PAUL MCCARTNEY
photographed on his farm in Scotland by Linda McCartney ; 1970-1973.
After the Beatles thing became so depressing, Linda and I decided weâd get out of London and start living full-time on our small holding in Scotland. It was quite a difficult period because of the bandâs breakup, but it allowed me to see another side of myself. First and foremost, we did everything for ourselves, and at this point it was Linda, Heather, Mary â who was still a baby â and me. If we needed something to eat, weâd go into town in the little Land Rover, come back up, and cook it. We didnât have anyone helping us, except for one guy, the shepherd, because it was a little sheep farm. It was an experience that allowed me to be a man. If a picture needed hanging, I was your man. If something needed doing on the farm, Iâd do it. If we needed a new table, Iâd make it.Â
âWhen Winter Comesâ is a series of memories of activities that had enriched me; each one makes up a nice little scene. I would fix fences, dig a drain, keep some chickens, somehow plant a vegetable garden. These are things Iâd learnt. Youâve got to put a fence up or the fox will have your chickens. Youâve got to dig a drain because if the vegetable patch gets too wet, nothing will grow there. All these new experiences were feeding into the songs I was writing at the time, like âHeart of the Countryâ. Iâd grown up in Liverpool and gone on the road with The Beatles around the world and then around again, and now here I was on a farm in the middle of nowhere, and it was sensational. There wasnât a bath in this little farmhouse, but there was a big steel tub in which theyâd cleaned the milking equipment, so we would just start filling this thing and about two hours later it would be ready. It wasnât quick, but that was the joy of it. Weâd get towels and just run â because the bath was in the barn next door, and it was bloody cold in the winter. Weâd run in and jump in this bath, which was not easy to get into. But we were young and vigorous, and the kids were too young to know to complain. Weâd jump in the big tub and have this fantastic Japanese-style bath. This was the kind of thing Iâd never done, ever, in my life, and it was amazingly liberating. I got to do all the things I think a lot of young people still dream about today â the famous âgap yearâ. I sense a lot of people want that freedom, escaping the rat race.Â
âI must find the time to plant some treesâ. That was something else Iâd actually done, though Iâd planted them very badly. But we were learning these new skills, and it was fun, and now Iâm a dab hand at it. I just lifted a piece of sod, stuck the roots of a little one-foot seedling underneath it and plonked the sod back down. In Scotland the weather can be harsh, and this was a hill farm, so there werenât really many trees to speak of. On the hills where we were, the only things that could really survive were Douglas fir or Norway spruce and the like. By the time I wrote this song, around the early 1990s, those little one-foot things Iâd planted in Scotland were bloody giants â thirty-foot giants.Â
Paul talking about âWHEN WINTER COMESâ in The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present.
izzy806
gummygunk
amandla
dailybridgerton
prguitarman
theartofmadeline
