oh my god please post the chapter of the girl who imagined john and paul were her parents
I was born in 1960 and the Beatles were an integral part of my childhood. They were never not on the turntable of my older half-siblings' record players, so that their songs really did seem to be the soundtrack to life itself. The gaps between the release of their records - in some cases as little as only months apart - seemed interminable, as distant and as longed-for as the beginning of the school holidays appeared to be, on the first day of a new term.
I was the sort of child who had an imaginary friend. This perhaps explains why I thought of Paul and John as essentially a second mum and dad. Or it could be a case of extreme narcissism. In any case, my real-life father was a bespectacled writer and could be difficult, preoccupied and a bit grumpy: John shared these characteristics. Paul, though, was cosy and round-faced and chipper; all qualities you'd want in a mother. I felt that, if Paul was my mum, all the children in my class would want to come back to mine for tea. He'd whistle along with the kettle and flash his cheeky grin and everyone would think my family were the nicest, happiest family.
All children long for their parents to love each other, and so it was with me and Paul and John. When they came on the telly, I was hungry for evidence of their mutual affection - and there it was: the complicit smirking, the suppressed giggles; like Dud and Pete with guitars. Dad/John was cleverer than Mum/Paul, and even a bit sarky sometimes; but Mum/Paul could handle him, coax him towards good humour.
I didn't really know that they wrote songs separately until The White Album came out and my half-brother told me that John had written Julia about his own, dead mother. This brought up feelings too complicated to be easily managed. How was it possible that there were things about John/Dad I didn't know? In real life, too, there was a paternal grandmother I had never known, so this was at least feasible. But why had I never seen a photograph of John's mother, when she was, in a sense, my own grandmother?
My main concern was how it could be possible that Paul and John wrote songs apart when they were indivisible. Lennon/McCartney: one entity. On the other hand, this revelation did make sense of quite a lot of their output. Clearly, Paul/Mum was thinking of the family when composing such child-friendly tunes as 'The Fool on the Hill', 'I Will', 'Martha, My Dear' and - of course - 'Your Mother Should Know'. Whereas John/Dad had obviously gone off to sulk in his writing room and compose peculiar stuff like 'I Am the Walrus'. This had its equivalent in real life, where my actual father would be in the library thinking about the Cantos of Ezra Pound while my mother was in the kitchen tapping her foot to Fred Astaire singing Cole Porter.
The news of their split, which came in April 1970, was cataclysmic. (Decades later, my own daughters would take the news of Geri's departure from the Spice Girls with the same horror and disbelief.) A divorce! Breaking up the family! It wasn't possible, surely? Could it be legal, even? Someone would stop them and bang their heads together and tell them to think of the kids - wouldn't they?
And then, with a sickening inevitability, came the step-families. At least Linda had a kind face and obviously made Paul/Mum happy. But she did bring her daughter, Heather, into the new family; which meant that Paul/Mum now lived with an actual little girl of his own. Competition, a usurper. Whereas Yoko... well, John/Dad didn't look at all OK. He was pale and unshaven and remote. (The fact that Yoko had a daughter too didn't register until I was a grown-up.) Also, why did she have to be around, ALL THE TIME? How would I ever get a minute alone with him, now? These puzzles and resentments and sorrows went on for a least two years, possibly three. Then in time I became a teenager and forgot all about my parents and only thought about the Jackson Five and the Bay City Rollers and how to style my hair like Suzi Quatro.
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, Craig Brown (2020)
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