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left behind. That way, I estimated, I might be a welcome visitor. Unless, of course, they were now so fame-drunk and success-sodden that they had ceased to have any interest in where they had come from.
    So those first chats were brief, hurried conversations, mainly at Abbey Road, before recording sessions. In those early days, I made sure not to outstay my welcome, knowing that they had always refused to have any strangers or outsiders present when they were actually working.
    John must have taken in my few words of introduction, saying who I was, where I’d come from and what I was doing. Some time later I received a letter from him, addressed to ‘WhiteHunter Davies, c/o William Heinemann Ltd, 15 Queen Street, London, W1’. Not a bad joke. Inside was a cutting, with no date, which appeared to be from a local Liverpool newspaper, saying a rhythm group called the Beatles had made their debut at Neston Institute.
    It is only recently that I have at long last been able to date the cutting, after searches in Liverpool and at the British Museum’s newspaper library. It appeared on 11 June 1960 (the day of my wedding) in the Heswall and Neston edition of the Birkenhead News . This was apparently the first time that the word ‘Beatles’ appeared in print. ( Mersey Beat , the local pop-music newspaper, which wrote about them constantly, did not appear till the following year, in June 1961.)
    It’s interesting that the newspaper should call them ‘The Beatles’ as only two weeks earlier, on 27 May in the Hoylake News and Advertiser , they were still known as the Silver Beetles. They did not permanently call themselves The Beatles till later that year.
    The cutting shows that John had stuck to his own name. Paul had become Paul Ramon, giving himself a Hollywood-1920s persona. George was Carl Harrison, after his hero, Carl Perkins. Stu Sutcliffe had become Stuart de Stijl, after the art movement. Thomas Moore, the drummer, an equally false-sounding name, was in fact called Thomas Moore.
    Although John always appeared to have no interest in the history of the Beatles, the fact that he had kept this cutting, which obviously must have been a big thrill for him at the time, made me realize that he did have some interest in his past. On the back of the envelope that contained this cutting, John had written the words ‘JAKE MY ARSE’.
    I must have given him some personal information during our hurried chat, and told him I had recently had a baby son, though I thought from his short-sighted look, staring blankly through his National Health spectacles, that he hadn’t been listening.
    I presume he thought that a working-class lad from the North should not be giving his children such poncy names. I didn’t know at that time about Julian (as his wife and family werestill kept pretty private). Later on, I always made a point of saying what a middle-class name, Julian, really affected, very poncy.
    Going to see the parents was one of the strangest parts about researching the book. I wanted to put a good deal about them in the final book, and how they had reacted, and wrote up a hundred pages of notes. In the end, there just wasn’t enough space for more than a few paragraphs about what had happened to them (see Chapter 28 ).
    The fact of their sons’ fame had taken them completely by surprise, and the recent and sudden transformation, from their working-class homes and environment into luxury homes in the suburbs, was an even bigger shock. In the case of Mimi, John’s aunt who had brought him up, she maintained she had always been middle class. Unlike the other three sets of parents, who all lived in council or rented houses, she and her husband owned their home. It was only a modest semi, on a busy road, not at all affluent and certainly not a professional area, though Mimi always had certain aspirations and hated John for getting mixed up with the common crowd. Even for Mimi, there had been some cultural, emotional and social