In the weeks that followed, we sustained the weekly column, properly as a duet; I cannot recall who wrote what, but it was his column and I was always
glad that George was the one we chose, because it did give him, as Brian had said, "an extra interest", and he is, so far from being the Quiet Beatle, a very talkative man, with as much interest in expressing himself as anyone else and maybe more than most.
To begin, not at the beginning, but at the only beginning he knows, we have to travel with him, in his own words
to try to imagine
the soul entering the womb of the woman living in 12 Arnold Grove, Wavertree,
don't really belong to me", he took the opposite approach and the risk of claiming this book in a slightly cynical trinity of pronouns.
Reading what Derek Taylor had to say about George was captivating once again. Perceptions of the man I dearly love by some-one as insightful and articulate as Derek have become somehow more important to me. Derek and George exchanged a special banter that often left others in the room completely bewildered by their verbal shorthand. It took time if you wanted to join in because their points of reference were wide reaching and covered decades of colourful and obscure characters and events, many shared during the phenomenal days of the Beatles that gave them a private world of experiences from which to draw. George quoted the wisdom of the great swamis, the Bhagavad Gita and the ancient Vedas, as well as the humor of Lord Buckley, The Goons, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks's The Producers and Monty Python. At the same time Derek regaled us with history lessons on both wars, commentary on current events and politics. If anyone in our household had a question pertaining to one of those subjects George always said, "Call Derek and ask him". He was very well read and shared with us information of all sorts, some of which we did not really wish to know, but all of it presented amusingly. I wasn't always certain what was fact or folly (although it didn't seem to matter).
The days they spent together working on this book were happy ones and took place over continuous cups of tea (for which Brian Roylance, who conceived and published the original, limited edition of / Me Mine, was mostly responsible, being the biggest fan of tea since Earl Grey himself). George and Derek's dialogue in these pages reveals much about their relationship, which began in Liverpool—and as they used to remind us, "Being born in Liverpool carries with к certain responsibilities". They'd worked together for thirty years, so Derek's interviews with George were second nature to both of them, yet they always managed to produce fresh recollections of their experiences. All of us around during the writing of / Me Mine took laughter for granted. It must have been a real eye-opener for Brian, whose previous publishing endeavors we considered to be more serious documents, such as The Log of the HMS Bounty and Charles Darwin's Journal of a Voyage in HMS Beagle. I would wager Brian was surprised at the emergence of his own sense of
Liverpool 15: there were all the barrage balloons, and the Germans bombing Liverpool. All that was going on.
I sat outside the house, in the car with Olivia, a couple of years ago, imagining 1943, nipping through from the spiritual world, the astral level, getting back into a body in that house. That really is strange when you consider the whole planet, and all the planets there may be on the physical level. . . how do I come to that family in that house at that time and who am I anyway ?
So, in this incarnation, on 2jtb February 1943, deep in the Second World War, deep in Liverpool and deep in winter George was born in 12 Arnold Grove, a cul de sac, terrace houses with an alley1 at the back. It still 4t\s "Arnold Gro"ve Unadopted". Still no one will own it.
To look at, it is just like Coronation Street: no garden, door straight on to the street. From the street, step into the front room. Then there's a back room with the stairs going up to two bedrooms. But thentwe moved, after about twenty-five years on the housing list, we moved. But back then, in Arnold Grove in my early days it was OK in its own period. It had one of those little iron cooking stoves in the back room which was the kitchen, where you had the kettle on the fire and the oven alongside the fire. Each room downstairs was about ten feet square (very small) and in the winter it was cold in the house.
Outside there was a little yard, almost all paved except one bit where there was a one-foot wide flowerbed, a toilet at the back, a dustbin fitted into the back wall and for a period of time we had a little henhouse where we kept cockerels.
When Olivia and I went up there no one was in, so we sat outside and imagined what it was like inside now. Probably it has had the fireplace knocked out and one of those little tiled jobs put in and it has probably got running hot water now. We used to have a zinc bath, a big one, hanging on the wall outside. We used to bring it in and put 1 Known in Liverpool as a "jigger".
