When They Were Boys Read Online Free Page B

it was more like threads.
    Threads. There are enough of them in the story to stretch a quilt from Liverpool to London. The boys were, like all boys, discovering new threads to their future at every moment. Theirs was a world, like that of all children of exploration, with some odd places. As little more than toddlers, little Paul McCartney and skinny George Harrison would play with friends in the Speke neighborhood, sometimes dangerously toying with German bombs that were, depending on whom you talk to, unexploded or harmless, probably the latter. Speke was a neighborhood of 25,000 people, many World War II veterans and their spouses, bringing up children in the British version of the postwar baby boom. It was busy with pedestrians and bicycles, this area near the airport. That airport doesn’t exist today, but the new one, John Lennon International Airport, is sparkling and not far away.
    In 1943, William Howard Ashton was born in the Bootle section of Liverpool. He says,
    I T WAS A REALLY TOUGH NEIGHBORHOOD, VERY BLUE COLLAR . Y OU GREW UP EARLY WITH A PLAN . . . MINE WAS TO TRAIN FOR THE RAILROAD AS ENGINEER .I DID THAT, BUT IN THE END, MUSIC WON OUT . L IKE ALL THE FAMILIES IN B OOTLE, MY PARENTS INSISTED THAT I HAVE A PLAN . W HO KNEW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN ? Y OU DID YOUR BEST, PRAYED A BIT, AND HOPED SOMETHING WOULD HAPPEN . T HE HARDER YOU WORKED, YOU HOPED THE BETTER CHANCE YOU WOULD HAVE, BUT LUCK AND CIRCUMSTANCES WOULD PLAY A PART . I WASN’T A B EATLE, BUT I HAPPILY RODE THE WAVE .
    Inspired by the boys playing at Speke and that “Lennon guy,” William became Billy J. Kramer, the strikingly handsome leader of the group Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. He would get close to the famous ones and receive a great gift someday: the words and music of their songs to record himself.
    â€œLiverpool may have been seen as a tough place,” Kramer says, “but my growing up was filled with memories of playing in the streets of Bootle, finding fun in the streets and love at home.”
    For John Winston Lennon, the middle name in honor of the great prime minister, life at home was a bit more complicated, as, it turned out, his own life would become. He had a birth mother and father, and he had a surrogate mother and father, and while he was well cared for in his younger days, he was strained by confusion, and with it, an angry side developed that would make him both popular and controversial, even in boyhood. His birth mother purchased an acoustic guitar, and while her sister Mimi, John’s surrogate mother, generally disdained popular music, mother Julia was happy to dance and sing with him. These were moments in time he would never forget in the years after his mother passed on.
    The drummers had contrasting childhood lives. Pete Best was born in India, and by the time he came to Liverpool, his mother, Mona, was separated from her husband. Mona, it turned out, was energized and ambitious, and would protect her sons at any cost.
    Richie Starkey grew up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood, raised mostly alone by his divorced mother, Elsie, who was loving, and always worried. When he turned six, she had reason to worry herself sick. Her little boy slipped into a coma. When he emerged after two months, his recovery from a serious illness was arduous, but eased by his first musical experiences banging on a tin drum.
    James McCartney, to become known to the world as Paul, was smart enough to get into the prestigious Liverpool Institute High School for Boys at age eleven. Paul often shared bus rides with George Harrison. The two, sharing interests of music and guitars, would get together and play, and talk, and play some more. George, a year younger and a grade apart from Paul at the Institute, told me that “I think Paul thought he was a bit better than me. You know what eighteen months’ difference is when you’re young.” Paul would admit later in many conversations that he acted superior to