1 Wrote the first piece without consulting him much about the content, promising him that he could see it before it was published. I had talked to him

about his family, knew that he had two brothers and a sister, all older than he, that both his mother and father were alive and well, father a bus-driver with Liverpool Corporation, a kind, pragmatic man, supportive towards George's career, mother strong, friendly, tolerant and keen; in all, a sociable well-integrated upper-working class Liverpool family.

Of George's attitude to his own life and status as a Beatle I knew little. He had not found it easy to communicate much of this, although we had become friends swiftly. He has said since: "Friends are all souls that we've known in other lives. We're drawn to each other. That's how I feel about friends. Even if I have only known them for a day, it doesn't matter. I'm not going to wait till I have known them two years, because anyway we have met somewhere before,you know."

However, I wrote our first column in which George told his father that his career would mean that he would have to go out into the big world and that he would not be around much. I invented a ''quote' for his father which read: "Never you mind about that, son, you just go ahead and play your guitar and I'll carry on driving the big green jobs." There was much more in the same vein; statements, pulled out of the air, attributed to this регзоц and that; motives tossed in from a newspaperman's ragbag of stereotypes, all dressed up in quasi-Liverpoolese. Articulate Scouse as She is Spoke on Council Estates with Nice Gardens. In short: the very stuff of the standard ghost-written article in the British popular press.

I went by train from Manchester to London to meet George at Brian's fiat at Whaddon House, Williams Mews, in Belgravia. All four Beatles were there, John wearing thick hornrimmed glasses—a surprise—Ringo smoking a great deal, saying very little, Paul suspicious of journalists and George, my new friend and collaborator anxious to see what he had 'written* for his first-person statement to the readers of the Northern Daily Express. I handed him the two typed pages. He read the first passage quietly, and then he cried "What's this: 'I'll drive the big green jobs, I'll carry on driving the big green jobs', what are big green jobs?"

There was a horrible silence. George looked quite as much amused as

amazed but there ivas still a terrible hole in the air. What were big green

jobs? "Buses", I said, "Liverpool Corporation buses, big, green things, jobs,

er, well, you know, big green jobs, double-deckers." "I've never heard anyone

call them big green jobs", said George, really laughing now. "I must say I

haven't either, Derek", said Brian. " Have you?" "No", I said. There was a feeling of insane hysterics. "Big green jobs", George repeated, shaking his head. "I'd better keep on reading this."

So he read on, and he said that it wasn't all bad, but there were ways of putting it right, for instance . . . and another thing, and then there was this and that. And so we began to collaborate, and so we have done, ever since; literally from that day to this, and me wonder how the relationship has rolled through such strange years, through the mania and the break-up of the Beatles, through drugs and drinks and big rainbow coloured jobs, never mind the bright green Apple job! Now that was a big green job.