Paul McCartney

1

'Hey, mister, gimme a quid and I'll show you Paul McCartney's house'

The pale blue minibus that starts out from Liverpool's Albert Dock promises 'the only tour to go inside the childhood homes of Lennon and McCartney'. On its side are two cartoon faces, outlined in the vaguest black and white yet still as instantly recognisable all over the world as Mickey Mouse. By now, perhaps even more so.

For many years, Liverpool was strangely reluctant to capitalise on its most famous sons. But no longer. At Albert Dock, the Beatles Story museum recreates the whole saga so realistically, one could almost think one had shared in it. Mathew Street, renamed 'the Cavern Quarter', is a teeming boulevard of souvenir shops and themed bars, with a near-as-dammit replica of the Cavern a few metres from the site of the original. In North John Street, the luxurious Hard Day's Night Hotel has both a John Lennon and a Paul McCartney Suite, each costing around £800 per night and always reserved for months ahead.

In addition, there is a huge choice of Magical Mystery Tours around the city centre's main Beatle landmarks–the Pier Head, St George's Hall, Lime Street station, the Empire Theatre–then out to the suburbs, where the most sacred shrines are located.

This one by blue minibus is a cut above the rest, being operated by the National Trust, a body normally dedicated to preserving and restoring Britain's ancient stately homes. The two homes for which we're bound are neither ancient or stately, yet between them attract as many paying visitors, proportionate to their size, as any Tudor palace or eighteenth-century Palladian mansion in the Trust's care.

Here, for once, the two names' fixed order of precedence didn't apply. Paul's childhood abode, 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton, was the first to be acquired by the Trust and, in 1996, opened to public view as the place where Lennon and McCartney's songwriting partnership began. For some years afterwards, it was felt that 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton, where John was brought up, did not qualify as a national monument because no specific Beatles track could be proved to have been composed there (even though Paul and he used to rehearse endlessly in its glassed-in front porch). Finally, in 2002, John's widow, Yoko Ono, bought the house and presented it to the Trust, together with an allowance for its restoration and upkeep.

This Sunday morning's blue minibus contingent are the mix of nationalities and ages one would expect. A group of four from French-Canadian Montreal is led by broadcasting executive Pierre Roy, a 'Paul' person to his manicured fingertips: 'I'm a Gemini like him, I'm left-handed, too, and my first girlfriend's name was Linda.'

A pair of young women in their mid-twenties hail respectively from Dublin and Teesside (the latter rather shamefacedly admitting she actually prefers George). Bernard and Margaret Sciambarella, a married couple in their forties, have merely crossed the Mersey from the Cheshire Wirral, bringing their 21-year-old student daughter. Despite both being hardcore Beatles fans they've taken this tour only once before. 'It's always the same if something's right on your doorstep, isn't it?' Margaret says.

We head off along Liverpool's revitalised waterfront, passing on one side the old dock basin, now ringed by espresso bars and boutiques; on the other, Victorian commercial buildings now transformed into desirable river-view apartments. At the corner of James Street is the former headquarters of the White Star shipping line where, one day in 1912, a company official stood on the balcony, reading the Titanic's casualty-list through a megaphone to the stunned crowds beneath.

Broadcasting technology a century ago turns out to have been rather more reliable than today's. 'Guys, I'm sorry…' is our driver's opening announcement. 'The bus only just came back from a service and the CD player isn't connected up yet. That means that unfortunately there won't be any music to go with the places you'll be seeing on the tour.'

So out of Beatle City in silence we go: through gangster-haunted Toxteth, past the magnificent iron gateway to Sefton Park, along Smithdown Road, where Paul's mother did her nurse's training. A turning left leads to Queen's Drive and the former family home of Brian Epstein which, disgracefully, no one has ever thought worth preserving for the nation.

'Right, guys,' our driver says, 'we're just coming up to a place you'll all recognise. I'm sorry there's no tape of Penny Lane to go with it.'

Who cares? The song rings out of collective memory louder and clearer than the purest stereo. Penny Lane is in our ears and in our eyes, even if its 'blue suburban skies' this morning tend more towards dish-mop grey.

It is arguably Paul's masterpiece, twinned with a John masterpiece, 'Strawberry Fields Forever', on the greatest-value pop single ever released. And Penny Lane the place competes with the site of the old Strawberry Field Salvation Army home as Liverpool's most-visited Beatle shrine. Over the decades, its street-sign has been stolen so many times that the local authority took to simply painting the name on buildings. Latterly, a supposedly thief-proof sign has proved little more successful than the old type.

It has always seemed the sweetest of song-titles, evoking an innocent 1950s world when Britain used big copper penny coins that often dated back to Queen Victoria's reign, confectioners sold penny chocolate bars or 'chews' and women did not pee but 'spent a penny', the cost of using a public toilet. In reality, the name commemorates James Penny, an eighteenth-century Liverpool slave-trader. Nor is the song really about Penny Lane, but Smithdown Place, where the lane (which, anyway, has more associations with John than Paul) widens into a shopping 'parade' and a terminus for several bus-routes.

Every topographical feature listed in the lyric is still here, for each of us instantly triggering a mental soundtrack of nostalgic piano, old-fashioned brass or the tripping notes of a piccolo trumpet solo. There's still a barber, 'showing photographs of every head he's had the pleasure to know', even if hairstyles have moved on from 'Tony Curtises' and 'ducks' arses' and the shop's name is no longer Bioletti, as during Paul's childhood, but Tony Slavin. There's a branch of Lloyds TSB, where the banker might well not own 'a mac' (raincoat, that is, not laptop) and nowadays is perhaps even more likely to be laughed at behind his back.

Here is the traffic island behind whose shelter 'a pretty nurse' could well be 'selling poppies from a tray' (and every one of us knows whom she represented). To the left, along Mather Avenue, there's still a fire-station where even now some dragoon-helmeted officer might be watching the time in an hourglass as he polishes his 'clean machine… in his pocket… a portrait of the Queen'.

Paul's and John's childhood homes lie less than a mile apart but in separate suburbs whose social differences remain very noticeable. Allerton, on this side at least, consists predominantly of working-class council estates whereas Woolton is a well-heeled enclave of industrialists, professionals and academics from Liverpool University. When John first met Paul in 1957, that distinction was multiplied a thousandfold.

On the blue minibus, after our McCartney prologue, we have reverted to the traditional pecking-order. First stop is 'Mendips', the semi-detached villa with faux Tudor flourishes where John, that supposed 'working-class hero', spent an irreproachably middle-class and rather pampered boyhood in the care of his forceful Aunt Mimi.

Not for almost two hours do we leave Woolton's leafy boulevards, drive down Mather Avenue and pull up outside 20 Forthlin Road. Another, identical, minibus is waiting to collect an earlier tour group who are just emerging through the minuscule front garden. The intoxicated buzz of their conversation includes French, Spanish and Russian, or perhaps Polish. 'Well, she was just seventeen…' sings a Dutch-accented male voice. 'You know what I mean…' an international chorus responds.

To modern British ears, the term 'council house' tends to signify society's lower rungs, but in the years just after the Second World War, these local authority-built and -subsidised dwellings represented a miraculous upward leap from overcrowded and insanitary back-to-back slums.

Twenty Forthlin Road is a classic example of the terraced variety: two-storeyed plain-fronted (which in the Fifties meant ultramodern) with a large downstairs window, two small upper ones and a glass-paned front door under a wedge-shaped porch. Although a national monument, it does not rate one of the blue plaques handed out by the National Trust's complementary body, English Heritage, to mark the homes of great figures in history. Blue plaques are conferred only where the great figure is dead or a centenarian.

Like 'Mendips', the house has a resident custodian who also acts as tour-guide. Most are devoted fans for whom living in John's or Paul's old home, restored to its 1950s character, is beyond Heaven. For some years, indeed, Forthlin Road had a custodian with an uncanny facial resemblance to Paul though his name, confusingly, was John.

Today, our guide is a motherly-looking woman with pale, curly hair who introduces herself as Sally, then tactfully relieves us of our bags and cameras, promising they'll be kept safe 'in the very same place where the McCartneys used to put their hats and coats'.

When the National Trust acquired the house, Paul's only stipulation was that it shouldn't be just a shrine to the Beatles but a memorial to a family. 'And at the beginning,' Sally reminds us, 'this was a very sad place for him.' In the little hallway above the front door hangs a simple wooden plaque:

To the left is the sitting-room where Paul first began writing songs with John (though he'd tried writing them by himself even before that). It is a tiny space, almost every square inch filled by a chunky 'three-piece suite' of sofa and two matching armchairs, a fringed standard lamp and a wood-encased, tiny-screen TV set. On a side table stands the weighty black dial-telephone (Garston 6922) that, for some time, was the only one in the whole street. The yellow willow pattern wallpaper was chosen by the National Trust as typical of such a room in the early Fifties; then, as it was being decorated, some of the McCartneys' original silver-blue chinoiserie paper came to light. A section of this is mounted on card under plastic, which a privileged member of each tour group gets to hold up for the others to see.

Against the inside wall is an upright piano, the kind that once stood in so many British front parlours. 'It was in this room that 16-year-old Paul sat at the piano and wrote "When I'm Sixty-Four",' Sally says. 'And, as you probably know [probably?], the piano came from the North End Road Music Stores, or NEMS, which was owned by Brian Epstein's family. No, this isn't the same piano,' she adds before anyone can ask. 'Paul has got that.'

Above the TV set hangs his brother Michael's photograph of him and John in their facing armchairs, poring over their right- and left-handed guitar fretboards, it's said, during the composition of 'I Saw Her Standing There' (hence that singing Dutchman outside). 'The two of them had a rule that if they couldn't remember a new song the next day, then it wasn't worth keeping,' Sally continues. 'If it was, Paul would write it down in his school exercise book. And he's still got that school exercise book.'

Folding wooden doors lead to a tiny dining-room and, beyond, a kitchen stocked with 1950s products like Rinso detergent, Robin starch and Lux soap. After the McCartneys moved out in 1964, a family named Smith occupied the house for 30 years and installed modern kitchen fitments including a stainless steel sink unit. When the National Trust took over, the original wooden draining-boards were discovered in the roof-cavity. Then the porcelain sink that went with them turned up in the back garden, being used as a plant-holder.

The garden is a modest grass rectangle, its view still the police training-college in Mather Avenue. 'Of course, there were police horses kept there when Paul was a boy,' Sally says. 'So lots of nice manure for his dad's roses.' The wooden shed used to hold a scullery–where clothes were scrubbed by hand, then fed through the rollers of an iron-framed 'mangle'–and an outside toilet. Now it holds a visitors' 'rest room' ('This is a long tour after all,' Sally says) and a guide's cubbyhole, where she's parked her lunch of a focaccia and sun-dried tomato sandwich.

She shows us the drainpipe which, late at night, Paul would shin up to climb through the inside toilet window and let John in at the front door without waking his father. This must be the only National Trust property where the drainpipe is pointed out as being of historical interest.

We go upstairs to the large back bedroom Paul ceded to his younger brother, Michael, though both kept their clothes there. Slung over the bed-head is a set of black Bakelite radio-headphones like those which first piped in the heavenly contagion of rock 'n' roll. Paul's old room, overlooking the street, isn't much wider than its narrow single bed. On the coverlet lie a scatter of significant artefacts including a paperback of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood (i.e. good English student) and a replica of his very first guitar, the reddish sunburst f-hole Zenith. 'Paul still has the original one,' Sally hardly needs to tell us.

Here each group is allowed a few minutes for what in church would be called 'silent reflection'. And it usually is silent or, anyway, wordless. 'Some people laugh, some people cry,' Sally says. 'Mostly they're just very, very moved.'

In all the years 20 Forthlin Road has been open to the public, Paul has never seen its restored interior, though he's paid several incognito visits to look at it from outside. Once, when he brought his son James, he was accosted by a small boy from a neighbouring house. Not realising who it was, the boy tried a hustle with all the Liverpudlian cheek of the Beatles in their prime:

'Hey, mister, gimme a quid and I'll show you Paul McCartney's house.'