Paul McCartney and John Lennon met on Saturday, July 6, 1957 — 12 years after the war, 10 years before they released Sgt Pepper — amid the pageantry of a suburban English garden party in Woolton, Liverpool: brass band, fancy-dress parades, cake stalls and hoopla games. Paul, 15 years old, was over from Allerton, a mile or two across the golf course. He didn’t hang out in Woolton much — it was a posh neighbourhood, a little prissy — but a friend from school, Ivan, lived there, and had suggested they go to the fête. There would be girls, plus Ivan had this local friend, John Lennon, whom Paul might like to meet, or at least see play with his group, the Quarry Men.
At about 4pm, he and Ivan arrived at St Peter’s Church. The noise of Lennon’s group was billowing through humid air from the field next to the church. Paul had seen John around, on the bus, in the chip shop, and he was already fascinated by him. Paul was an intellectually hungry boy who was unconvinced by school and unimpressed by the prospect of an office job. Here was this older lad, nearly 17, a leather-jacketed, sideburned, vulpine rocker who seemed to have already made an irreversible break from workaday life.
Paul listened as John blasted out, in his rude, powerful voice, songs that Paul knew by heart: Come Go with Me by the Del-Vikings, Rock Island Line by Lonnie Donegan, Be-Bop-a-Lula by Gene Vincent. Later Paul remembered that he was struck by how good Lennon looked and sounded. He was also intrigued by what Lennon got wrong. Lennon played his guitar oddly, his left hand making simple but unfamiliar shapes on the fretboard, and he messed up the words in a way that Paul found almost inexplicably thrilling.
This was not a meeting of equals but fundamentally lopsided. For teenagers, age gaps are magnified: every year is a generation. John was not just older; he was already a big figure in the small world of southeast Liverpool teenagers. He was magnetic, unignorable. Girls fancied him, boys feared him. Paul knew, if he wanted to be friends with John, or to join him up there one day, he was the one who would have to make the effort. John Lennon didn’t care.
Paul also knew that he had a shot at propelling himself into John’s orbit through their shared love of rock’n’roll. Indeed, this was the reason he wanted to meet John in the first place. Paul was seeking partners who were as crazy about music as he was. What started on his dad’s piano had become an obsession after he acquired a guitar. He would play it every minute his hands were free. He got pretty good, and he knew it.
Other than music and a pronounced suspicion of authority, John and Paul shared something else: they were walking wounded. Each had experienced jarring, alienating, soul-rending events that left permanent scars.
Mother Mary
By the time he met John, Paul’s mother had been dead for eight months. Mary Mohin came from Catholic Irish stock and was raised in poverty, the second child of four. Her own mother died in childbirth when Mary was nine. Mary’s father, who was from Co Monaghan, took the family back to Ireland, tried and failed to make a living in farming, and returned them all to Liverpool, this time broke, and with a new wife and stepchildren, with whom Mary and her siblings did not get on. Mary had a steely self-reliance. She threw herself into a nursing career, specialising in midwifery. At 30 she was a ward sister, and unmarried.
Mary had been friendly with the McCartneys, a Protestant Irish family, for years, and had recently moved in with her friend Ginny McCartney. In April 1941 Mary married Gin’s older brother, Jim, a cotton salesman, handyman and former leader of a semi-professional jazz band. Their first child, James Paul (“Paul”), was born 14 months later. Peter Michael (“Mike”) arrived 18 months afterwards.
In 1953 Paul passed the 11-plus and started at a prestigious grammar school, the Liverpool Institute. After observing how much he liked playing on their piano, Mary and Jim found a teacher for him, but he quickly abandoned the lessons; he wanted to get straight to playing what he loved.
His parents encouraged him to audition for the choir at Liverpool Cathedral — he could sing beautifully — and Paul deliberately flubbed it. He had an aversion to being told what to do.
Jim was genial, dapper and funny, but it was Mary who set standards of dress, cleanliness and manners, and insisted they were kept to. She was warm too, a liberal dispenser of hugs and kisses. As an adolescent, Paul guarded his independence from her. Still, he admired her. He saw how hard she worked. It was also Mary to whom Paul looked for comfort when he was anxious (he later wrote a song about this, Let It Be).
The piano was at the heart of the home and the heart of social life — wherever the wider McCartney clan gathered, at home or in the pub, a sing-song usually ensued, often with Paul’s father leading proceedings. The association of music-making with love and happiness became ingrained. Paul lived inside the ordinary miracle of a loving family and, like everyone else who does so, took it for granted. Until it was taken away.
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The McCartneys were not well-off. The cotton industry was in a bad way, Jim’s job did not pay well and he was fond of a flutter on the horses. But thanks to Mary taking extra hospital shifts, the family did well enough to move out of their house on a poverty-stricken estate in Speke to a similar but newer house on Forthlin Road in Allerton, on the southern edge of the city. Paul was nearly 14.
Within a year, though, Mary felt a pain in her breast. She put it down to the menopause. It got worse. She went to see a cancer specialist, who recommended immediate surgery, but by then it was too late. Mary was 47 when she died. It all happened within a month. Paul and Mike knew almost nothing about it until their mother went into hospital, while they were shipped out to their aunt and uncle’s house. Gathered in the living room to be told the news by their dad, Mike cried, while Paul asked, “How are we going to get by without her money?”
It sounds cold, and it troubled Paul for years afterwards, but to me it is heartbreaking: the sound of a hyperactive young brain going into overdrive in order to evade a shattering psychological blow.
Much of Paul’s mature personality can be traced to Mary’s life and the fact of her death: his work ethic and his devotion to family. Her death also inculcated a determination to project invulnerability.
Paul and Mike were told next to nothing about their mother’s death. “We had no idea what my mum had died of,” Paul said. “Worst thing about that was everyone was very stoic, so nobody talked about it.” The extended family rallied around Jim rather than the children. The McCartney children were made to seal up their pain. Paul learnt to maintain an appearance of perfect emotional competence no matter what strain he was under.
In the days after Mary’s death, Paul prayed for her to come back. “Daft prayers, you know. If you bring her back, I’ll be very, very good for always,” he recalled. “I thought, it just shows how stupid religion is. See, the prayers didn’t work when I really needed them to.”
Julia
In July 1957 John’s mother was very much alive, almost painfully so. Around this time Julia Lennon was both central to John’s life and outside it: an intimate who remained just out of reach. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him or that he didn’t love her; it’s that she didn’t seem to want to be his mother, and this broke his heart.
In September 1929 a 16-year-old boy called Alf Lennon met a 15-year-old girl called Julia Stanley in Sefton Park, Liverpool. Alf was working-class, Irish Catholic, short and irrepressible: a charming chancer, a talented drinker. Julia, who came from a Protestant family, was middle-class, slender and beautiful, with red hair. So began an enduring but erratic relationship. Alf joined the merchant navy and spent months at a time at sea. Julia worked as an usherette at the cinema. The two lovers would see each other when Alf came back to Liverpool. They married in 1938.
Julia was the fourth of five sisters. Her father taught her the banjo and she learnt to play popular American songs. Among her sisters, Julia was known as the rule-breaker and mischief-maker. The oldest, Mimi, eight years Julia’s senior, was in some ways her opposite: ambitious for social advancement, conscious of responsibilities, a believer in self-betterment through hard work. The two sisters stayed close despite repeated clashes of will.
Their biggest clash came over the welfare of Julia and Alf’s son, John, born on October 9, 1940. Mimi was present at the birth. Alf was away at sea. Julia and John lived with Julia’s parents, sister Anne and various lodgers. Julia, 26, was not ready to give up on her youth. She took a job as a barmaid in a pub and began a relationship with a Welsh soldier she met there called Taffy. Mimi and her husband, George Smith, who did not have children of their own, often looked after John in their house in Woolton.
In 1944 Alf returned after 18 months at sea, to be told by Julia she was pregnant with Taffy’s child. John, who witnessed his parents rowing, must have been horribly confused. Alf then took John away to stay with his brother and sister-in-law, ten miles away. John stayed with this couple for at least a month. He was well looked after but never saw his mother.
When Alf returned to sea he deposited John back with Julia, although John spent much of his time at Mimi’s house (Julia gave birth to her second child, a daughter, in 1945; she gave her up for adoption). Mimi felt increasingly strongly about what she perceived to be the neglect of her nephew, and in the spring of 1946 took action. A year earlier Julia had started going out with a door-to-door salesman called Bobby Dykins, whom she met while working as a barmaid at the Coffee House pub in Wavertree, and moved in with him to a one-bedroom flat. She and Bobby shared a bed with John, who was five. Mimi was appalled. She informed the council and an official was sent to inspect the home. They agreed that the child was not being properly cared for.
Mimi was licensed to be John’s primary carer. She and George took John into their house, on Menlove Avenue, for good. A few weeks later Alf turned up while on leave and stayed the night. The next day he told Mimi he was taking John to the shops and didn’t come back. He whisked John to Blackpool, where they stayed with a friend of Alf’s.
Julia arrived in Blackpool to retrieve John. An argument ensued. John remembered his father demanding that he choose which parent he wanted to be with. Alf later claimed that John said he wanted to be with him, which is quite possible, since they had been together happily for the past few weeks. Julia, in tears, walked away, which made little John beg her not to go. She picked him up and took him with her to Liverpool.
John did not hear from his father again until he was an adult. Once in Liverpool, though, Julia, who was pregnant again, handed her son back to Mimi, instilling a lifelong sense of hurt, puzzlement and betrayal in John.
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Auntie Mimi
Under the care of Mimi and her husband, George, John became a member of Woolton’s genteel community: he enrolled at the local school and at Sunday school at St Peter’s Church, where he sang in the choir. Mimi and George were not well-off — George ran two small dairy farms — but lived in a semi-detached house with a spacious garden. It even had a name: Mendips.
John loved his uncle, who bought him his first mouth organ. Mimi was a voracious reader and the house was full of novels, poetry and biographies. He and Mimi would read the same book and argue about it afterwards. She was strict, demanding, sardonic, snobbish. But she was never cruel. Above all, Mimi was present. When she took John in, she promised that he’d never return to an empty house and never be left in the care of a childminder. She walked John to and from primary school every day.
At school, John was a star pupil. He had no problem passing his 11-plus to win a place at Quarry Bank High School for Boys. At home, Julia visited him for a while but then the visits stopped. Mimi told Julia they were unsettling for the boy. John spent much of his childhood under the impression that his mother had moved far from him, without understanding why (in reality Julia lived just a couple of miles away). He did see her now and again.
At Quarry Bank, things started to slide. John did well in art but badly in most other subjects. He hit puberty early, becoming distracted by girls and the need to dominate his peers. “I wanted everybody to do what I told them to do,” he remembered. “To laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss.”
When he was 14 John’s beloved Uncle George died from liver disease. Around this time John began seeing more of Julia, of his own volition. He would often bunk off school and hang out at her house. At first he kept these visits a secret from Mimi. It must have been an oddly illicit thrill, making clandestine visits to his own mother. It was certainly disorientating — he wasn’t sure if Julia felt like his mother, or his aunt, or a big sister, or something else; in later life he talked about a sexual attraction to her.
From an audio diary Lennon made in 1979: “I was just remembering when I had my hand on my mother’s tit in No 1 Blomfield Road… I was about 14. I took the day off school, I was always doing that and hanging out in her house. And we were lying on the bed and I was thinking, I wonder if I should do anything else, you know. I always think, well, I should have done it, presuming she would have allowed it.”
There’s no evidence that Julia invited or encouraged any such transgression; the story is significant insofar as it lingered in John’s mind for the rest of his life. (Oddly enough, Paul has spoken of having sexual feelings towards his mother too: “At night there was one moment when she [Mary] would pass our bedroom door in underwear . . . and I used to get sexually aroused.”)
Julia, who was in her early forties, loved pop music. She introduced John to American folk songs and Doris Day records. She taught him to play the banjo and sing along. Later she bought him his first guitar.
Julia was the most outrageous, the most reckless person John knew. She flirted with his mates, wore stockings on her head and danced in the kitchen. In 1956 she shared John’s excitement about Elvis. When he decided to form a skiffle group, she was all for it. As John’s relationship with Julia deepened, his schoolwork suffered, and his love for rock’n’roll became all-consuming. He and Mimi rowed incessantly. He spent an increasing amount of time at his mother’s.
Underneath the schoolboy bravado was mental turmoil. And no wonder: John’s mum lived somewhere else and, worst of all, this was seemingly through choice. Julia reappeared intermittently, shimmeringly. When she visited Mendips she would hug him, tickle him and vanish; later on, when he started visiting her, he was made to feel at home without ever feeling truly at home. Julia was loving and magnetic and always just out of reach. He adored Julia in part because she did not act like a mother, but he dearly wished her to be one. John’s childhood left him with a need for all-consuming love, and a terror of abandonment and betrayal.
When John played at the Woolton village fête, Julia and Mimi came to see him. Mimi was appalled. “Mimi said to me that day that I’d done it at last. I was now a real Teddy boy,” he said later. It was not a compliment. It’s tempting to say that John was inspired by Julia and had to overcome Mimi, and indeed that’s how the story is often told. In fact he and Mimi stayed in affectionate touch right up until the end of John’s life. She was his only constant.
These two women, who between them were the biggest influences on John’s formative years, offered diametrically opposed models for how to live. One represented hard work and self-discipline. The other represented freedom and self-expression. In 1957 it must have felt to John that life was about choosing between these two paths. Then along came Paul.
John and Paul
After the Quarry Men finished their set, they wandered over to the hall. John and Paul had been introduced briefly outside, but it was in the hall that each began to assess the other at close quarters. The conversation turned to music. Paul, who must have run through this moment in his head, asked John for a go on his guitar, and John said yes.
Paul knocked out a stunning version of Twenty Flight Rock, an Eddie Cochran rocker familiar only to aficionados. He knew every word. Paul then took to the piano to sing Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally, his screams and whoops reverberating through the hall. Paul later recalled sitting at the piano and smelling beery breath over his shoulder, before realising it was John. John was struck by how well this lad could play, and by how handsome he was. (“He looked like Elvis. I dug him.”) He was also a little unsettled by Paul’s lack of fear.
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Up until then the Quarry Men had been a half-hearted affair, months of inaction punctuated by gigs. Members came and went, turning up or not turning up, staying in only until John turned on them. “I’d been kingpin up to then,” he recalled. “Now I thought, if I take him on, what will happen?” Shortly after the fête, John sent his bandmate Pete Shotton to ask Paul if he wanted to join the Quarry Men. Paul pretended to think about it before saying yes.
At the Woolton fête when Paul reached across to take John’s guitar the 20th century tilted on its axis. Two damaged romantics with jagged edges that happened to fit began to fuse into something new and packed with energy. “That was the day,” John Lennon said, ten years later, “the day that I met Paul, that it started moving.”
Menlove Avenue
Twelve months later, on Tuesday, July 15, 1958, John, now 17, was at Julia’s house on Blomfield Road when she left in the evening to visit Mimi, less than two miles away. Julia didn’t tell him the purpose of her visit. A couple of weeks earlier her partner, Bobby, had been arrested for driving while drunk. He received a heavy fine, was banned from driving and lost his job as a waiter. When the household’s straitened situation became apparent, Bobby told Julia that they could no longer afford to have John round to stay. However she felt about it, Julia’s purpose that evening was to convey the message to her sister.
Julia left Mimi’s house just before 10pm. As she was saying goodbye at the gate, John’s friend Nigel Walley approached to see if he was home. Mimi told him he was out. Julia, with her customary charm, said, “You’ve arrived just in time to escort me to the bus stop.” They walked down Menlove Avenue. As they neared the bus stop, which was on the other side, they said goodbye. Julia turned left to cross the road; Nigel turned right to go home. He heard a terrible skidding and a thump. When he turned he glimpsed Julia’s body flying through the air.
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John remembered a policeman knocking on the door of Blomfield Road and asking whether he was Julia Lennon’s son, before informing John and Bobby that Julia was dead. Later, he recalled: “I thought, f*** it, f*** it. That’s really f***ed everything. I’ve no responsibilities to anyone now.”
After Julia’s death, John seemed numb on some days, drunk and vitriolic on others. Mimi saw it as her role to maintain order rather than tend to his emotional needs. Alf Lennon did not get in touch. John was left alone with his grief. Perhaps not completely. John did not talk about his mother’s death with Paul but the event cemented their bond.
John knew Paul understood something of what he was going through. Paul later said: “Each of us knew that had happened to the other . . at that age you’re not allowed to be devastated, and particularly as young boys, teenage boys, you just shrug it off.” It shattered them, he said, but they had to hide how broken they felt. “I’m sure I formed shells and barriers in that period that I’ve got to this day. John certainly did.”
Shells and barriers are defensive fortifications, but for John and Paul this shared trauma also blasted open an underground tunnel through which they were able to communicate in secret from the rest of the world, and even from themselves. In music they could say what they felt without having to say it. The songs they wrote and sang together were not “about” their feelings — they were their feelings, including those for each other.
At least in their early years, those feelings were refracted through the idiom of rock’n’roll. It was not a conscious strategy. In 1956 Paul wrote I Lost My Little Girl — only much later did he reflect that he wrote it in the wake of his mother’s death.
© Ian Leslie 2025. Extracted from John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs (Faber £25), published on March 27. Order from timesbookshop.co.uk.
● How Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday — and found his voice. Read more from Ian Leslie’s book in The Sunday Times Magazine next weekend
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