill, Gin, Joan and others—sat around the room singing the old songs, 1920s favorites like “Baby Face,” “When the Red, Red, Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along,” and the one that gained the biggest cheer of the night at every McCartney party, played at just the right moment, “Carolina Moon,” at which point everyone would be standing and swaying and drinking and singing, a family united in harmony.

  The McCartney boys switched schools in September 1951. Speke’s authorities had misjudged the numbers, and Stockton Wood was now bursting with fifteen hundred infants; as it happened, a school in another district—Joseph Williams primary, in Belle Vale, just beyond Gateacre—was short of older children. Paul made the move and Mike went too; a special shuttle bus was laid on to take them all to and fro, and instead of working the standard nine-to-four day they began and finished half an hour later. Great larks were had on the bus, especially on the top deck, and the fifty or so transplanted Speke kids formed a bond others at “Joey Williams” didn’t share. A photograph shows them outside their new school, and Paul, aged nine or ten, is the one who catches the eye—intentionally so. The rest are the usual motley jumble of postwar British children in varying degrees of “it seemed smart at the time” raggedness; Paul is trim in a dark school cap and pulls a face while staring at an issue of the Dandy, the comic’s color pages clutched in his hands. Everyone is looking at the camera, Paul isn’t, and he’s the most knowing of it. His performance naturally steals the attention.

  Paul and Mike had to share a room at 12 Ardwick Road, and such was their bedtime squabbling, Jim had the bright idea of rigging a set of Bakelite earphones by each bed, connected to the wireless downstairs under his control. The boys could put the earphones under their pillows and drift off to the sounds of the BBC Light Programme or Home Service. A similar setup was also in place at Mendips, where Mimi let the wireless run up to John’s bedroom (over the front door) by an extension speaker. The impact of radio on these fertile young minds was momentous. They all listened to the thriller and sci-fi serials and to the half-hour comedies like Life with the Lyons. This and others like it were conventional humor shows, funny if formulaic; but there was another comedy that operated in a world entirely its own and whose impact shaped the characters and personalities of many listeners: launched by the BBC in 1951, this was The Goon Show. These sensational half-hours broke every possible rule of comedy, of radio, of the imagination, and life was never the same again for its devoted fans. In Liverpool—on Menlove Avenue, Ardwick Road and Upton Green—schoolboys Lennon, McCartney and Harrison sat close to the speaker.

  The Goon Show’s residing genius was Spike Milligan, a writer, humorist, musician and humanitarian whose flights of comic fantasy and invention knew no bound; his cohorts were Peter Sellers (a uniquely talented voice artist), Harry Secombe (an explosive Welsh geyser of mouth-raspberries and song) and also, initially, Michael Bentine (a brilliantly resourceful nutcase). Its preposterous comedy situations, like floating Dartmoor Prison across the English Channel to France, and attempting to stop a flood by drinking the River Thames, made it the quintessential product of radio, with Milligan conjuring ideas and mind-pictures far beyond physical possibility. Schoolboys loved it, imitating the voices and phrases—“you dirty rotten swine!”—for the rest of their days; Lennon, McCartney and Harrison separately and hungrily adopted Goon humor and its punning wordplay as their own, where it nestled among many other influences, not least Liverpool’s own incessant comedy.

  Milligan had no template—he was a true original—but he was everyone’s template thereafter, and his surreal visual cartoonery gave John Lennon vital creative impetus
(“My main influences for writing were always Lewis Carroll and The Goon Show, a combination of that”). Of equal merit, Milligan let John see that he wasn’t alone in living with a creative whirlwind inside his mind. Whatever else was going on in his world, tuning the dial to the BBC Home Service week after week reassured John that it wasn’t just him—“Their humor was the only proof that the WORLD was insane,” he would say.45

  And there was always something going on in his world. In 1949, the aunt John regarded as his favorite (not counting Mimi), the widowed Elizabeth, called “Mater,” had married a Scotsman and gone to live in Edinburgh along with her son, John’s older cousin Stanley. John’s new uncle was a dentist, Robert “Bert” Sutherland, and he had money in the bank; they bought a comfortable, late-Victorian stone-faced house in Ormidale Terrace, very close to Scotland’s national rugby stadium at Murrayfield, and John spent the next six summers here. He traveled by bus, initially fetched by Stanley, and unescorted from the age of 13. (His trip in 1954 earned him a newer and better harmonica, gifted to him by the bus driver—another spike in his musical development.)

  Edinburgh would always hold a unique place in John’s heart; he had only to hear pipers to fall into a romantic reverie. As well as the house here, Bert had a croft at Durness, on the northwest tip of the British Isles, and no Scottish holiday was complete for John without a stay at this remote spot through the mountains. These visits were a formative influence on his life, instilling an abiding warmth for Scotland, its people and their accents, which he imitated lovingly, and always amusingly, on several recordings in later years.

  Given all this extracurricular input, and his natural intelligence, John couldn’t help but shine at Dovedale Road. He was academically ready when the time came for the crucial Eleven-Plus, and aware of its importance. “They hang it over you from age five,” he’d remember. “If you don’t pass, you’re finished in life.”46 Mimi knew he would fly through it and had already decided which school would educate him for at least the next five years—hoping it would become seven or even eight, with John taking A-Levels, then going on to university and emerging with a profession. She considered Liverpool Institute, but George’s brother Alf was an English master there and Mimi didn’t want John creating problems at school that would reverberate at home.§ She opted instead for Quarry Bank High School for Boys; it was closer to home anyway, just a walk across Calderstones Park, and she’d be able to keep an eye on him. Before long, a letter arrived at Mendips indicating that John had indeed passed and that his place at Quarry Bank was confirmed, starting September 4, 1952.

  John was delighted Pete Shotton would be with him—they’d not been at school together before. Theirs would be a Crazy Gang act through the Quarry Bank years: partners in crime, laughs all the time, standing and sinking together, scrapping with each other when they weren’t fighting others, cycling together to and from Menlove, so inseparable that some called them LennonShotton or Shennon and Lotton. As Pete reflects, John needed to be in a partnership: “He always had to have a support. He would never have gone and performed on his own. He always had to have a sidekick.” Michael Hill, who like John came to Quarry Bank from Dovedale Road, says that though John and Pete were close, John was definitely the leader. “It was always ‘Lennon and Shotton,’ never ‘Shotton and Lennon.’ Pete wasn’t without talent of his own but he was an acolyte of John’s. We all were.”47

  It could have come as a nasty shock that Quarry Bank planned to educate them, that they were meant to work, and work hard, continuously for years to come. Opened in 1922, the school had a reputation for high achievement, sending boys to Oxford and Cambridge. The teachers were “masters” and wore gowns, and some wore mortarboards; boys called them “Sir” but themselves were known only by their surname. The place was run along pseudo public school lines—prefects had the right to hit boys with a tennis shoe, and, like the masters, could hand out detentions. The headmaster, E. R. Taylor, was a lay preacher who did everything with “strong Christian values,” including the caning. The school motto was Ex Hoc Metallo Virtutem—more or less “From this quarry, virtue is forged.” The school’s founder, R. F. Bailey, its only head before Taylor, wrote the words to “The Song of the Quarry,” the school hymn every boy learned and sang once every term and also at the annual prizegiving at Philharmonic Hall in the city. The sheet music says it must be sung vigoroso, and the opening verse runs:

  Quarry men old before our birth

  Straining each muscle and sinew.

  Toiling together, Mother Earth

  Conquered the Rock that was in you.

  First-year boys weren’t streamed, but how they performed in those initial ten months governed where they stood afterward. John did some excellent work, but by the end of the first year, while first in Art, he’d picked up plenty of detentions—twenty in the summer term alone—and finished twenty-third out of thirty-three. He failed to make the “A” stream for the following year—he would be in IIB. Shotton slipped down with him.

  What had happened? On top of his usual behavior, two things in particular. First, John experienced an early onset of puberty and found other things crowding his mind. Sex would consume his waking and somnambulant thoughts from now to the end of his days; he would be a sexual being to the extent of cursing it.48

  Second, John had formed another gang, an inside-school outfit to run in parallel with his Vale Road posse, and he was determined to set an example. “I wanted everybody to do what I told them to do,” he’d explain, “to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss.” Michael Hill recalls John as “the chief clown. He could have the whole class in tears of laughter and the teacher in tears of pain. Looking back on it, it was awful. The teachers had to maintain discipline, but if we were given an inch we’d take a mile.”49

  The biggest cloud on a boy’s horizon in the 1950s was the call-up, conscription, National Service. You could say it different ways but you couldn’t avoid it: everyone between 18 and 21 was expected to serve a two-year spell in the armed forces—eighteen months in active service and six more in reserve. Call-up papers would arrive soon after an 18th birthday. An army officer came to Quarry Bank to lecture on it; John Lennon, and also Richy Starkey, both born in 1940, were already wondering how to dodge it.

  John’s plan was to skip the country: “I was always thinking I could go to Southern Ireland if it came to it [but] I didn’t know what I was going to do there, I hadn’t thought that far.” (He would have faced prison on his return.) Richy was also desperate to avoid the dreaded letter—“The last place I wanted to go was in the army”—and surely would have done so on medical grounds. George Harrison was soon swearing to evade it any which way: “I made up my mind when I was about 12 that I was not going in the army.” Paul McCartney was hoping to avoid it but consciously preparing for it. In the woods down by the Mersey, he climbed trees to spy on people, he used a stick for a bayonet and imagined himself running another man through, and he killed frogs and hung them on barbed wire, calling them “Johnny Rebs” in the language of American Civil War films. Paul took Mike there to see them and he was horrified.50

  This was a key period in Paul’s life. He took the Eleven-Plus in February 1953 at Liverpool Institute. It was a daunting experience to step up to its great sweeping entrance then walk through wrought-iron gates into a marble-pillared hall, but he passed the test and would be an “Inny” pupil come September.

  Around this time, Jim and Mary were keen for Paul to have piano lessons, to build on his innate musical talent. To begin with, the teacher came to Ardwick Road, but neighboring children were always knocking on the door to ask Paul out to play, so Jim said he should go to the teacher’s house instead. Being made to go somewhere he didn’t want to go, to do something he didn’t really want to do, applied the brakes. Paul was happy playing piano his way, not somebody else’s; he wanted to pick out tunes, not be forced to read music; and he certainly didn’t want to bother with “learning dots.” The end came when he was given home
work. School homework was bad enough but it was compulsory, music wasn’t; Paul abandoned the lessons after four or five weeks, saying the teacher’s house “smelled of old people.” Jim would reflect, “He always seemed to know exactly what he wanted and usually knew how to get it.”51

  Paul also failed an audition to become a choirboy at the Anglican Cathedral. It was Jim’s idea he should join the Liverpool Cathedral Choristers’ Guild—he felt sure his son’s voice was good enough—so there Paul was in April 1953, dutifully lined up with other boys, waiting to audition one by one for choirmaster Ronald Woan. Jim later found out what happened: Paul failed not because he couldn’t sing but because “he deliberately cracked his voice.” It was subtle defiance—but, as it turned out, for the best. Had Paul passed, all subsequent events could have turned out very differently, for being in the choir involved a busy calendar of commitments for at least three years and possibly longer.52

  Then came June 2 and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which prompted the McCartneys to rent their first television, also the first in the street. All the neighbors and their children were invited to watch the seven-hour BBC coverage. Paul won a Liverpool Public Libraries prize for an essay anticipating the London spectacle (“after all this bother, many people will agree with me that it was well worth it”) and collected it in a ceremony at Picton Hall, the splendid circular reading-room opposite the Empire Theatre. It was a prestigious event, and when the Lord Mayor announced “And in the under-eleven age group, from Joseph Williams primary school in Gateacre, J. P. McCartney,” and he had to walk up on the stage, his knees were “rubbery.” “It was my first ever experience of nerves,” he’d remember. “I was shaking like a jelly.”53