‘There weren’t many other kids from the Institute living round our way. I was called a college pudding, fucking college puddin’ was what they said.
‘All I wanted was women, money and clothes. I used to do a bit of stealing, things like ciggies. We’d go into empty shops, when the man was in the house part at the back, and take some before he came in. For years, what I wanted out of life was £100. I thought with that I could have a house, a guitar and a car. So, if money had been the scene, I’d have gone wild.’
However, Paul wasn’t all that useless at school. In 1953, he got a school prize for an essay — a special Coronation Prize, a book called Seven Queens of England by Geoffrey Trease, published by Heinemann, which he still has. He always got good marks for all his essays. ‘I remember a school inspector once asking me how I could write such a technical essay about potholing. I’d heard it all on the earphones in bed. They were marvellous, just lying in bed listening to the radio. Did incredible things to your imagination.’
Jim had rigged up a set of earphones for each of them in bed, as an attempt to get them to bed early, keep them there and stop them from fighting. They did fight a lot, but not more than most brothers. Michael used to call Paul ‘Fatty’ to annoy him. ‘He had been beautiful as a baby, with big eyes and long eyelashes,’ says Jim. ‘People used to say, “Oh, he’ll break all the girls’ hearts one of these days.”’ But as an early teenager, he went through a chubby stage.
The McCartneys moved from Ardwick when Paul was about 13. His mother gave up being a domiciled midwife, though she later went back to being a health visitor.
They got a council house at 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton, where Paul spent all his boyhood from then on. It is in the middle of a low terrace row, a bit poky and insignificant, but neat and clean. Menlove Avenue was now just two miles away.
They hadn’t been at Forthlin Road very long — Paul was just 14 — when his mother suddenly started to suffer pains in her breast. They went on for about three or four weeks, coming and going, but she put it down to the menopause. She was then 45. ‘It must be the change,’ she used to say to Jim. She told various doctors but they agreed that was what it was and told her to forget it. But she kept having them, and more and more seriously.
One day Michael came into the house suddenly and found her crying. He thought it was because he and Paul must have been doing something they shouldn’t have been doing. ‘We could be right bastards.’ But he never asked her what it was. She never told them. But she decided this time to see a specialist. He diagnosed cancer. They operated and she died. It had all happened within a month of first having had any serious pains.
‘It just knocked me down,’ says Jim. ‘I couldn’t understand it. It was awful for the boys. Michael especially was still only 12 and very close to her. They didn’t break down or anything. It just hit them very slowly.’
‘I can’t remember the details of the day we were told,’ says Michael. ‘All I can remember is one of us, I don’t remember who, making a silly joke. For months we both regretted it.’
Paul remembers what it was. ‘It was me. The first thing I said was, “What are we going to do without her money?”’
But they both cried on their own in bed that night. For days afterwards Paul prayed for her to come back. ‘Daft prayers, you know, if you bring her back, I’ll be very, very good for always. I thought, it just shows how stupid religion is. See, the prayers didn’t work, when I really needed them to.’
The two boys moved out for a few days, during the funeral, to stay with their Aunt Jinny. ‘I think Dad didn’t want us to see him breaking up,’ says Paul. ‘It was a bit of a drag at Aunt Jinny’s. We both had to sleep in the same bed.’
Jim was left with the biggest problem. He’d never done much in the house, as his wife was so organized. He was now left, at 53, to bring up two boys of 14 and 12, through perhaps their most difficult years. He had money problems as well. His wife as a midwife had made more than him, as Paul had so cruelly mentioned. By 1956, Jim’s salary was only £8 a week. Every other working man was at least feeling the beginnings of affluence, but the cotton trade, in which you were supposed to be secure for life, was having a very tough time.
Two of his sisters helped a great deal — Aunt Milly and Aunt Jinny. One of them would come one day a week to Forthlin Road to clean out the house properly. And when the boys were young, they often popped round in the evening to let them in from school.
‘The winters were bad,’ says Jim. ‘The boys had to light the fires themselves when they came home from school. I did all the cooking.
‘The biggest headache was what sort of parent was I going to try to be. When my wife had been alive, I’d been the one who chastised them. I delivered the hard stuff when it was needed. My wife had done the soft stuff. If we sent them to bed without their supper, it would be her who took something up to them in bed later, though it would probably be my idea.
‘Now I had to decide whether to be a father or a mother or both, or rely on them and just be friends and all help each other.
‘I had to rely on them a lot. I would say, “Don’t come in when you come home from school unless one of your aunts is here.” Otherwise, they would have their friends in and wreck the place.
‘I’d come home and find five eggs gone. They wouldn’t let on at first, saying they didn’t know what had happened to them. Then they’d say, oh yes, we did give the lads a fried egg each.
‘By and large, they were quite good. But I missed my wife. It knocked me for six when she died.’
Michael particularly doesn’t know how his father managed it. ‘We were terrible and cruel. He was bloody marvellous. And all that time without a woman. I can’t imagine it. Paul owes a lot to his dad. We both do.’
Both of them used to mock his two pet bits of homespun philosophy. ‘Here he comes, with his two ‘ations,’ they used to say. Jim used to tell them that the two most important things in life were toleration and moderation.
‘Toleration is very important,’ says Jim. ‘They would laugh at people with infirmities, as kids do. I’d explain to them how they wouldn’t like it. And moderation, a lot of trouble is caused without that. You’re always hearing people say, “I’d string the bugger up,” without thinking carefully about what would be the best for someone.’
Jim always did think about what was the best for people. He has a natural charm and courtesy with everyone, but it’s not just the salesman’s cosy touch, it’s much deeper and more genuine than that. In the hands of a less thoughtful or considerate father, they could easily have broken out when their mother died.
From his mother Paul seems to have inherited his capacity for hard work and dedication. He is the sort of person who can always get things done, when he wants to.
In some ways Paul despised school and the whole system of passing on processed rules, as much as John did. But there was a part of him which didn’t want to let himself down. He could always turn on the hard work, even in little bursts, enough to get him through. John became completely bolshie and uncooperative. Paul could never be that.
His brother Michael thinks there was one direct result in Paul of their mother’s death.
‘It was just after mother’s death that it started. It became an obsession. It took over his whole life. You lose a mother — and you find a guitar? I don’t know. Perhaps it just came along at that time and became an escape. But an escape from what?’