I honestly think it was more than a stolen watch. Paul shows signs of a severe facial injury in his adolescence that affected his lower left lip and left a substantial scar at that same area, going down his chin. Not the sort of injury you get from a couple of bullies taking your watch. He was made to testify in court, again seems like a lot for a boy's stolen watch. I'd love to get my hands on the court records but they're probably sealed or whatever. I think he was seriously assaulted when he was about 12 and needed substantial surgeries to fix his face. Someday I will write a long post on that, when I have energy. But you can see that his lip was usually "fixed" in photos, and the scars hidden under pancake makeup until around 1965, when he seemed like he was done with makeup.
Age 19, a party at Rory's
You can see the lip anomaly at the Yellow Submarine premier.
AHDN shot, the lip poorly "corrected" and a glimpse of the bigger scar:
Much clearer in the 1965 Bailey photo. You can see where Bailey's studio "fixed" the lip, but the scars are clear:
Sometimes, when speaking or lip-synching the lower left lip would go a little haywire, as though he didn’t have perfect control of injured nerves?
Around at 12, very skinny, perhaps unable to eat due to his injury? UPDATE: thanks to @downthepub notice that this pic is used in the lyric video for “Home to Us” showing up after the line “the world around us wasn’t safe…” it’s flipped but it’s the same picture! All four boys seem to have facial injuries. Perhaps a treatment facility? It’s an odd photo in many ways. But it’s included in the video…
Around age 13, chubbier and healing:
His whole left face has indications of healing going on in that picture. And then, the scars:
It looks like there might have even been some sort of prosthetic helping his cheek.
This is all speculation but very interesting. One thing to consider is that if something violent did happen to Paul when he was young, it would explain a lot about his anxiety, the self-consoling hugs, his unwillingness to give himself away.
One more shot, because it's also interesting. We've all seen this:
When looking at it (and note, he's not riding, he's standing on a step, posing with what looks to be a brand new bike, perhaps replacing what was lost on that day), I noticed something shiny at his neck and, since his mother was Catholic, I wondered if it was a religious medal. I used filters to see, because sometimes you really can see more with a filter and colored it, and what I found was that it's not a religious medal. It looks like Paul's head is laying on a brace of some sort, possibly to permit healing (as with a prosthetic) without gravity affecting it? Either way you can clearly see that the right side of his head is resting on the brace, the rod of it coming up from under his shirt.
Poor lad certainly went through something. No wonder he is such a stubborn mystery.
Btw, I wrote a short fiction of Paul and Ringo showing each other their scars. It's FICTION, and you can find it at A03 but I just had to write about it.
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