‘I used to think, how far can it go? Every newspaper was full every day of the police having to keep the kids back. All that free publicity. Brian never had to pay for any of it.
‘I think their secret was they were attractive to the kids because they represented their frame of mind, they represented freedom and rebellion. And they liked doing it so much, that’s why they did it so well.’
I stayed with Jim, and his new wife Angie, several times in their home, and always had a very enjoyable evening. When he came to London, he used to ring me and come round for tea. One night, when I was staying with him in Cheshire, Paul had sent up an advance copy of ‘When I’m Sixty-four’, which he said he had written with his dad in mind. That evening, they must have played it about 20 times, dancing round and round the drawing room. I was convinced Jim was going to have a heart attack. Angie, a much younger lady, was encouraging him to jump about.
Michael, Paul’s younger brother, was also living at home at that stage, and he told a story about Paul’s innate sense of diplomacy, which he had always noticed, ever since his young days.
‘I was in Paris with them, and George Martin had arranged for them to sing “She Loves You” in German. He waited in this studio for them for two hours, and they didn’t turn up. George arrives at the hotel where we all were, the George V, and when they see him come in, they all dive under the tables. “Are you coming to do it or not?” asked George. John said no. Then George and Ringo also said no. Paul said nothing.
‘They all went back to their meal. Then a bit later, Paul suddenly turned to John and said, heh, you know that so and so line, what if we did it this way? John listened to what Paul said, thought a bit, and said yeh, that’s it.
‘That had been the real reason why they hadn’t turned up. But without arguing, Paul had cleverly brought the subject round again, sorted it out. Before long, they all got up and went off to the studio.’
Mimi was the only one who had left the Liverpool area, coming down to the South Coast to a new bungalow near Bournemouth. She too had found her life in Liverpool taken over by the fans, though she had always tried to be kind to them, searching round for some old object belonging to John to give them.
‘One day I at last couldn’t find anything. “Not even a button?” this girl said. Well, I’ve always had a phobia for cutting buttons off all clothes before throwing them out. So I got out my big button tin I’d had for years and gave her one. She threw her arms round me and kissed me. She said she’d never forget it. She later wrote and said she was wearing it on a gold chain round her neck and all the girls in her factory were jealous.’
This naturally led to all the other girls in the factory writing to Mimi for John’s buttons, and then fans everywhere, as the story got round. ‘I’ve sent buttons to every country in the world. America, Czechoslovakia, everywhere.’
In the end she was very upset by two fans who had broken into her house when she was ill in bed upstairs. She’d left the back door open for the doctor and when she heard noises down below, she thought it must be burglars. She crept downstairs, expecting to be attacked, and found two girls, stretched out on her brand new sofa, with a pile of used toffee papers all round them. She told them to go, furious that they had come in without asking, making her house a public property. They did at last leave, but on the way they stole her back door key. Mimi sat down and cried.
‘I was like that when the bread man arrived. He very kindly phoned his works and a man came and put a new lock and key on the door. It was the Scott’s bread man. One of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me.’ It was not long after this that Mimi decided to leave Liverpool completely.
It’s interesting to think, all these years later, that many of those Beatle souvenirs are now turning up at Sotheby’s in London and being sold for a fortune, before going on to decorate the games room or the bar of some Japanese millionaire.
Mimi was very helpful to me, on my visits to her, though so many of her stories about John as a little boy seemed to clash with his own versions, given by John himself, and by his school friends.
In Mimi’s eyes, John had a perfect middle-class upbringing. Yes, he could be naughty now and again, but more on the lines of Just William and his pranks, nothing nasty or horrible and certainly not criminal. She didn’t know where such tales came from. Her own stories were mainly about John’s early childhood, almost as if she had drawn a veil over most of the rest, determined to keep him young and sweet and innocent for ever, at least in her mind.
Even when she witnessed a triumphal Beatle concert in Liverpool at Christmas 1963, their first return after their number-one record success, her mind still went back to John’s early days. She was standing at the back, having refused to sit in a front-row seat.
‘It was at the Liverpool Empire. I was looking at John on the stage, but all I could see was him as a little boy. I always used to take him to the Empire at Christmas for his annual treat. I remember the time we’d seen Puss in Boots. It had been snowing and John’s Wellingtons were still on in the theatre. When Puss came on in his big boots, John stood up and shouted, “Mimi, he’s got his Wellington boots on! So have I.” His little voice was heard everywhere and everyone looked at him and smiled.
‘I was very proud of course to see him playing on the stage at the Empire. It was the first time I realized what an effect they had. There were mounted police to restrain the crowds. Bessie Braddock was standing with me at the back. It was very exciting.
‘But I couldn’t help thinking all the time, no, he’s not really a Beatle, he’s the little fellow who once sat upstairs with me and shouted “Mimi — he’s got his Wellington boots on.”’
It is true, if you look at the snapshots of John when he was very little — especially the polyphoto strip — he does look a very appealing, innocent little boy.
One of the problems about piecing together the Beatles’ early childhood life was the fact that there were two missing parents. Julia, John’s mother, was, of course, long dead, and so was Paul’s. I knew that Ringo’s real father, who had got divorced from his mother Elsie many years ago, was still alive. And I also suspected that Freddie Lennon, or ‘that Alfred’, as the Mimi side of the family always called him, was still around somewhere. There had at least been no news of Freddie’s death. Throughout all of John’s school life, Mimi dreaded Alfred turning up one day. I contacted shipping companies and hotels where he was supposed to have worked as a washer-up and failed at first to get any news of him.
I had better luck tracking down Ringo’s father, also called Richard or Ritchie. In my first letter, I rather upset him by spelling his name wrong. Tut tut. I was never much good at spelling. I addressed him as Mr Starkie, instead of Mr Starkey. All Beatle fans know that. He reprimanded me in his reply, but said he was willing to talk to me.
He was living in Crewe, working partly as a window cleaner. He did not have a lot to tell me, but I very much admired how he had kept away from Ringo after the divorce, and even now, when his son was famous, he was not cashing in in any way and stoutly refused to contact Ringo or his former wife.
Apart from the parents, I also spent a lot of time in the Liverpool area, tracking down school friends, schoolmasters, people who played with them, at one time, in the Quarrymen.