When we were boys there were Beatles, as chance and good fortune had it at the time. Wondrously so. Then when there were no more Beatles, as their time together became part of everyone’s past, so we were no longer boys. But grown and ready to get on with whatever might come next in our lives. Coloured in as we had been, and wondrously so, by Beatles.
Before that though in late September of 1969, when we were almost grown, almost colored in and there were still Beatles, there came a knock on the door at 12 Hillary Cresecent. And it was my best friend Paul. Carrying his reel to reel tape recorder and saying "I've got it!" as he walked into our house with a tape of “Abbey Road."
But before we plug in, thread the spools and "Come Together" starts playing let's go back to when the 1960s started. Which for me was on 19th January 1963. Then this chapter of the story will walk us through the whole rest of a decade’s transformation of us and of British society. “The days of dash and daring” as Derek Taylor, publicist to The Beatles themselves, would later call the time.
Then, 19th January, 1963
Maghull
Before now the late nineteen fifties and early sixties had been full of the usual boy things for the child we last saw watching the 1958 World Cup Final with his dad. I'd had my tonsils taken out, because that's what happened to snuffly sore-throated children then. My sister Debbie had been born, completing the Hughes family. And I'd started school on the same day as discovering I was something called a Catholic. Also, my prescribed football team Liverpool FC had finally managed to get themselves promoted to the First Division.
But there weren't yet Beatles. And I can’t really bring this story into the 1960s until there are.
They’d been somewhere of course, and for quite a long time by now. Playing the Cavern, meeting Brian Epstein, going to Hamburg and finding those haircuts. But they weren't in my life until 19th January1963, the day before my 9th Birthday, when me and most of the country first saw them on a TV programme called "Thank Your Lucky Stars."
So my version of the 1960s and all that colouring in had begun. Gradually at first. It was after all only the ok “Love Me Do" they’d sung that night. But as "From Me To You" followed "Please Please Me" and was itself soon followed by "She Loves You" and with EPs and LPs coming out and into the singles chart too, the monochrome sky of the 1950s got bluer by the day, the hills turned greener and all the rivers sparkled. Especially our River Mersey here in Liverpool where the beloved boys came from. And from where, as far as I was concerned, the whole transformation had started. The transformation of the decade, the country and the lives of the likes of me and Paul.1Long ago, as it was, when we were boys.
Which, breaking into here as if this story were a musical, I would attempt to sum up years later in a song of my own, Written when Paul and I were forty, and called “When We Were Boys.”
Long ago when we were boys
And there were forty years less traffic noise
Northway was a single carriage road, long ago
The Meadows seemed like miles away
But we'd go exploring every day
Far beyond the fields we'd know
Forty years ago.Prefab houses, Foxhouse Lane
Our friend David Wilson loved The Hollies
We never saw him after junior school
David Kubiski too
“Oh won't you stay, just a little bit longer"
Listening to Brian Matthew in your kitchen
Forty years of me and you.When we were boys
Later on, you at the door
We thought there might not be any more
You smiling coming in with "Abbey Road"
Taped off Tony MacAleavey
Me and you setting up your reel to reel
Then analysing every note
All those northern years ago.When we were boys
Laughing on a swing bridge
Being alive felt like a privilege
Buying singles we could barely afford
Me and you and Barry Ward
And remember Barry telling us
That his sister Hilary had got an LP
By The Beatles?Everything was always getting better, we flew right round the moon
Seemed like Liverpool really mattered
We collected autographs
Ian St John and Brian Harris
We talked about the girls in our class
Catherine Simm and Sheila McIlroy
And there were forty years less traffic noiseWhen we were boys.
Here’s the song itself, if you’d like to listen like this really has turned into a musical.
And it's all in there really. The thrill, the confidence and the joy of living out in all that space, in the new beginnings of our new town, on the outer edges of Liverpool in the 1960s. But now?
Well it was certainly a time of transition and opening up for the whole country and society, not just me. But of course it hadn’t started with The Beatles or even in Liverpool. More likely with the actions of whole generations of our parents, planners and politicians before us. Including the trade unions, the war-time coalition, soldiers reading the Beveridge Report in 1942, the ‘45 Labour government and, yes, the still continuing at the time post-war consensus method of running the country between the two main political parties.
“Running the country” having first turned up as a concept for me early in our Maghull days, when my dad had walked me over the farmer’s field to the local library one day and explained how the place worked.
That I could pick the books I wanted and take them home. Then after we or rather he had read them to me, we'd bring them back.
“It's part of how we've decided to run the country. Books are important and this is a good way of making sure everyone can read all the books they want whether or not they can afford to buy them” he’d said.
Educating his little son in the gently British version of socialism.
As soon as I was then considered old enough to venture out walking on my own, and that was much much younger than it is for children these days, I haunted that library. And began the serious business of reading it. I'd soon exhausted the children's section and by the age of nine would be spending such long hours in the library, reading books in the adult side on football, cricket and motor racing, but also stronger stuff like Sherlock Holmes and George Orwell (“Animal Farm' to get you going” my dad recommended) that by the age of nine the kindly librarian there had given me the precious gift of an adult card. So I could take the whole library home in regular instalments.
The beginning of my reading life then. The walking too, and of always having a book with me every time I’d set off, often with Paul but also on my own, to see where every road and footpath out of Maghull led to. I felt like I was outside for most of that decade.2
Except for when I’d stay in on long summer days watching Test Matches on the television. The West Indians and Australia seasons I especially remember. I’d read books of Wisden then, scores and batting averages like they were fine literature, and was even a regular in the school cricket team. The only sport I was ever very good at. Until my interest disappeared, never to have much returned, as the sixties ended. Which had also happened to my being a Roman Catholic. Neither of these surviving the transition time of my adolescence.
Oh yes, I was only ever a Catholic in the 1960s. So let’s talk about that.
Before I started school I have no memories of being brought up as a religious child. I can’t imagine I wasn’t mind, as my dad was always very devout. But I have no memories of churches or prayers from then. Then after my first day at school it was never in doubt that I was a Catholic and that school and religion were a double-act.
And the church and God part of that was ok, then. I liked the rituals, the buildings and the sense of eternal certainty. And by the time of secondary school Paul and I were both proud to be altar boys who got picked to be among the servers at the opening celebrations for the Catholic Cathedral in town, in spring 1967, the peak of our altar boy careers.
Looking back though I have no doubt this interlinking of church and school did interfere with my education. At the infants and juniors in Maghull, which were otherwise innocuously pleasant, the hardline nun who was the non-teaching Head was a violent menace who'd regularly interfere in lessons and belittle or even attack any child given half an excuse. In my case, one time, for the sin of looking like my brother who’d been found at playtime reading The Beano.
At the secondary school in Bootle, which was run by an order of priests, there were none of them anything like as bad as the hardline nun. But even there music and religion lessons would often be given over to practicing for regular and obligatory services in the school chapel. My eventual refusal to attend these as my Catholicism waned with my adolescence being a big part of the reason I was, in the end and to my relief, expelled from the school. For the waning, the refusal and what I now remember as a few acts of mild adolescent rebellion they didn’t even try to cope with. Including the apparently mortal sin of having hair that touched my collar.
So I went somewhere more grown up, Wigan Tech, to finish my interrupted A-levels. Grew my hair half way down my back and was joined there by several friends from school, including Paul.
So that’s school, but the God part of religion? I always tell people my belief disappeared overnight but I think it had been more like an ebbing away. And that I’d only carried on going to church for so long out of habit and because it was expected by the priests and my parents.
As an aside, as readers of my writing over the past couple of years will know, I’ve had a think about religion again. Reasoning that because a lot of people do seem to return to it as late life and thoughts of a possible afterlife loom then perhaps I should have a think about all that myself. My spiritual explorations then including a stay at a monastery, some time as a visiting Quaker and a good few blog posts. But ending up content in my unknowing about an afterlife, and with my continuing absence of belief in any kind of God. The “lapsing,” as Catholics call it, of my 1960s faith having turned out to be permanent.
Unlike walking, reading and music. Which have remained three of the principal pillars of my life, along with a fourth that turned up late in the sixties. Which I’ll call beginning to care. Because before then, well I’d never looked very far beyond myself. From a life that was busy, full and going so well I’d assumed it was, like my song says “always getting better” for everyone else too. Until the day I learned it wasn’t. Which happened when I was on a bus going into town and saw a Shelter poster about poverty and homelessness in a part of Liverpool that was news to me called Granby. But I think I’ll write about that when this story reaches the 1970s, when I’ll get old enough to start doing something about it.
Now, 7th November 2023
Three chapters into all this then, and I’ve been thinking. About the nature of memoir. And how there's no absolute requirement on me to write about everything in this that's ever happened to me. Is there?
And I’m thinking this now because I want to explain something before the story goes any further.
To explain how a decade that began with the Hughes family sat around the dining room table after tea playing Happy Families could end with me and them growing steadily apart. For the principal reason, and I say this after a lifetime's reflection, that my mother Rose and I didn't really like each other. A fact which, over time, ended up also estranging me from the rest of the family in my increasing avoidance of her.
When I was tiny and hadn't had much to say for myself all was fine, of course. But some time in the later Maghull years I remember Joe, my dad, saying these words of wisdom after yet another incident:
"Come on Rose, you can't bring them up to think for themselves and then blame them when they do."
But she did, relentlessly.
And I don't want or intend to have to write about all the incidents that resulted from this all the rest of the way through a memoir of what’s been, on the whole, a happy life. Just because my mother and I didn't really like each other.
So I won't. It being in the nature of memoir to not have to write about everything.
Next time: I’m going to stay with the 1960s and have a sideways look at what would later be known as culture. But I’ll be calling my chapter “The Other Songs On The Wireless.” About what was happening for me and my friends as well as the music of The Beatles.
Then before long? I’ll be starting work, having my first go at university, leaving Maghull and moving back to Walton. Plus, there’ll be David Bowie. All coming soon.
But for now and here let’s bring this ramble round my own version of the 1960s to its conclusion on the day Paul’s turned up at our house in with “Abbey Road.” A golden ending to the only decade of our lives when there’d have been Beatles all the way through. Brought to a sublime conclusion that September afternoon when we sat down, pushed “Play” and began listening to perfection...
”Here come old flat top, he come grooving up slowly…”
And all those other wondrous songs.
My friend Paul, by the way, is Paul Du Noyer, who has gone on to a life of writing about music in many a publicationincluding his near definitive book on Liverpool music “Wondrous Stories.”
Much more about Maghull can be found in these archive posts. Several written with my other main boyhood friend Barry Ward. On “Food in the 1960s” - “Sweets” - “Ice Cream, lemonade and crisps” - “Autographs” - “Games” - and “Snow.” A thorough social history of what mattered to suburban boys on the outer edges of Liverpool back then, I hope you’ll agree.
I absolutely love the idea of the Beatles colouring in our lives. I was 10 years too late for them, so growing up, I took them for granted and feasted on Two Tone and Indie. But as all that faded, they started to creep into my consciousness, everything from Rubber Soul onwards, and I realised what joyful, rebellious, thoughtful souls they were, and what magic they made. I'm off to listen to Abbey Road, which can never be a bad thing.