Things I Couldn't Tell My Mother: A Memoir

by Sue Johnston

  I loved working in Liverpool. The city has always been full of life and energy. The people there know how to have a laugh and the tax office was no exception. Everyone was very friendly and socialised together. The girls I worked with used to go to a club at lunchtime and very soon I was invited along too. In the words of the Marks & Spencer’s advert, this was no ordinary club: this was the Cavern, the place that spawned the Beatles.

  Although I enjoyed working with the people there, I hated working in the tax office with every ounce of my being. The monotonous drudgery of the job drove me nuts – I was literally paper shuffling – and I was the worst person to be working somewhere as officious as the tax office. I would do anything to avoid filing and would hide post, only for it to be found again days later. I didn’t and still don’t have a natural administrative bent. Just the sight of a lever arch file can leave me feeling hopelessly disorganised.

  We used to go to the Cavern for our lunch break at twelve and return at one. But soon I wasn’t returning at one. It became half one, then two, until I was stretching my lunch well into the afternoon and cheating my time card. I remember seeing one of the tax collectors, Chris Crummy, performing there with his band. I nearly fell off my chair and had to hide in order to watch him but he soon left the tax office, when his band the Searchers became successful, changing his name to Chris Curtis. That was the thing about the Cavern. It seemed that everyone in Liverpool of a certain age was down there, being part of it. Even the tax officers! But it was only going to be so long before someone found out what I was up to when I should have been at work.

  Around this time I joined a drama group at the Liverpool Institute. I thought it might be the way into the career I was sure awaited me. However, we didn’t seem to learn much, we were just given different things to perform and instructed to go out and perform them. I seem to remember a lot of time on buses, dragging our props with us. Our bookings were usually in old people’s homes and the sight of a bunch of extremely keen teenagers ready to bludgeon their ears with ‘Getting to Know You’ must have made their hearts sink! I made friends with a few of the people in the group but soon I began to drift away. There was no focus in what we were doing and the pull of the Cavern and everything it had to offer proved too great.

  I used to love going to the Cavern on my own, taking in the sights and sounds of everything that was going on there. When I first started going it had just stopped being a jazz club but still had the overhang of that jazz/beatnik fashion, tight black trousers and black polo necks, so my attire had to be black – colour would have been far too gauche! I would wear a big baggy mohair jumper and leggings; I thought I looked the bee’s knees. The Cavern was on Matthew Street, directly off the main shopping street in the city centre. You walked downstairs, and it was as its name suggested: an underground cavern. As you neared the entrance you could smell the club: it was damp and stinking but it was such an exciting place to be and the smell was part of it.

  Once down there it was very dark. There were brick arches that straddled the two cellars that made up the club. It used to drip moisture from the ceiling, and it was hard not to think that it was other people’s sweat plopping on your head as you danced. It wasn’t unusual to go to the toilet and find yourself face to face with a rat. I’m not painting the best picture, am I? But there was such a buzz about the place that you just wanted to be there. The stage, if you could call it that, was a slightly raised area at the back of the cellars and there were rows of chairs positioned in front of it. To the side of the stage there was a band room where the bands got changed, but there wasn’t much cat-swinging room in there either. Down the side of the cellars there was an area where people would stand and do the Cavern Stomp, the signature dance of the club. It was less a stomp than a slowed-down jive. The best way to describe it is to imagine a child doing an elephant impression as they stomp their feet from side to side. Then slow it right down. It was hardly the tango but we thought we looked great!

  At the back of the club they served tea and pop. It sounds very naive that we all gathered and drank cups of tea, but it wasn’t about getting drunk, it was about the music and the atmosphere, and the Cavern had both in spades. There was a real sense that you were at the heart of something very new and very special.

  There is a Cavern club still there on Matthew Street but it isn’t the real one. The original Cavern was filled in by Liverpool council in 1973 when they bulldozed the building above. It is mind-blowing to think that such a hallowed place of modern popular culture had been flattened. But there you have it. Planning and heritage wasn’t big on the agenda in the early seventies.

  I marvel at my confidence back then. I would get on the bus, go into town on my own, and turn up at the Cavern to see if there was anyone I recognised. I was by now hanging out there in the evening as well as at lunchtime. If there wasn’t anyone I knew, I’d just make friends with whoever was there.

  When I came home my mother would say in disgust, ‘You’ve been to that club again!’ And she was right, I had, because it had become part of my life and I was in there every day that I possibly could be. I don’t think my mother could understand why I wanted to spend all this time with people that weren’t my family, so I tended not to tell her who I was with or what I was doing, which, when I think of it now, probably added to her feelings that I was drifting away from her. Of course, I was just spreading my teenage wings but my mother would trot out a seemingly endless number of examples of daughters who were well behaved, who wanted to be close to their family and settle down. I always seemed to be too independent to her for my own good.

  I remember the first time I ever saw the Beatles perform. It was 1961. I had gone to see the Swinging Blue Jeans play and supporting them were a group who would go on to become the biggest band in the world. I have to say, I lost it – I was mesmerised. There was something so edgy and vital about their performance that was airbrushed out when they were given their mop tops and their little suits and told to act clean-cut for the teenyboppers’ worried parents. But back then they were going between Germany and Liverpool – they spent a lot of time gigging in Hamburg, honing their craft before they were famous – and they were unbelievably raw and sexy.

  I got to know Paul well, and Ringo who wasn’t drumming for them yet; it was still Pete Best. I would see John Lennon there with his first wife Cynthia, who I felt was treated very shoddily by the girls who came to see John and were in love with him from afar. I met Gerry Marsden from Gerry and the Pacemakers and his girlfriend, who he later married, and we all became good mates.

  The Beatles first appeared on TV on 17 October 1962 on a regional programme called Scene at 6.30. At that point my mother knew that they were the reason her daughter spent so much time in the Cavern but she had yet to clap eyes on them. They were dressed in leather biker jackets and looked very sexy. My mum was appalled. After that, when Paul came to our place to drop me off, she’d asked in disgust, ‘Has that dirty Beatle been in my house?’ She gave me the silent treatment for a while after that.

  Paul wrote to me from the Star Club in Hamburg once, a great letter, it even had doodles on the front of it – which was stolen from me when I was working on Brookside. I took it in one time as no one believed that I had this treasured possession, but then it was whizzed from my locker and I was devastated; no one ever owned up to the theft. My cousin remembers me reading her the letter and what an eye-opener Hamburg evidently was. Little Richard was performing there at the time. There was a dizzying array of people who would come through the doors of the Star Club, Paul said, the likes of which we didn’t get much of in Liverpool. He said that in one of the clubs one night John Lennon ended up with a stunning, exotic-looking woman, only to discover on closer inspection that she was a he, which the other Beatles found hilarious.

  Another piece of Beatles history I had, which I have to hold my hands up to losing, was an old reel-to-reel of the Beatles singing ‘Love Me Do’ in someone’s garage when they were first putting
it together. I am shamefaced to say that I taped over it with the Max Miller show. Whenever I admit this to anyone there is always a sharp intake of breath – I’ve yet to meet someone who’s said, ‘Still you’re the proud owner of a classic Max Miller show.’

  While the Beatles were in Hamburg I began seeing the drummer from the Swinging Blue Jeans, who was still a car mechanic at the time. His name was Norman Kuhlke and he was my first really serious boyfriend. Strangely enough, my mother really took to him. She would make him apple pies to take on tour. She seemed genuinely pleased for me to have a nice boyfriend. Even though he was in a band he was friendly and my mum must have felt I had some stability in this mad Liverpool life she imagined I was leading.

  Towards the end of my numbered days at the tax office, Paul McCartney told me there was a job going at NEMS, the record and management company run by the Epstein brothers. When I first started there it wasn’t quite the empire it would become; they used to sell a few records and had a furniture shop too.

  I was offered a job working for Brian Epstein’s personal assistant Peter Brown’s personal assistant. I would be his personal assistant. So I was personal assistant to the personal assistant to the personal assistant of Brian Epstein – try putting that on your business card! Epstein would go on to manage the Beatles and give them their signature look. It was a great job, being at the centre of all of the new music that was coming into the country.

  One day I had a record land on my desk from America. It was called ‘The Hippy Hippy Shake’ by Chan Romero. I listened to it and it blew me away. I grabbed the record and went in search of Norman.

  ‘You have to listen to this song,’ I told him. ‘It’s amazing.’

  He put it on and his face lit up. The minute the record was finished he went in search of the other band members and that was how the Swinging Blue Jeans came to record their number one hit ‘The Hippy Hippy Shake’. I also told them about ‘You’re No Good’. I wish I’d asked for a cut of the royalties!

  All the groups would come in to listen to the American stuff we received. It was very exciting to be in the thick of all this. My parents were glad that I hadn’t gallivanted off anywhere further than Liverpool city centre, but they were keeping a watchful eye on me, wary that if I was daft enough to pack in a job at the tax office I might be daft enough to do anything. When I think about it I must have been a constant worry to my poor parents.

  At the time I’m sure my mother and father envisaged that I was up to all sorts but it was all quite innocent. The worst thing we did, I think, was to take something called Purple Hearts. They were given to us by our bosses at NEMS to get us through the night when we had a big record launch ahead of us. If someone had suggested to us that we were taking ‘drugs’ I’m sure we would have been horrified, but that’s exactly what we were doing. These cutely named pills were actually speed, but we didn’t think for a moment that we were doing anything illegal.

  By the time I was nineteen I had been seeing Norman for over two years. I was still going to the Cavern as often as possible as well as to another club called the Mardi Gras. One night I was out with my friend Bah when I bumped into the tour manager for the Swinging Blue Jeans. This was odd, as I thought that they were all away on tour together – or at least that was what Norman had told me.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, trying to be as casual as possible but sensing that something was wrong. ‘I thought you lot were on tour.’ My mouth had gone dry.

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Norman’s just gone off on holiday to the Canaries with a friend.’

  I knew exactly what ‘friend’ meant. I was devastated. I looked at Bah dumbly, wanting the ground to open up and swallow me. I turned away and ran from the club; I needed to get out of there. I went home and sobbed uncontrollably all night.

  The next morning I woke up and just thought, ‘Sod it!’ I was still devastated by this betrayal but it had galvanised me somehow. I knew that I had to stop living vicariously through other people and get on with my life and what I wanted to do. Norman came back from his week with his groupie, full of remorse. But I was gone; not interested. There were lots of people trying to persuade me to give Norman a second chance, his mother and sister rang me too, but I explained that I wasn’t going to get back with him. I needed to look at what I wanted to do, stop literally following the band.

  I have to say, even though I was so strong-willed at the time, Norman’s betrayal did affect me deeply. Until this point I think I had been entirely trusting and confident, but this experience really knocked my sense of self.

  Almost overnight I turned my back on the Liverpool scene. I didn’t have any regrets about doing this. The Beatles had moved to London and most of the other bands who had played at the Cavern had also made it big and left. I felt that I had been there for the best part of it. It had been two years of madness, the Beatles had come along and created this phenomenon that was the Mersey sound, and we all genuinely felt like we were part of something special, something that everyone in the country wanted to be a part of. But for me it now seemed the right time to move on.

  The last time I saw Paul was when the Beatles came back from London to appear at the Cavern. ‘She Loves You’ had just hit number one. I was with Paul, then George met us and Ringo came later. We were all going to a party but first we met for a drink. They were all nervous. Since they had left for London they had begun to worry that Liverpool would turn its back on them. That the city would see them as deserters.

  ‘Sod it,’ Paul said eventually. ‘Shall we go for a drive past the Cavern and see if there’s anyone there?’

  The gig was the next day but before the Beatles had left for London, people would queue the day before they played to ensure they had seats.

  We all piled into Paul’s bottle green Ford Classic and headed for Matthew Street. We turned the corner and there was a queue snaking along the street.

  ‘Is this for us?’ Ringo asked, craning his neck to look at the crowd.

  Matthew Street was so narrow that we couldn’t turn round, we had to keeping going. We drove on towards the crowd and as people began to realise that the car slowing down had the Beatles in it, I experienced Beatlemania first-hand. Paul wound the window down; girls were screaming, men were shaking his hand. The crowd surged around the car and it began to rock. I hid under the lads’ coats in the back and waited for the fuss to die down. Eventually Paul was allowed to wind his window up and we drove on. I came out from under my pile of coats.

  ‘Well, I think they still remember us,’ Ringo said drolly.

  We went to the party and that night Paul offered to drop me home. His pride-and-joy Ford began spluttering. Eventually it came to a shuddering halt just outside the abattoir. We both got out and stood for a moment, wondering what to do, until a taxi came our way and we flagged it down. The taxi driver couldn’t believe his eyes when he realised he had a real-life Beatle in his cab. Paul accompanied me back home, and we sat up chatting until the early hours – my mum and dad were away and there was no risk of the ‘dirty Beatle’ being escorted off the premises – and then he went on his way.

  That was the last time I saw Paul for many years. He went off to become part of the biggest band of all time and it was time for me to plough my own furrow.

  Chapter Four

  SINCE SCHOOL MY only real contact with the world of acting had been with the group from the Liverpool Institute. Now that I was determined to become an actress, I set about looking for somewhere that might give me some direction.

  I heard that a new theatre was being built by Pilkington’s, or ‘Pilks’ as it is locally known, a large glass manufacturers in St Helens. St Helens was only a bus ride away from Whiston, so heading there for work was only the same as working in Liverpool. Sir Harry Pilkington, the owner of the factory, was married to an actress and their daughter, April Wilding, was an actress too. They were very keen on the arts. The theatre had visiting companies bringing in different shows and I knew that if I could get involved it woul
d be great experience for me. I was also aware that if I got a job at Pilks it would make my parents happy, as the glass factory was seen as a good place to work. So I took myself off to St Helens to secure a job.

  I began work in the Pensions Department and immediately joined the amateur group. Of course, I didn’t like my new office job that much, but as with the tax office in Liverpool the people I worked with were great. I decided that I needed to tackle this job differently. I was going to come back from lunch for a start! I also decided that even if I didn’t like it, no one need know as I was going to approach it as if it were an acting role. Rather than slouch around the place making my discontent felt to all and sundry, I took on my new role of clerk with great gusto, became a whiz at filing and made sure that every single piece of documentation I had to deal with was in order. One of my responsibilities was paying out weekly pensions to past employees. This was the nicest part of the job, meeting the people that you were dealing with. After a few weeks I went along to the first casting for a play that was to be performed at the new theatre and was delighted to be given the role of a cockney maid. All the old people recognised me from pension day and cheered when I came on and there would be shouts of ‘Here she is!’ I still have the programme from that show, a treasured possession. My parents came to see me perform and they seemed to really enjoy it. There was an article in the Liverpool Echo about the show and when my mum died I found it among her possessions. I was really touched that she had cut it out and kept it.

  This was a peaceful time for me and for my parents. I had an office job, which pleased them, and I’m sure they thought that once I’d got this acting fad out of my system this job would offer security and a future. For me, I was heavily involved in the theatre and learning all the time so I was very happy. I had such a thirst to learn, to get to grips with everything that the theatre had to offer. I began working part-time at the theatre itself as well as in the office. It became like the Cavern, in as much as I was there as often as possible – it was my new haunt. I would operate the lights and do the amateur shows and work there at weekends, it was a big part of my life.