We used to be The Beatles
Tony Bell
Title and words: Copyright Tony Bell 2007

This is a sample of the book, with just the first five or six chapters on view here. Any comments - positive or otherwise! - can be left on the website message page.

In late 1960, The Beatles - whose line-up at that time was John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best and Stu Sutcliffe - split up briefly after they came home from Hamburg. They didn't see each other for nearly a month, but they eventually got back together and we know the rest...
This story imagines what their lives would have been like if they didn't get back together. It picks them up in the summer of 1980, with John approaching his 40th birthday.

Chapter 1

July 4 1980

The white Ford Escort slowed and turned into a gateway on the narrow country lane. The driver turned the engine off and wound the window down,  leaned back into the headrest and closed his eyes. A faint smile appeared on his lips when he heard the skylarks, the quintessential sound of summer, whirling high overhead. 
Five minutes went by. He was just beginning to drift into a dream when the spell was broken by the roar of an approaching motorbike. He tutted, waiting for the sound to fade into the distance, but the moment had gone.
He switched the radio on, turning up the volume when he heard the intro to Slade's Coz I luv you. It was the Golden Oldies spot, which, as far as he was concerned, was the only thing worth listening to on Radio 1. Most music was crap these days, he always said. And every time he said it, he recognised it as a sign that he was getting older.
He remembered people saying exactly the same thing when he was a teenager, and the smile became a wry one with the realistion that those ’squares’ as he called them were probably the same age, or even younger, than he was now.
He loosened his tie, the late afternoon sun encouraging his relaxed state. He liked the raw energy of Noddy Holder's voice. It reminded the driver of himself in the old days, although he never managed to sound as raucous as Noddy. He closed his eyes again, and, just as Coz I luv you faded out, the smile transformed into a broad grin. He leaned forward, turned the radio off, then rattled out a manic drumbeat on the steering wheel. 'Six weeks. Six whole weeks. Forty three days away from that fuckin' place! Yes!' 
And then he let out - what he would later recognise as a somewhat self-conscious - whoop of joy.
The cow on the other side of the gate stopped grazing, its attention momentarily distracted from chewing its way through the meadow by the commotion. It stared at the shape which was responsible for the noise. The man behind the wheel peered through the windscreen and said 'How now, brown cow', and laughed again.
He adjusted the rear-view mirror so he could see the lower half of his face. This moustache has got to go. How long have I had it? Fifteen years? Yes. Since I started teacher training.
He’d shaved the beard off two years earlier, around about the same time that he’d finally relented and had a proper haircut.  It was just over his collar these days, and he winced when he pictured his hirsute former self.
He flicked the mirror back into position, then tore off the hated tie, throwing it onto the back seat in a deliberately careless gesture, knowing it would remain where it landed for the next six weeks. 
The cow maintained it's vigilance for a few moments. Sensing there was no threat, it lost interest, bowed its head and carried on chewing.
'You haven't got a clue, have you? There you are, munching away, without a care in the world. And you're gonna end up as glue on an envelope, but you don't know that so you don't care about the future, do you? And d'you know what? Neither do I. Not today anyway.'
John Lennon enjoyed the last day of the school summer term. It was, as he always said to his friends, 'the best fuckin' day of the year'. And when the last day of term coincided with a glorious afternoon such as this, it didn't get any better. He stepped out of the car and locked the driver’s door. 'Not that anybody's going to nick this heap', he said to the cow. The cow ignored him.
'Just like being back in the friggin' classroom', he muttered.
He took his jacket off and threw it over his right shoulder, dangling it by the loop on the collar with his forefinger, while his left hand rattled the loose change in the pocket of his brown cordorouy trousers. He raised his face to the sky, basking in the rays of sunshine. It was hot, the hottest day of the year so far, the forecast on Radio 4 that morning had promised. A thought crossed his mind: 'Cows can get sunburn, can‘t they? Or is that pigs?'
He wasn't sure. It was something he had once read in a magazine, something about farmers having to apply sun cream to their stock in order to protect them. The thought evaporated as quickly as it had formed, and John carried on with his walk.
He breathed in the fresh country air and headed down the high hedged lane towards the footpath which would take him to Storeton Woods. This walk in the Wirral countryside had been a ritual for the last fifteen years. It was a demarcation line, the sign that he was free from the miserable treadmill of teaching. He knew that, in three or four weeks, the familiar dread feelings about the first day of the new term in September would arise and the gloom would descend. But for the moment, he was determined to enjoy his freedom.
Climbing over the stile, John carefully navigated his way through the cowpats in the field next to the old RAF gunsite, a relic of  the second world war which was now overgrown and surrounded by tall trees. Years ago, shortly after he had moved to the Wirral from Liverpool, he had explored the gunsite, but was disappointed to find that only the foundations of the buildings remained. A cast iron boot scraper on a step was the only evidence of the people who spent six years of their lives in this place.
Everytime he walked through these fields, John wondered what life had been like for the guys based here forty years earlier, the men whose job it had been, night after night throughout the blitz, to try and shoot down the Luftwaffe bombers as they headed for Liverpool and Birkenhead with their deadly cargo.
There was a reason for John's interest in this little piece of war history. 'Just think,' he often said to his wife. 'If one of those Jerry planes had been on target, I wouldn't be here today.'
John was born during an air raid on Liverpool, and he often found himself toying with the notion of 'What If?'.
This trait wasn't restricted to the war and the possibility of a bomb landing on the hospital where he had left his mother's womb.
'What ifs?' took up an unhealthy proportion of his time, he knew this was the case because his wife told him often enough that he spent too much time dwelling on what might have been.
But he was about to do something which he believed would put an end to his prediliction for thinking about the past, once and for all. 
As he trekked up the shallow gradient towards the woods, John considered the tactics he would employ when he arrived home. This was the day, he had decided, that he was going to tell his wife that, no matter what she said, no matter how much she argued and ranted, he was going to do what he had wanted to do for so long. He sat on the trunk of a fallen tree and took in the view across the patchwork of Wirral fields and beyond, to the hills of North Wales. He reached into the jacket pocket and pulled out a packet of Benson and Hedges and his Zippo lighter, dipping his head cupping his hand across his mouth to protect the flame from the breeze.
Blowing the smoke into the air he said: ‘You only live once, and you're a long time dead‘, then looked around to reassure himself that some passing walker wouldn't think they had come across a nutter talking to himself.
But it was okay. He was alone. As he smoked the cigarette, he had a final mental run through of the speech he intended to deliver later. He was going to do it. He was going to do the thing he should have done years ago, and she wasn’t going to stop him this time.
Flicking the cigarette into the grass, he stood up and shouted ‘Yes! The Beatles are going to make a comeback!’
As he grinned at the prospect, he was startled by a voice which came from behind him.
‘All well and good mate, but that ciggy could start a fire y’know’.
John turned to see an elderly man walking his dog. The man regarded him as one might when discovering a nutter talking to himself, and nodded accusingly towards the still smoking cigarette butt.
‘Er, yeah, you’re right,’  said John sheepishly. ‘I’ll put it out. Don’t want to start a fire, do we?’

Chapter 2
It is 11.30 on the night of July 7 1980, and Paul McCartney was tired. He lit another cigarette hoping that the nicotine would propel him into the state he needed to be in. He knew that it wouldn't, it never did, but he lit up anyway. Maybe it was time for another coffee. He realised he hadn't finished off the last polysterene cup of sweet tasting gloop from the vending machine, and promised that he would wait at least half an hour before enduring another.
Paul was more than tired, he told himself, he was physically drained, and the phone on his desk hadn't stopped ringing since he'd taken over the shift five and a half hours earlier. He'd sat through the evening conference, disecting the stories the reporters had brought in that afternoon, making decisions which would dictate what tomorrow morning's edition of the Liverpool Daily Post would look like. The front page lead story, he had finally decided after much discussion with his deputy and a reporter who was getting too big for her boots, was a police crackdown on massage parlours in the city.
It had been a choice between the massage parlour story and the young guy who had travelled from Liverpool to join the Muhajideen in their fight against the Soviet Red Army  in Afghanistan. A few elements were missing from this story - little things, like whether there were any facts to back it up, for example - and this had led to a bollocking for the reporter who was on the trail of the man who wanted to fight Moscow.
The reporter had been left in no doubt about what what was necessary if she was going to be able to make the story stand up, and Paul had decided to go with the other option for the front page.
Paul enjoyed his job. He was the night editor, and he liked being at the centre of things. And he enjoyed the process of turning a young reporter with a load of enthusiasm and  a few half facts into a real journalist. There was no malice in this, it just had to be done if both he and the paper were to retain their reputation.
The young reporters on his team had to learn the hard way, just as he had done, and he felt a glow of satisfaction when he saw them leaving the Post to go to a job with one of the national papers. 
But more important than that, Paul relished knowing that it was he who made the final decision on what the people of Merseyside and North Wales would be reading as they headed off for work the following morning. ‘I'm the guy who forms opinions around here, don’t forget that,’ he would tell his wife, and although he always said it with a laugh, he believed there was some truth in it.
He never thought he would get this far when he stumbled, almost by accident, into the world of newspapers. But seventeen years on, at the age of 38, Paul felt frustrated that he had reached what he knew many of his colleagues thought was the pinnacle of his career. At first, the job with the Post had been a lifeline. He was unemployed and wondering what to do with his life after The Beatles relinquished their dreams of stardom in 1960.
There had been a couple of dead end jobs - working as second man on a delivery van, winding electrical coils in a factory, labouring on a building site - and these occasional bouts of employment had been puncutated by long periods on the dole. And then, one day when he was taking a look around the newly opened Metropolitan Cathedral with his girlfriend Cath, Paul had bumped into Jimmy Evans.
It was, he was to later realise, one of those chance, life changing meetings, because Jimmy was to provide him with the means of escape from the Labour Exchange and intermittent casual work.
During the three years that the band had been consumed with dreams of pop stardom, it was Paul who had devised and written their press releases and sent them off to Jimmy, who was at the time the arts editor at the Liverpool Echo. When they met outside the cathedral that day, Jimmy was the deputy editor, and he had suggested that Paul - after hearing about the demise of the band - should follow his journalistic leanings.
Two months, dozens of phone calls and a lot of flannel and bluff later, the one time Beatles guitarist, songwriter and vocalist began a journalism course at Preston Polytechnic. Paul was an assiduous student, and six months after he graduated, he landed his first job - with a little help from Jimmy - at the Daily Post, the sister paper of the Liverpool Echo. Years of hard work and a slow, and at times frustrating progression followed. It was a case of  Dead Mens Shoes at the Post when it came to moving up the promotion ladder. Occasionally, somebody would get a job with one of the nationals and there would be the chance to move up, or in most cases, sideways. Paul could have packed up and moved to London himself, he was certainly good enough at his job, but he didn't want to leave Liverpool.
Well, that's what he always said, but in the summer of 1969, he and Cath bought their house in Bebington, a town on the Wirral peninsula on the other side of the Mersey.
‘It's alright, apart from all the plastic scousers,’ he would tease his wife, who was herself a  plastic scouser. This is a description which those born and bred in Liverpool apply to people from the Wirral who share a similar accent, but, the genuine scousers insist, are nothing like the real thing.
To counter this, Wirralians always ask why, if Liverpool is such a great place, does every scouser who makes a few bob move as quick as they can across the Mersey. Paul was used to hearing this particular argument from Cath, and although he always attempted to shout her down, he had to agree that she had a point.
After four years of trying to make council meetings sound interesting and chasing ambulances and fire engines, Paul had landed the job of chief reporter. Then he had a spell on the features desk, when he interviewed most of the big stars who came to Liverpool to appear at the Empire or other venues in the city. During the sixties he had sat down with his shorthand notebook opposite the Rolling Stones, The Who, The Animals, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and just about every band who had made it such a memorable decade for pop music.
If the interview was going well, he would steer the conversation around to the time he spent with the Beatles, and he had been delighted when Jagger said he remembered the name of the band. He'd seen it on a poster once, but he couldn't remember when or where, he said. Paul suspected that the Stones front man was being polite, pretending that he knew the name of his band, but he was still pleased enough to mention it when he got back to the office. The other reporters and sub-editors had jeered good naturedly when he told them that Jagger remembered his band, and for months afterwards he had to put up with their sarcastic cracks whenever the Stones appeared in the news.
'Hey, Macca, look, here's your mate Mick! Hang on, lets see if he mentions you...oh, sorry, mate, he hasn't. Again.'
'Bastards', Paul smiled as he recalled the banter in the office. It had been good fun in those days. Everybody got on well together, there was a real team spirit, and although it was hard work, there was always time for a laugh.
But all that had changed when Mark Bekinsale arrived. His reputation had turned up in Liverpool well before him, and the staff at the Post had braced themselves after hearing the horror stories. None of these turned out to be hyperbolic. The new editor in chief of the Post was every inch the bastard he had been portrayed as.
Paul could handle the fact that the guy was a bastard, but if there was one thing he could not abide, it was a bullshitter. And when the new boss proved himself to be a talentless bullshitter who couldn't write a decent story to save his life, Paul knew there would be friction between them.
How did this man get the job? It wasn't the first time he had asked himself this question. Paul had applied for the editors job, and had been convinced that he was in with a serious chance of the promotion.
In fact he was so convinced that, following his interview with the board of directors, he asked Cath to come for a walk with him that afternoon, telling her he wanted to show her something. The McCartney family - Paul and Cath and their two sons, James and Michael, lived on Broadway, a pleasant road lined with detached and semi-detached houses. The day after he applied for the top job at the Post, Paul had noticed the ‘For Sale’ sign outside his dream home.
‘Well, what do you think?’ he had asked Cath as they stood at the end of the driveway. A sign on the wall told them the house was called 'Westwards'. It was less than five minutes walk from their home on Broadway, but it was another world. The five bedroom detached villa was surrounded by gardens on all sides and looked out across the mid Wirral fields to the hills of North Wales.
‘It's lovely,’ she replied with a puzzled expression. ‘But I see it every day on the way to work, you know I do.’
‘This is where we're going to live if I get the job,’ he said, still staring at the double fronted house.
‘You are joking. Do you know how much it is? We could ever afford it.’
He knew that this would be her response, but he had worked out the finances. With the editor’s salary, and the profit they would make from the sale of their house, plus Cath's wages, they could do it. Okay, he conceded that they might have to cut back on the little luxuries - like food and clothing - but they could do it. Paul continued with his sales patter.
‘Don't worry about that. I told you, remember: Stick with me kid, and one day you'll be farting through silk.’
He grinned, as he did everytime he repeated the the line that Robert Mitchum had told his new wife in the days when he was an aspiring actor. He'd read it once in a magazine and it had amused him, which was why he trotted it out at every opportunity.
Cath raised her eyes. ‘Look, you know I never fart. I’m a lady. How much is this place anyway?’
‘Got you‘, thought Paul and smiled, already picturing himself sitting in the back garden, glass of red wine in his hand as he enjoyed the views across to Moel Fammau, the peak which dominated the range of hills in the distance across the River Dee.
And then, two weeks later, he had opened the envelope emblazoned with the Daily Post logo.
The single sheet of typed words contained the usual platitudes found in any rejection letter - one of the finest candidates, many years experience, fine journalist, loyal to the company, blah, blah, fuckin' blah - before it got to the point and told him that the Board had come to the decision to give the position to an outside applicant.
It was hard for him to accept the decision. Paul knew it should have been him sitting at the editor’s, not Bekinsale.
But he wasn't. It was as simple as that. He and his colleagues had concluded that the suits who made the decision were taken in by Bekinsale’s bullshit. They had believed his promise to make the paper ‘vital and fresh‘, and more important, they had belived it when he told them that he would sell more copies of the Post.
Well, the last of these hadn't worked out, Paul thought. And although he could never admit it, he was secretly pleased when the sales figures had showed a steady decline since Bekinsale had taken over. Okay, they were in decline before the new guy arrived, but the editor’s boast that he would increase the figures was looking a little hollow to say the least. And when those figures went into freefall, Paul hoped this would alert the executives that they had made a mistake. But it didn't. Tragically, Bekinsale’s attempts to turn the conservative Post into a downmarket version of the Sun or the Star didn't make them reconsider their choice either.
Paul winced when he remembered the first story Bekinsale had insisted on running on his first day. Well, if you could call it a story. The new editor thought it was time the young women of Merseyside were given advice on how to get out of a car without showing their underwear. This involved lots of pictures on the centre pages of leggy models - hired at great expense to the Post incidentally - stretching in and out of their vehicles. Without exception, the editorial team thought it was a bad idea, but Paul’s new boss was delighted, and his swagger was even more pronounced when the paper hit the streets.
Then there had been the story the editor had concocted about the problems busty women have finding the right bra, which, once again, involved two pages of women in their underwear.
‘Is this a fuckin’ newspaper or a wank mag,’ was how Mike Hodge, a sub-editor on Paul's desk put it when he saw the page layout. Hodge’s brother and fellow sub, Jack - a man given to sudden and spectacular outburts of fury if he deemed something was unsuitable for the paper - was by now exploding with the regularity of a Yellowstone Park geyser, much to the amusement of his colleagues.
Paul thought it couldn't get any worse. But it did. His new boss brought in a friend to write a weekly column, promising that it was going to be a ‘great read, hard hitting and controversial’ which, he assured Paul and the other members of the editorial team, would generate a lot of mail for the letters page.
The first column from the editor's protege wondered why ‘so many women in Liverpool have fat behinds and saggy bellies.’ Paul couldn't believe Bekinsale would actually print it, but he did. The response from the readers was deafening in its silence, but the plunging sales figures told their own story.
It was hardly a surprise that Paul tried to keep any contact with the editor in chief to a minimum. He found himself seething with anger everytime he looked at Bekinsale’s  pudgy face and those mean, porcine eyes. He knew that he and his boss were heading for a scene, and when it happened, he knew he would not be able to restrain himself from telling his boss exactly what he thought of the way he was running the paper.
'Ugly, useless fuckin' tosser' Paul said out loud as he leaned forward to his typewriter to begin writing the following morning’s ‘The Post Says’ column.
Bill, one of the sub editors, heard his outburst looked up and said ‘I bet I know who you're thinking about.’
‘Yeah, I bet you fuckin' do,’ Paul replied with a grim smile as he started to type the words of wisdom for the following day's column.

Chapter 3
'We represent most of the leading financial institutions in the country. Banks, building societies, unit trusts and so on. And because we are independent, we can give you...'
The voice of the man sitting in front of the desk trailed away into silence. One of the two men sitting behind the desk opposite shifted uncomfortably in his seat as he witnessed yet another would-be salesman crashing and burning as he went through the script test. The candidate seemed to recover, and he picked up where he left off. ‘Yeah, that's it, I’ve got it.... And we can give you the best possible advice on what kind of endowment savings policy is best for you…’
But once again, he lost his way and the words dried up. ‘It wasn't this difficult when I was reading the fuckin thing last night', was the thought which careered around George Harrison's head. He was blowing the second interview, and he couldn't afford to do that. ‘I almost had it then, I really did. Can I start again?
Selling insurance was a lot harder than George had imagined, and he hadn't sat down in front  a client yet. This was what he was thinking now as the two men in suits opposite stared at him. The features of the older guy were contorted into what was intended to be a reassuring smile. The other one, the mean looking one, just stared at him.
The shirt and tie which George had bought for his first interview were too tight. He felt like his head was about to explode and all he wanted to do was tear off the tie and flee from the office, past the plastic plants and the receptionist with the plastic smile and through the front doors to freedom.
But he couldn't. If he left now, the only place he could go was back to the Job Centre. This was a chance to earn some real money, that was what the advert in the Post had said. He had spent the previous three months scouring the jobs pages in the local papers after he was made redundant from Blacklers store in the city centre. He’d worked there for twenty years, and although he had been assured that a qualified electrician would soon find another job, this had not been the case.
George had managed to find a bit of work on the side, but he needed to earn some real money again, anything would do until he could find another electrician job.
He had initially dismissed the prospect of selling insurance, but his wife, Jean, had persuaded him that it might be the right thing to do. ‘You always said you were fed up at Blacklers, didn’t you love? So why not give this a go. It might be just the change you need, and anyway, I’d like to see you going to work in a suit instead of them overalls.’
George had been married to Jean for fifteen years, and in that time they had never had a serious argument. It was, as he often said, love at first sight, and he’d never looked at another woman. Well, yes, he’d looked of course, but that was as far as it ever went. He sometimes thought back with a smile to his time with The Beatles, and all the women he’d had, particularly when they were in Germany. But all that changed when he met Jean.
They had a short engagement, in fact, from meeting each other in the canteen at Blacklers to getting married had taken less than a year. The newly weds moved into their two bedroom terraced house in Wavertree - just across the park from where George grew up - in 1965, and neither had any desire to move. Jean was born and bred in Wavertree as well, and they both liked the atmosphere and community feeling of the Liverpool suburb.
Their daughter, Louise, named after George’s mum, was born in 1965, and although both George and his wife came from large families, they had made the decision to have just one child. Jean had left Blacklers when Louise was born to become a full time mum and housewife
George was happy with this arrangement. He liked being the breadwinner, the man who brought home the wages and provided for his family, just like his dad had done when he was a kid. Everything ticked along nicely in the Harrison household until that day when the redundancies were announced. He had driven home from work in a daze, terrified at what the future held. George knew lots of skilled tradesmen who were on the dole, unable to find work. 
Jean had been her usual supportive self when he told her, reassuring him  that everything would be okay. She said that she would go out and find herself a job, but George wouldn‘t hear of this.
‘And who’s going to look after Louise if you go out to work? And look after the house? Listen, love, I’ll find something. We’ll be okay. There’ll be a bit of redundancy money, I’ll sign on the dole, and there’s the money from the gigs as well. We’ll muddle through. We’ll be fine, we will.’
He had reluctantly agreed to Jean’s suggestion for a career change, and phoned the number in the advert, and now here he was, about to blow it completely. He had to get through this second interview, and that depended on how well he read  the sales script from memory. He had practiced time and time again at home until the words danced in front of his eyes and he was sick of going through the wheedling and promises to potential customers contained in the five page script.
But it was no good. He faltered again, closed his eyes as he tried to remember the next lines, but couldn’t and then unable to contain his frustration, blurted out:  'Oh, this is a pile of shite, isn't it? I'm wasting me time, and yours, so I think I'll leave it. Thanks anyway.'
He was about to stand up and leave, when the mean looking guy spoke for the first time.
‘George, where are you going? Sit down mate. You're doing really well. It's just nerves, that's all. Look, lets have a coffee, and then we'll have another go. Yeah?
George sat back in the hard plastic seat and exhaled loudly. He thought about what Jean would say if he packed it in before he had even started. And then he thought about the weasel-faced guy he would have to face at the Job Centre, the one who acted like a Gestapo officer and treated George like he was something inferior when he signed on every Tuesday. He let out a deep sigh and said 'Yeah. I'm sorry. It's like you say, I'm a bit nervous. Can I have a ciggie and then have another go?'
That had been a week earlier, and after taking his cigarette break, George had surprised himself when he sailed through the script from memory. He was now an associate at Ellis Reed and Williams, earning £60 a week retainer, with the promise of much more from the commissions he would earn from sales. He didn’t like the idea of knocking on doors or phoning strangers out of the blue, but his training manager, Ralph Craddock, had reassured him that this was not how things worked at Ellis Reed and Williams.
‘What we do here, George, is very different. We ask our associates to draw up a list of all their friends and family, and then you sell life cover to them. But we never call it life insurance! It’s a saving plan. If you mention life insurance they’ll say no straight away. Anyway, once you’ve signed them up, you get them to recommend a couple of other people who would be interested, and it goes from there. It really does work. You’ll be coining it before long.’
George wasn’t sure it would be as easy as Craddock suggested, but he had to give it a go, not least because he’d spent thirty quid on his new suit. The list of names he had drawn up didn’t contain any of his relatives. The prospect of trying to flog insurance, even if it was dressed up as a savings plan, to his brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins filled him with dread, so he’d opted for his friends instead.
It was while he was sitting at the dining room table compiling the list that he thought about the boys from the band, and although it had been years since he had seen any of them he added their names. He had heard that John was a teacher somewhere on the Wirral, and that Paul worked at the Daily Post, but as for Pete, he didn’t know where he was. He decided to track down Lennon and McCartney. That should be easy enough, and they both had steady jobs so he was sure that they would be open to the idea of buying some life cover - fuck - a savings plan, from him. After all, they were once mates together, and they would know they could trust him.
Jean came into the room, drying her hands on a tea towel, and looked over his shoulder as he was adding their names.
‘Oh, I remember those two. But it’s years since you’ve seen them isn’t it?’
He put his arm around her waist and pulled her closer. ‘Yeah, but I’ve got nothing to lose by getting in touch with them, have I? Anyway, as soon as they hear my sales patter, they won’t be able to say no, will they?’
Jean leaned down and kissed him on the cheek. ‘That’s the spirit. You’ll be great at this job.’
She kissed him again. ‘Pie and chips for tea. That okay?’
‘Steak and kidney?’
‘Of course.’
‘Great. And I’m having you for afters.’
She giggled when he reached down and grabbed her buttock, making it wobble with a frantic hand movement.
‘George! Stop it!’
‘You love it really.  Anyway, go and get the dinner on, I’m starving…’
She laughed, then said: ‘Ooh, you cheeky sod! What did your last slave die of?’
‘A terminal buttock shake. Now get in that kitchen, woman…’

 Chapter 4
'It's no big deal, Cyn. It's a get-together with the guys, that's all.  I haven't seen them for years, and I just think it would be great to see them again. Why can't you just accept that it's something I've got to do?'
Two hours after his ramble through the Wirral countryside, John knew that he was getting nowhere in convincing his wife that a reunion was a good idea. This was familiar territory. He had raised the subject of a reunion a couple of times over the last two years, and Cynthia's reaction was always hostile. The discussions - if you could call them that - always ended in a row, which is where they were heading right now.  She had left the back room and gone into the kitchen.
'I mean, tell me, just what is your problem?’ John shouted, pushing his glasses back to their customary place. They had an annoying habit of slipping over the bump on his nose whenever he became agitated.  He had thought about getting contact lenses, but he was squeamish about the idea of putting them on his eyeballs.
'Just tell me, what's the problem with a group of old mates getting back together for one night? For fuck’s sake, I haven’t even asked them yet anyway…'
He knew what her reaction would be, and he wasn't wrong. Cynthia in a rage was something he tried to avoid, and by the look in her eye when she came back into the room, one of those moments was imminent.
‘Harm? What is the harm?'
She was up to maximum volume immediately. 'Do I have to remind you of the situation we're in?'
She was facing him, hands on her hips, the now-familiar look on her face.  He hated her when she did that. She never had that hard look years ago.
'How much money do we owe, exactly? Do you know how much debt we're in? Do I have to tell you? It's two thousand pounds, John. Two thousand pounds.'
He knew this onslaught would continue for at least the next five minutes, so he let out a dramatic sigh - which he knew was guaranteed to piss her off - and looked theatrically at his wristwatch. He was disappointed not to get a reaction this time.
'We are in trouble, and all you want to do is mess about trying to recapture your youth with a bunch of losers from the past, people who you said you never wanted to see again, remember, instead of doing something about our debts.
‘And apart from all that, you said you would decorate the house this summer, and all you’re interested in is messing about with a bunch of blokes you haven’t seen for years. Look at the state of that ceiling. You said you were going to get that sorted out last year, and just look at it.’
John didn‘t look. He knew the plaster was peeling, and that there was a damp patch in the corner, and yes, he did say that he would decorate the house. But it was such a drag and he couldn’t find the motivation to get started.
‘Anyway, I’m an art teacher, not a friggin decorator,’ he sneered.
‘Yes, and I’m a secretary, but that doesn’t prevent me being a full time cook, gardener and housemaid, does it?’
‘Touche,’ he thought. But he maintained the sneer.
Cynthia had come into the back room looking for the book she was reading, and with the kids out of the way, John had chosen this moment to raise the reunion subject. He was prepared for resistance, but the level of her anger, which had flared as soon as he mentioned it, surprised him. She was staring at him, eyebrows raised, hands still on her hips. She was waiting for him to make the next move, but John knew there was no point in continuing. He would be wasting his breath.
'Oh, just fuck off,' he said, and felt strangely satisfied at the venom in the words. He knew it was childish, but he also knew this would end the row.
He was right. Cynthia threw the paperback she had picked up from the book case onto the table, and then she slammed out of the room. John collapsed into the settee and, five minutes later, he was still staring at the poster on the wall. He was genuinely baffled at the hostile reaction, and not for the first time, he wondered why he was still with her.
This was the room where John spent most of his evenings strumming his guitar, painting and writing his poems. He heard her stamping up the stairs, followed by the bathroom door slamming shut and taps being turned on.
He sat in silence, considering his next move about getting the group back together.  Group? They called them bands these days didn't they? Group, band, it's all the same thing. And he was going to do it. It didn't matter what she said.
He looked around the room. This was supposed to be his territory, but Julian had been trying to lay claim it as a refuge where he and his friends could hang out. John didn't want to come across like a hardline dad, but he was going to have to say something to Jules.
The room was small, but it contained everything John needed. A three seater settee which had seen better days took up most of one wall, the worst of the wear and tear hidden by a leopard print throw. Leopard skin wasn't John's thing - he had picked it up from an Oxfam shop - and he intended to get a new one at some stage.  A new sofa would be better, but that was out of the question, but he was sure they could stretch to a throw.
'That sounds like a line I could use sometime', he mused. 'Stretch to a throw. I'll remember that'.
The only other furniture was an oak effect table, a present from John's aunt when he and Cynth were married. A portable TV stood on the table, alongside the gleaming silver Aiwa music centre, which he was saved up for six months to buy. His old stereo - a mid seventies relic - had finally packed in last year, and unable to face the prospect of not being able to play his records in his own space, he had saved five pounds a week in an old biscuit tin until he had enough for the Aiwa.
Floor to ceiling shelving - which John had made himself and of which he had been quite proud at the time - ran the length of the opposite wall. The white formica covered shelves were stacked with his LPs, singles, magazines and books. An old chopping board lay across the books on the top shelf. This had been rescued from the bin when Cynth had thrown it out and it now served as the preparation board on which John rolled his joints. French windows led out onto a small patio - another example of John's handiwork, although he wasn't quite so proud of this due to the fact that everytime it rained, a large puddle gathered in the centre of the paving. 'I'll have to do something about that', he told himself in the aftermath of every downpour, but he knew he never would.
The remaining wall of John's domain was dominated by the Che Guevara poster, alongside a black and white framed print of another hero, Elvis Presley.
It showed Elvis in a classic pose from his fifties heyday, a time when it was impossible to conceive that drugs, burgers and the rigours of Vegas Cabaret would finish him off. 
John had cried when Elvis died three years earlier, unashamed as the tears poured down his face as the news came in from Memphis while he sat with his wife and children watching the news on TV.
He was 16 when he heard Heartbreak Hotel for the first time on a crackly signal from Radio Luxembourg, and that was the moment his life changed.  The atmospherics and hissing in the ether didn't detract from the message the song sent to John, and every other teenage kid he knew. From that point on it had been Elvis, Elvis, Elvis. For the first time in his young life, he felt as though he had a purpose, a reason for being.  His Aunt Mimi bought him his first guitar - which was now leaning against the wall under the Elvis print - a few weeks later, and that was when the dreaming began. 
He snapped out of his reverie and flipped open the pack of Benson and Hedges.
Shit. Three left, and he was skint. His eye immediately went to the side of the table where the giant Bell's Whisky bottle stood. It was three quarters full of loose change. Payday was another week away, so it looked as though a raid on the bottle may be imminent. This was the only kind of savings that John was familiar with. The pennies, ten pence pieces or whatever loose change happened to be in his pockets, were dropped assiduously into the bottle. He'd once managed to avoid emptying it for six months and was delighted to find that he had saved more than thirty pounds.
He lit the cigarette and drew deeply, settling back on the sofa as he exhaled, the three perfect blue rings in the air testament to a quarter century of smoking. His eye settled on the book Cynth had thrown on the table. It was 1984, a novel John had tried to read on more than one occasion. He'd never managed to get beyond the first chapter, but judging by the folded page corner, Cynth had nearly finished it. He felt a pang of guilt that he had ruined her night with the row. She had probably been planning  to read the book in the bath, surrounded by candles, a glass or red wine in her hand. Why did they always end up shouting? This had become a part of their everyday life lately, and he just didn't know what to do about it.
Anyway. This was the way things are. No point in dwelling on it. His thoughts shifted.  He was going to talk to Julian about his invasion of his space. Maybe he'd get one of those notices that his son had one his bedroom door, except his would read:  'Dad's Room! Keep out!'
There was another reason he wanted to preserve this sanctuary. John didn't want anybody, even his own son - especially his own son - to find the stuff he wrote. He knew if anybody were to read the mishapen and occasionaly tortured thoughts which escaped from some hidden recess of his subconscious, thoughts which ended up as scrawled words on the pages of an exersize book purloined from the school stock room, they may not immediately recognise it as poetry. They would probably think he was a bit weird. This was his secret. Poetry, painting and cartoons were his escape from the real world, the world of school, kids and paying the mortgage. A world where he felt a constant, debilitating certainty that everything he did, said or thought was ultimately pointless.
But John had a working title for his jottings and cartoons, just incase a publisher were to show interest. He knew this was unlikely - the main reason being that he had never even considered sending them to a publisher - but secretly hoped that one day, somebody, somewhere, would recognise what he felt sure was an undiscovered talent.
Years ago, when hope and the last vestiges of ambition drove his thoughts and actions, he had stapled together the pages of poems and cartoons and placed them inside a folder which bore the legend Wirral Borough Education Commitee. Maybe he should just call it Poems from a loser.  At least Cynth would agree with him on that. Anyway, even if he did get a publisher interested, he knew that people - the majority of people out there, thick people - wouldn’t understand what they would percieve to be warped words and images.
John hated thick people, those who couldn't think beyond Terry and June, Coronation Street, Crossroads and Dallas. The millions of people out there who didn't think like he did. Nobody thought like John did. He was reminded of this everyday at school, especially in the staffroom. At least the kids had an excuse for their closed minds and narrow views.
And that was the problem with him and Cynth. While his wife was concerned with the day to day running of the house - and trivial matters like owing a few quid to the bank, paying off the catalogues and the Hire Purchase, and making sure the kids were doing okay at school - John concentrated on what he liked to think were more cerebral matters.
But occasionally, if he was being absolutely honest with himself - which wasn't that often - he had to admit that his wife had a point about the money. She had done a good job bringing up the kids and looking after their home, which was never in a state less than pristine, apart from the fact it needed decorating, of course, but what did she expect?
An art teacher at Woodchurch Comprehensive doesn't earn a fortune - actually it was £5,342 a year - so it doesn't take a genius to come to the conclusion why they were in the shit. And Cynth was no genius, as he always pointed out to her when the rows erupted. When the shouting was over, he always felt guilty about the insults he spat at his wife. It wasn't too bad tonight, he reflected. 'Okay, I swore a bit, and I shouldn't have told her to fuck off, but it didn't get out of hand. Not like it used to.'
He winced when remembered the times their confrontations had gone beyond insults. He had hit Cynthia more than once, when they were younger and even poorer and he was even angrier. It hadn't happened for years, and when they had talked about it Cynth had told him it didn't matter, that it was all in the past. But he still felt the guilt eating away at his insides when he pictured her bruises, still purple and vivid in his imagination.
She had this effect on him, he used to tell himself. It was like she was asking for the insults, asking for the punches. He couldn't explain why, even to himself, but he wanted to put her down, to humiliate her, even though he knew she didn't deserve it. It wasn't her fault.
It was his fault, because he felt trapped and he took it out on her. This was at the heart of his problem, and it was his problem, not Cynthia's. He had felt trapped in this relationship for as long as he could remember, and always, hanging above him like a black cloud, was the awful realisation that there was no way out.
He thought back to a couple of years earlier, to the night he was watching Pennies from Heaven, a series on TV. In one episode, Bob Hoskins’ character - what was his name, Arthur something? - fantasised about his wife being killed in an accident, because although he was unhappy and trapped, he could never bring himself to leave her.
John also remembered the guilt he felt when he identified with the character‘s feelings. Not that he’d wanted Cynthia to die. Jeez, no. No, it was just the fact that he recognised something dark in the character played by Hoskins that made him feel uncomfortable about himself.
He didn't even know what it was that he wanted, yet there was the constant feeling that there was something - or was it somebody? - else out there, just waiting to be found. 
John and Cyn. They were meant for each other, that's what everybody said. But they had no idea of the state of their marriage.
Well, there was one person who knew the truth.
It had started off as nothing more than a friendly relationship in the staffroom, but they both knew within weeks that there was something more to it than that.
Christine. He recalled how, just by saying her name, it made him feel alive, more alive than he had felt since he was a young man.  It was two years ago, and it began the way these things often do, with a casual reference to the situation at home. Christine had picked up on it, and told John if he ever wanted to talk, he knew where to find her.
Everyday after that they would huddle together in the corner of the staffroom, speaking in hushed tones, their conversation masked by the hubbub of noise from the others present. If somebody came too close, or the room suddenly went quiet, they would seamlessly change the subject to curricullums or detentions.
Initially their chats had been about John, his wife and the tensions within their marriage, but it soon moved on from that. They swapped life stories. She told him that she lived alone, after breaking up with a long-term boyfriend whose name was Phil, but who she always referred to as The Bastard.
It was their secret, and they delighted in greeting each other in an overly-formal manner whenever they met in the corridors or the refectory. ’Miss Mellor,’ John would say, and she would reply ‘Mr Lennon,’  the twinkle in her eyes seen only by him.
‘We must sound like something out of Jane Austen,’ he told her, the first night they met up after school.
They had to meet. They both knew there was much more to say than could be said in whispers in the crowded staffroom. But that first time, there wasn’t much in the way of conversation. They were sitting in the living room of her flat, and from the moment that their lips touched in that first kiss...
But it wasn’t just sex. He felt in tune with Christine on every level. During the many meetings after that night, they talked about every subject imaginable, everything, from the chances of Jim Callaghan’s government being re-elected and the prospect of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister if that didn’t happen, to the Boomtown Rats ripping up the poster of Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta on Top of the Pops, the week that they knocked them from the number one spot in the charts.
And they talked about The Beatles. He’d told her about the band he used to be in, and she listened, feigning horror, as he related tales of what they used to get up to in Hamburg.
John also told her about his idea of getting them back together, and he smiled at her enthusiastic response. ‘John, you should do it, you’ve got to do it! Can I come and see you if you do?’
Christine made him laugh. She made him feel alive.
She made him think about leaving Cynthia, and going to live with her. She’d asked him to several times, but he couldn’t do it. ‘It’s the kids,’ he told her, the night he told her it was over.
‘I love you, you know that. But I just can’t do it. I couldn’t live with myself if I walked out on them.’
They talked for more than an hour. Through her tears she’d said she understood, that she knew it could never really have come to anything, it had been fun while it lasted, and anyway, we can still be friends can’t we?
That was a year ago, just before the end of the summer term. He hadn’t seen Christine since then. She didn’t come back to Woodchurch Comp the following September, and he heard in the staffroom that she was teaching in Manchester. It had torn him apart to hear the other teachers gossiping about the reasons for her sudden departure while he had to sit there, having to pretend to be indifferent.
He’d found out which school she was at, and phoned her during lunch hour in her staffroom. She was aloof, and they had a stilted, awkward, conversation lasting less than five minutes.
When John put the phone down, he felt physically sick at the thought that she might meet somebody else, another teacher, and he tortured himself with images of Christine and this other - so far only imagined - man flirting discreetly, and falling in love, just as they had done.
Even now he couldn’t bear to hear songs that reminded him of his time with Christine, switching the radio off as soon as they came on. Before Christine, he would have described Love is in the air, by John Paul Young as sentimental bollocks. But this was the song which he kept hearing when they first met, in April 1978 and he felt visceral pain if he happened to hear it. At times, he told himself he was over-romantising their affair, that it only seemed perfect because it was something he knew he couldn’t have. But he could never quite convince himself that this was the case. He could have had it. But he stayed with Cynthia. Why? Why?
John pushed the memories of her aside, and his thoughts returned to his  dead marriage. They were together forever, that's what everyone said. John had believed it himself, years ago. He had once written some lines about their love, and he felt a mixture of sadness and embarrasment when he recalled the words.  Loving you. And he had meant it when he wrote it.
He thought back to that day at Raby Mere. It was 1965, the year Winston Churchill died. The date had stuck in his mind because his middle name was Winston, something he had never quite forgiven his mother and father for landing him with. It had something to do with that  air raid when he was born, and his mum, Julia, had given him the name of the wartime leader in a moment of relief and patriotism when they had survived the night.
'I must be the only friggin' white bloke born in Britain since 1940 to be called Winston', he often said to those close friends who knew his secret. He had considered changing his middle name to William, or Wilf, anything but Winston. But in the end he couldn't be bothered with the paperwork.
And then, somehow, those little bastards at school had found out. From that day on, the chorus of 'Winny!' would go up behind his back in the corridors. And if they really wanted to wind him up, they would call him Winifred. He'd seen that name on the wall in the school. 'Speccy twat Winifred' had been scrawled in white chalk on the wall next to the doors of the science block.
Speccy Twat Winifred. He could see the irony in their piss taking, although he reflected that the kids he taught wouldn't have had a clue what irony was. They wouldn't even be able to spell it. But John was aware of it, because when he was at school, he hated the men who taught him. 'Emotionally retarded psychopaths' he muttered as his thoughts went back to the grim red brick buildings of Quarry Bank High School, the place where he had received what was laughingly called an 'education'.
He would have been one of the little sods writing graffiti on the walls about the teachers. 'Not that we wrote graffiti then', he thought. 'We'd have been horsewhipped if they'd caught us'.
And now, here he was, 26 years later, a worn out one-time rebel, the butt of the kids jokes. Maybe it was time he bought himself a horsewhip.
He snapped out of what Cynth would have called ‘wallowing in self pity‘, and his thoughts returned to that summer day at Raby Mere fifteen years earlier. They had hired a boat, and with John in charge of the oars and Cynth sitting opposite clutching Jules tight, a picnic basket at her feet, he had rowed to the far end of the narrow stretch of water, coming to a halt at the bank where overhanging trees dipped to meet them.
Loving You. He had sung the words to her. Jules had giggled and Cynth had laughed a joyous laugh, and he knew he had touched her. In those days, he still wanted to touch her.
And just look at us now. We can't even bear to be in the same room half the time. 
Where, why, did it go wrong? When he met her, it was so different. She stood out from the other girls at the Art School. He could see her now, wearing that black duffle coat, her blonde hair flowing over her shoulders, head held high as she walked along the corridor. John had chased her for what seemed like years but what was in reality only a matter of months, determined that he was going to win her round and get a date. She became an obsession, this posh bird who came over from from the Wirral every day. But Cynthia was having none of it.
Well, she was having  none of it at first. He knew that, despite the icy exterior, she fancied him, and he played up on his Scouse, working class, hardman image, which, he reflected, wasn't that difficult in college full of middle class kids.
The leather jacket and Teddy Boy hairstyle helped, but - and he smiled as he thought about it - he was about as working class as Cynth was. He just managed to hide it better than the other kids.
The hardest part of those early courting days was recognising her when she came into a room, because John din't like to wear the glasses he needed to see the world in focus. It just wasn't cool, was it? It didn't bother him now, but it did in those days. Even Buddy Holly hadn't made goggles cool. Now if Elvis wore glasses, it might have been different…
They had a date at the cinema, and all he could see was blurred images on the screen because he didn't want her to know he wore glasses. It was a Cary Grant film, that was all he could remember, something to do with him being a jewel thief in the south of France, and was it  Audrey Hepburn in it as well? And even though the film was blurred as his memory of that night, he remembered thinking that, one day, he would buy a place on the Riviera for him and Cyn.
He sighed, but this time it was not one of his dramatic sighs. John found it both comforting and frustrating whenever he recalled the times when things were different, a time when he was full of hope, full of fire, full of joie de vivre.
And then it was there in his head again: That awful, sickening realisation that the person you once loved in a way that would seem over the top even by the standards of a Mills and Boon novel, the person you once had fantastic, exciting and occasionally dirty sex with, the person that you once loved more than life itself, bears no resemblance to the stranger you find yourself living with today.
'We're hanging on to memories of when it was good. That's the only reason we're together' he had said to her after one row. Cynthia didn't answer. She didn't need to, because her silence confirmed that she had reached the same conclusion.
He sighed again, and picked up 1984. He studied the cover, wondering if he could be bothered with the effort of starting to read it again. He flicked the book open and began reading, and smiled when he saw that the main character was called Winston Smith. He’d forgotten that. He carried on reading until he reached the page where Orwell is describing Smith’s vague memories of childhood, and an image of his mother came into his head.
Julia had died when he was seventeen, knocked down by a car driven by an off-duty policeman.  Maybe that's where his anger came from. Well, that's what the patronising psychiatric nurse had said when John went through his bad patch five years earlier. They'd tried to put him on pills to calm his nerves, but he didn't want that.
He went to the sessions for a few weeks, but then decided he was going to sort it out himself. 'And you're doing a fuckin' great job of it', he said to himself.
He'd lost his mother before, when he was a child and she had left him  with Aunt Mimi, but she always came back to him, flitting in and out of his life as the unknown circumstances of her life dictated. But after that day in 1958 Julia never came back again.
His felt different after that day, the day his mother died. His friends had a mum and dad, brothers and sisters. He had his Aunt Mimi and Uncle George. And then Uncle George had died.
Fuckin hell, snap out of it you miserable bastard. He reached for the Benson and Hedges. Two left. He was smoking far too much these days, but he was going to pack them in soon, wasn't he? Maybe tonight was a good time. It would save him £6 a week if he gave up.
Or maybe I should start rolling my own? He laughed as the double entendre leapt out at him, but it was a humourless laugh: 'I've been rolling me own for years since I stopped shagging the missus'.  Jesus Christ. I'm turning into Jim Davidson.
Money money money. The confrontation with Cynth was still eating away at him. He didn't live an extravagant lifestyle, so where did it go? A few pints when he went into town with his old mates Mal, Pete and Ivor on Saturday night, a few spliffs here and there - a habit of which Cynth never attempted to hide her disapproval, which was something else that pissed him off - and that was it.
And anyway, he funded his little extravagances with the guitar lessons, didn't he?
He couldn't see how a reunion of the group was going to make a difference to their situation. The bills would still land on the doormat, so why would a get together change things? And who knows, if it went well, they might get a few more gigs in the pubs and clubs out of it, and that would bring in a few quid, wouldn't it?  He had tried to convince Cynthia of this, but he knew he was wasting his breath whenever he mentioned The Beatles. He had come to the conclusion that she was probably worried that he might enjoy himself if they were to get back together.
The Beatles. John, Paul, George, Stu and Pete. Those were the days. We came so close to making it. Well, that's what John told himself, but he knew that coming close to making it means nothing. It's as bad as never even having a chance. But nevertheless, if he happened to be on the outside of nine pints of bitter in the Crack pub in Liverpool on a Saturday night, he would tell anybody who was prepared to listen just how close he and his mates came to being famous.
Fame. That was what they all dreamed of then. But Stu had known that they were going nowhere, and perhaps more important, he knew that even if they did get the break he wasn't up to the job.
Stu was a reluctant aspiring pop star. John had persuaded him that he should be the bass guitarist, despite the fact that he couldn't actually play the bass. But that didn't matter, because he looked the part, and more important, he had won an art competition, so he had some ready cash. John talked his mate into investing the money wisely, and Stu had bought a bass guitar. He smiled as he thought about the way his friend would stand with his back to the audience so they wouldn't see that he was barely able to play the brand new instrument.
It was early in 1960 and they had been pounding the circuit for two years now, playing in grim bars, including one in Parliament Street, where they provided the backing music for the strippers. When they came off stage, they would laugh as they talked about the guys in the audience who had been masturbating in what they thought was a clandestine manner, but which had been disconcertingly obvious to the young guys on stage. 'Music to wank to, that's what we're playing' Stu had complained.
'Overtures for onanists', John would respond, laughing. But unlike his friend, he was looking at their career in the long term. These dates were only the first steps to the big time.
'We won't be doing this forever,' he would tell Stu, and Paul would always back John up. Paul was as hungry as he was in those days. Hungrier, perhaps, because John had his nose pushed out when Paul joined the group. He thought Mac was trying to take over, and this had led to their first arguments.
But while Lennon and MacCartney fell out over just about everything connected to the running of the group, they agreed on one thing. They were heading for bigger and better things. He recalled the words which had become a mantra whenever Stu faltered and showed signs of losing interest in the group.
'We'll get the break, and that'll be it, we'll be out of here. We'll be famous, Stu. We'll have birds chasing us everywhere, we'll be the top of the Hit Parade, we'll be somebody. We've just got to keep at it.'
Poor Stu. Dead at 21. Eighteen years on, and John still thought about him. He missed him, and often imagined what he would be doing had he lived. Stu might have become famous. He was a good artist - much better than John - and who knows, he might have got the break.
'Famous', John mused. 'Imagine being recognised in the street, people coming up to you and asking for your autograph. Being a Somebody, and not just an obscure Nobody, like an art teacher at a crappy fuckin school who has to give guitar lessons in his spare time. Imagine having money, possessions, a big house in the country.'
No matter how John tried, it wasn't easy to imagine this life. But sometimes, when he was drifting off to sleep at night, he could remember, like it was yesterday, a time when it seemed they were so close to making it…
The Cavern Club, 1960, a cellar beneath a warehouse in Mathew Street. The Beatles were on stage, clad in their leather jackets and jeans, whipping the lunchtime crowd - mainly made up of office girls escaping the tedium of the typing pool for an hour - into a frenzy. The people in the crowd seemed to be glued together, with barely room to dance. Condensation poured down the bare brick walls and ran in droplets from the low ceiling onto the heads of the melee below. But the kids didn't mind.
And as he drifted into sleep, John could hear the screams, smell the sweat of the crowd, and he could hear his own, still youthful, voice singing the songs he and Paul had written.
The Cavern was gone now, of course. Six years earlier, in 1974, the city council had decided to demolish the buildings in Mathew Street as part of a refurbishment programme. John had been one of the protestors who had lobbied the council not to destroy what he and his fellow protestors saw as a part of Liverpool's heritage. This was were all the  top groups in the north had played, and a few of the guys from the old days had turned up to join the protest. He was the only member of the Beatles to make a stand, he recalled.
Paul hadn't bothered, but then again, John recalled, Paul hadn't bothered with Liverpool much since he had moved to the Wirral. But Ritchie, one of their old mates, had been there.
Ritchie Starkie - he called himself  Ringo back then - had played at the Cavern with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, a group who were often on the same bill as the Beatles. When John met him in 74 he was calling himself plain old Ritchie, and he was incensed as John had been about the demolition plans. But their protest was in vain. The buildings were pulled down, and the cellar that had once been known as the Cavern had been filled in. Whatever happened to Ritchie? John wondered. He recalled that he seemed to have done well for himself, but couldn’t remember what business he was involved in.
John and the others were one step away from making the big time. Everyone who came to see them said the same thing. They wrote some of their own songs - well, he and Paul had written them - they were young and full of energy, and they had the right look: leathers, quiffs, jeans and cowboy boots. Their stage act was one of carefully contrived anarchy, and the kids loved it. They were wild, and although they were in reality pussycats, they came across as dangerous. The Beatles made the established stars of the day, people like Cliff, Marty Wilde, Mark Winter and Adam Faith, look like middle age men in comparison.
What was her name, that girl who looked after the coats at the Cavern? She was always going on about John and the others. She was probably their biggest fan.  What was her name? It was unusual, so he knew he should remember it.
Cilla, that was it. Priscilla. He hadn't thought about her since those days. I wonder what happened to her? She's probably married with five kids and working in Woolies. Maybe she married Ritchie. He remembered that they used to knock about together. Priscilla wanted to be a singer - everyone who went to the Cavern thought they had what it took to be a singer - but when she eventually nagged the manager to let her get up on stage, John recalled she had a voice that could clear the crowds out of the club. Still, I suppose she came in handy at closing time, he thought.
And then the guy from Decca Records came in to see them one night. He was so impressed by their performance that he came straight to their pokey dressing room - it was the Gents toilets, actually - after the show and offered then a recording contract right there and then. This was it. The man from Decca was interested in putting out Love me do as a single. They were on their way, they were going to be stars...
It was usually at this point that John would wake up. And once he realised that his subconscious had taunted him once again with the dream of a contract from Decca, reality would kick in and he would peer myopically at the alarm clock on the bedside table.
Then he would groan, and nudge Cynth awake, asking her to get up and make a cup of coffee.  As he mentally prepared himself for another day in front of a classroom of kids who had no interest in what he was trying to teach them, he wondered why he always felt so tired, so drained, so heavy, even after a night's sleep.
It was their fault. The council estate kids at the school, the horrible, obnoxious teenagers who he was convinced wanted to make his life as difficult and as miserable as possible. He'd come close to punching a few of the lads when they had crossed the boundary, but so far, somehow, he'd always managed to keep control.
They wouldn't have treated me this way if they'd known me back then. This was a thought which churned over in his mind as his pupils taunted him. They wouldn't have called me Winny then, not if they'd seen me and the lads playing. They would have been like the other kids at the Cavern, screaming at us while we were on stage, and pushing each other out of the way just so they could stand next to us after the show.
But the kids at Woodchurch didn't know about John Lennon's glory days. To them he was just another teacher with leather patches on the sleeves of his jacket, another old guy who wore a shirt and tie which didn't match, another authority figure forcing them to do things they didn't want to do. That was why he was a target for their frustrations.
In his more lucid moments, John knew the  reason behind their behaviour and attitude. It wasn't anything personal, he was just the teacher, but this didn't help him when he had to put up with it every day of the week.
He gave up on his musings about the reunion gig - he had hoped he could get it organised for his 40th birthday which was less than four month aways - and his thoughts returned to his and Cynthia's financial situation. 'So I'm such a bad husband. So what do I spend my allowance on?'
Allowance? Yes, Cynthia gave him pocket money, a fact which John hid from his friends, who he felt would be sure to take the piss if they knew. Cynthia let him have £20 a week, and that had to cover all his expenses, including the petrol for the old Escort, the white and rust coloured heap of shit which he drove the four miles to work every day.
If there was a few quid spare, he would buy an LP once a month - although he always avoided anything by The Dave Clark Five. He had always found it impossible to comprehend how the so-called Tottenham Sound had made it, and were still going strong, when the Beatles fame hadn't extended beyond Merseyside.
No, when John went to buy his records at Rox in Birkenhead, he always looked under 'C' for Cream, 'H' for Hendrix  or 'P' for Pink Floyd. Now that was what he called music. And if Cynthia's allowance would stretch that far, he would buy a book, usually a biography, but that was the extent of his spending.
The Tottenham Sound. What a laugh.
It was no consolation to John that one Liverpool band  had managed to break the stranglehold of the London groups in the early sixties. The Dave Clark Five may have made him question the justice of the pop world, but it was even harder to understand why Gerry and the Pacemakers were still having regular appearances in the Top Ten in the first year of the eighties.
'I'm telling you, I did gigs with them, and I'm not kidding, they were fuckin' shite,' John would tell his drinking mates at the Crack. He'd seen them recently on Top of the Pops, singing a protest song about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
'Just who do they think they are, singing about stuff like that?,’ he had raged to Cynthia as he watched Gerry Marsden warbling something about the Red Army's actions being 'unlawful in Kabul'.
'Unlawful in Kabul, my fuckin arse. It should be friggin unlawful that they ever got a record contract', John had seethed to his mates in the Crack.  He was on a roll now, while Ivan, Pete and Mal sighed collectively and settled down for another Lennon rant.
'So what is he, an ambassador for world fuckin peace now? He wasn't so keen to sing protest songs about fuckin' America bombing fuckin' Vietnam, was he? Fuckin Tory bastard, that's what he is. He'd support America, but he's straight on the anti-Comunist bandwagon.'
And everytime John went off on one his rants, Mal Evans, the guy who had once been the Beatles roadie, nodded sympathetically and murmured soothing words, as did Pete and Ivan, two of the original members of The Quarrymen, a previous incarnation of the band. Pete and Ivan were never commited to the music and had left in the early days, but the four school friends had kept in touch since then.
The regulars at the Crack were used to John and his outbursts, and they would nod agreement until he calmed down and stumbled out of the pub homeward bound for Cynthia and the kids, with Mal in tow. Mal always walked with him to Central Station, making sure that his old mate headed for the right platform. There had been more than one occasion when John, his senses dulled by nine pints of Tetleys, had ended up on a Southport-bound train instead of the one which went under the Mersey to the Wirral.
He was still sitting at the desk in the back room. The black and white portable TV was on, the volume switched off. The Little and Large Show was on, but John was more interested in the Elvis Costello track which was playing in the background.
Elvis was from Birkenhead, and John had followed his progress and bought a few of his LPs. He knew his dad, Ross McManus, from years ago. He had set himself up as a manager, and at one time had considered taking on the Beatles, although this came to nothing. The last he heard of Ross, he had a gig singing the R.Whites lemonade advert a couple of years earlier. How did that go? Some bloke in his pyjamas sneaking downstairs to have a sly swig of a bottle of pop, that was it. Still, he must have got paid good money for it.
John sneered at the TV screen as he turned the volume up. Little and Large were still on.  'This pair are supposed to be the new Morecambe and Wise? They must be friggin joking' he snorted.
But then his features broke into a grin. The fat one looks just like Gerry Marsden. Oh, but hang on, he’s got a better voice than Gerry though.
He had opened his second bottle of Mateus Rose, and was wishing he had a bit of weed handy. 'Fuck it, and fuck her', he thought, as he struggled with the corkscrew.  He was going to get in touch with the others, no matter what Cynthia said.  'It's not everyday that you're forty is it?.
Little and Large had finished, thank God - and he sat back to watch News at Ten. It was as depressing as ever. Reginald Bosanquet was on tonight. 'Is that guy pissed?' John always wondered this whenever he saw him reading the news. The American hostages were still being held at the Embassy in Tehran, and there were more redundancies in the steelworks and shipyards at home. But worse than all of that was the news that Ronald Reagan was the favourite to defeat Jimmy Carter and win the American elections in a couple of months. John was convinced that Ronald Reagan would end up going to war with Russia.
Reagan as President? It had been bad enough the previous year when the Tories got in and Thatcher kicked Jim Callaghan out. Was the whole world turning right wing? He made a mental note that tomorrow he would join the Labour Party. While he agreed with Cynthia that Michael Foot - who was being tipped as the next leader - had the misfortune to look like a tramp, he was sure that Foot would do a better job than Thatcher, and that when the next election came round, people would realise the mistake they'd made voting Tory in 1979. And John was going to help them win that election.
But even as the thought was filtering through his mind, John  knew that he wouldn't join the Labour Party. But it made him feel better just thinking about it. 
It had been a couple of hours since the row with Cynthia, but he couldn't escape the 'negative vibes' as Julian would have called them. The wine was having no effect - well, it wasn't having the effect he was looking for - and he was wishing he had another pack of cigarettes.
His head was filled with rambling, unconnected thoughts. Julian wanted to go to University to study sociology. That was going to cost John an arm and a leg - possibly two legs - but Cynthia reckoned it would be worth it in the long term.  John always pointed out that Sociology was a pile of useless crap when it came to getting a job, another view that was guaranteed to end in a row.
This was how conversations with Cynthia always ended up these days, he thought. Recriminations and sneers, blame and counter blame, attack and counter attack. And on top of all that, she always tried to put him down whenever he talked about getting the band back together, the one thing that he was convinced would give him some joy and satisfaction in his life.
What was her problem? They had a nice house, didn't they? Okay, it was only a semi, but it was in Pensby. It was a nice place, just a couple of miles from Hoylake where Cynthia had grown up. John hadn't wanted to move across the Mersey from Liverpool, but when the Beatles had split in 1960, and he made the decision to go on to teacher training college after Art School, moving to the Wirral was a condition which Cynthia had laid down.
He could still remember the arguments.  He would have been happy to stay in the bedsit in Liverpool 8, but Cynthia missed the Wirral. She didn't mind staying over in the early days, but when things became serious - for example, when she told him she was pregnant with Julian - things changed. And that was when she told him she missed the little luxuries of life. Like a bedroom. And a bathroom that wasn't shared by four other tenants. He could see her point now. Pensby was nice. It was too big to be described as a village, but it had a villagey atmosphere which John liked.
The Mateus Rose was at last taking effect. He couldn't remember the last time he and Cythia had actually talked to each other, unless it was about their children.
Julian and Mimi. They were the only reason he was still here with Cynthia. It seemed so long ago now, but when Julian was born he had provided the bond which he truly believed would keep him and Cynth together. And then Mimi came along in 1970, and for a while it seemed that they could really make it work. But all the good intentions, all the brave words about staying together forever and being a real family, had long since faded.
And now Julian was seventeen, and like all teenagers, he had his awkward moments. 'A bit like I was at his age', John acknowledged, but this didn't stop him shouting at him when his frustration boiled over. But he knew that Jules was a good kid - despite the fact that he only seemed to become aware of  John's presence when he wanted to 'borrow' money. He had grown distant from his dad, a gradual process which began when Julian was approaching his teens. It was around this time that he had stopped giving John a hug, and the withdrawal into the self conscious, snarling youth had begun.
But Mimi was different. Daughters always are, his friends who had daughters themselves often told him. Mimi was ten years old, and while her mannerisms sometimes suggested a  miniature version of Cynthia, John could see his mother, Julia, in her features. 'I hope you take after my mum and not yours', he would think whenever he looked at her. And those looks could only be described as adoring.
Mimi. Little Mims, he called her. She was named in honour of Aunt Mimi.
Shit, how long had it been since he had phoned his aunt? It must be four weeks. He made a mental note to call her tomorrow, knowing that he wouldn't, but once again, he immediately felt better for promising himself that he would get in touch.
What was it Aunt Mimi used to say when he was practising his guitar every night in the front room at Menlove Avenue?   Something about it being all well and good, but you'll  never make a living out of it? He used to tell her he would soon be earning a hundred pounds a week, and that he would buy her a house by the sea when he and the group made it.
Well, that was one thing Mimi was dead right about, although I‘m earning a hundred pounds a week now, so maybe we were both right. I never did make a living out of it, John reflected as he searched the telephone directory for Paul MacCartney's number.
He knew that Paul lived somewhere in Bebington, and as he began searching through the listings, he thought this was about right for the man who always wanted to live on the Wirral. Bebington was suitably middle class for the man John referred to as the ultimate social climber.
The Beatles were going to get back together in time for his birthday, and Cynthia, or for that matter, anybody else, wasn't going to stop them. 
Well, that was unless the others told him to fuck off. But that was a chance he would take. And anyway, he was sure that he could persuade them. All he had to do now was track them down. It was for his 40th birthday, so how could they refuse?

Chapter 5
Paul McCartney hadn't heard from John since the night Mimi was born ten years earlier. The phone had rung late one night, and a very drunk Lennon was on the line, telling him about his beautiful baby daughter. Paul was genuinely pleased to hear the news. He had always liked Cynthia and he knew she wanted more kids, and if he really pushed himself, he thought John was okay too. Well, he was now that all the bitterness was behind them.
There had been some friction when the group had split - in fact he was sure there had been punches exchanged at one point between him and John - but that was all a long time ago.  At the end of that phone call  in 1970, John and Paul had both made promises to keep in touch, but neither kept that promise.
So when the phone rang at Paul's home, he had been surprised to hear John on the other end of the line, not least because it was nearly midnight and he was in bed. The voice from the past was clearly marked by the effects of alcohol, which made Paul smile as the preliminary greetings were exchanged.
When he first met John - at a Summer Fete at Strawberry Field -  he was drunk then as well. And of course, Lennon was bladdered when he had called to tell him about little Mimi's arrival in the world. And here he was again, pissed on the end of the phone.
When was it, when we met? It must have been more than 20 years ago, Paul thought as he counted the years back.  'It was nineteen fifty fuckin seven' John informed him when he asked.
'Where does the time go, Mac? I'm forty in a few months. Forty! Can you believe it? I can't. What was it Roger Daltrey said? 'I hope I die before I get old? I don't wanna die before I get old, I want to live forever, me.'
For the next five minutes, the pair swapped details of the paths their lives had taken since 1970. John told Paul about the school, and of course, the 'little twats' he had to deal with everyday. 'Always the drama queen', Paul thought as he listened to the rantings of the man who he had once shared dreams of stardom with.
And then John got down to business. 'Listen, like I just said, I'm forty in October, and I suppose it's always the same when people get to this age, but I've been doing a lot of thinking. I'll come straight to the point, Paul. What do you think about us all getting back together? Just for one night, I mean. It would be a laugh, and I just think it would be a great way to turn forty. So, what do you think?
Paul was surprised. Since The Beatles had split up he hadn’t bothered with the music scene. Yes, there had been the period when he joined up with another band in Liverpool, after they came home from Hamburg, but that had fizzled out after a couple of months. Since then, his only involvement with music had been interviewing bands who played in the city, and the occasional session on his guitar when he put words to a melody he came across.
He couldn’t think of anything less appealling than getting back together with a bunch of blokes he hadn’t seen for nearly twenty years
But because John was tired and emotional - he liked that term, he’d read it in Private Eye, and he always used it to describe somebody who was pissed -  Paul replied ‘Er, yeah, that sounds sort of okay, cool.
‘Let me think about it, hey? Look mate, it’s late, I’m tired, you’re drunk, so lets talk about it later? I’ll call you tomorrow mate.’
McCartney replaced the reciever without giving John a chance to reply, knowing that if he did he would be on the phone for the next hour, and lay back on his pillow.
‘What was that about?’ Cath mumbled, her head covered by the duvet.
‘Ahh, it was nothing love. Just an old mate who’s had to much to drink and now he’s dreaming too much. I’ll give him a call tomorrow, he’ll have forgotten all about it by then. Nite love.’
John sat in the back room, staring at the telephone in his hand. It was thirty seconds since Paul had ended the call, and he could hear the tone coming from the receiver.
He pushed his glasses back over the bridge of his nose, hissed ‘Twat!’, and then flung the phone down.
‘We could have made it, I know we could…we were that close,’ John mumbled to himself, staring at his thumb and forefinger, which were separated by just two millimetres. ‘That close, and we let it go, we fuckin blew it…’
He leaned back into the settee, closed his eyes and let his soon-to-be-sleeping memory take him back to that day - the day that The Beatles were over, although they didn’t know it then - in Hamburg nearly twenty years earlier.

Chapter 6
The wind blowing across the city from the Baltic was bitingly cold,  forcing the five young men walking up the Reeperbahn to hunch their shoulders and plunge their hands deep into the pockets of their leather jackets, their chins nestling into their chests in an attempt to escape the icy blasts. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best and Stu Sutcliffe had been in the German city for five months, but the news they had received the previous day had alerted them that their time here may have been coming to a premature end. City council officials had somehow discovered that seventeen year old George was too young to be working in the country, and they had been told he must go home.
The Beatles were on their way to see the owner of the Top Ten club, who had just offered them a contract to play there. This was a move up the ladder from the Kaiserkeller, and they were hoping Peter Ekhorn would find a way around the problem. ‘If they send him home, we’re fucked’ said Lennon to nobody in particular. The others nodded glumly, while George, walking at the rear of the group, dropped his head even lower.
It had all been going so well. The boys had arrived in Hamburg with their new drummer, Pete Best, after a two week tour of Scotland. They were beginning to build up a following at the Kaiserkeller, thanks to their mix of their own songs, covers of old favourites and a manic Lennon-led stage act which the German crowd loved.
Despite their hopes, Eckhorn, the owner of the Top Ten had been unable to help them, and George had to go home, travelling alone by train and boat back to England and Liverpool. From this point it had all unravelled for The Beatles.
The remaining members played two nights at the Top Ten, but then there had been the incident at their digs, when Pete and Paul inadvertently started a fire. The police were called and the pair were arrested and held in the cells for a couple of hours. They were then told that they were to be deported, leaving just John and Stu.
‘Great’, John had said when he heard about the deportation order. ‘I’m left with a bloke who can hardly play the fuckin bass guitar…that’s going to be a great stage act, isn’t it?’
It was hard to say who was the most upset by these developments, as Stu had by this time met and fallen in love with Astrid Kirschner, and John suspected that his friend’s disappointment was more to do with leaving Astrid than seeing the band crumble away to nothing.
John also had suspicions that there was some kind of underhand
dealing taking place between rival club owners. It was strange that the authorities had suddenly targeted George, and the fire that Pete and Paul had started had been so small that deportation seemed a little harsh. These suspicions were confirmed - to John at least - when he was told that his work permit was being rescinded, and he would have to leave as well.
He had called to see Stu at Astrid’s house and told them the news. John had sold some of his clothes to buy a ticket home, and with his amp strapped to his back and guitar in hand he followed the train and boat route back to Liverpool.
He arrived at Mimi’s house in the early hours, waking her up by throwing stones at her bedroom window, and asking if she could pay the taxi driver who had driven him from Lime Street station. And Mimi hadn’t helped either, shouting after him as he walked upstairs, ‘Where’s your £100 a week now, John?’, a reference to John’s promise of his earning potential.
And that was it. The Beatles were finished before they’d really got started. They never played together as a group after that final four man performance in the Top Ten club, although they did meet up in The Philharmonic pub in Liverpool, three months after they arrived home, with the intention of talking about getting back together.
John couldn’t remember the reasons why they hadn’t picked up where they left off. He recalled some arguments between him and Paul about the direction they should take - actually, it became quite heated, and the pair had to be separated when they squared up to each other.
There was also a reluctance from Pete to get involved again. He had found himself a job and was playing part time with another group, and his comments suggested that he wouldn‘t be coming back to The Beatles.
George was keen to get back together, probably because he felt that it was his fault that they had broken up, although the others half-heartedly assured him that this wasn’t the case. Stu hadn’t been at the meeting. He had also been sent home a couple of days after John, but had returned to Astrid as soon as his documents had been cleared, and he had said in a letter to John that he had no intention of coming back to Liverpool. He was going to concentrate on his painting, admitted that he had lost interest in the group, but wished them well for the future.
John, Paul, George and Pete had said their goodbyes that night in 1960 with promises to keep in touch and talk about getting the band back together, all agreeing that they couldn‘t leave it too long otherwise their fans would forget about them and move onto another group. But after they left the Philharmonic pub, everyday normal life had got in the way of what had once been their dream, and the four young men had gone their separate ways.
 John woke with a start, and looked at the clock on the wall. It was 4 am, and the chill night air from the open window made him shiver. His back was stiff after falling asleep on the two seat settee, where he had ended up in a feotal position. He stood up and made his way, unsteadily, thanks to the two bottles of Mateus Rose, to the bedroom. In the half-light he could make out Cynthia under the blankets, her back turned to his side of the bed as usual. He got undressed and slipped between the sheets, making sure there was at least a foot of space between him and his wife.
‘I’m going to phone him again tomorrow,’ he muttered as the memory of his earlier phone call to Paul returned. He pulled the blanket up to his chin, snuggled his head into the pillow and said, ‘The bastard’s not going to fuck it up for me this time.’