In Liverpool and we are still moving in and out of happy reminiscences of childhood. He is, however, soon to leave Liverpool for the first trip to Hamburg.
Liverpool was always OK. Calderstones Park. Do you remember that rock outside Wavertree baths and the library ? It was a meteorite which had fallen out of the sky. 1 remember sliding on it. It was all polished, a big lump of black shiny rock; there were tunnels going up to Childwall Five Ways and so many other things . . .
And when it was holiday time, there were other simple pleasures in ordinary places not far away, country pleasures, seasides, nothing that cost much.
We went to Moreton1 (because my ma had a friend there, Phyllis Anderson) and Bidston Hill not far away, New Brighton, Southport2, and of course the big one, Blackpool, only once or twice, to see the 'lights'. We went all over Wales, staying in little places, nice old stone cottages with slate roofs. Probably they cost next to nothing to rent. You could actually live a whole happy life in a place like that.
Liverpool produced some funny little fellows: insurance salesmen, I never knew what it was about but they came every week, different ones; maybe there'd be two, then a priest would come and just knock and you'd give them money and they'd go away. On the corner of this place I lived, in Upton Green, Speke, there was a guy Mr. Bewley, and he started coming round the houses selling fish from a box and then after a while he had a handcart and then after that he got a truck with a flatback and he came round selling potatoes and all kinds of stuff.
Then he got an old Qosville single-decker bus parked round the back on a piece of wasteland and he had quite a place going there, and then he bought himself a Standard Vanguard, followed by a Ford Consul and then a Zephyr Zodiac and then something happened and they were all wiped out. Well.
Years later the Harrison family, having been on another housing list, made another move, away from Speke. They went to live in jj4 Macketf s Lane near
1 A plain little part-resort bat mostly a residential, light industrial town with few amenities on the Wirral/Mersey coast.
2 'Common' and 'posh' resorts respectively, suitable for day-trips, more than for overnight stays.
W
oolton
and it was while they
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members his career was 'getting going'. It was from Mackett's Lane that he first 'left home' in the sense that he went away to k—to Hamburg for the first of many visits with the young Beatles.
Mackett's Lane was a nice, council-owned house {much preferred to Upton Green where George had spent so many of his school years but never, because of the urgency of his career, as much 'home' as Upton Green) where George's parents lived until the palmy days of 1966 when, with all the children married and settled elsewhere and he rich and famous, they moved into a pretty bungalow near Warrington, an honest town with some character of its own but chiefly known as being about halfway between the great cities of Liverpool and Manchester.