OCTOBER, 1962

Chrissie Cunningham used to cycle down the half-mile of school drive and onto the York Road so as to get into Wetherby by 7.00 AM, the time at which Mr. Dee, the newsagent, unbolted his door. Then, standing on the pedals and leaning forward over the drop handlebars of his Claude Butler racing bike, he’d race the papers back in time for the first early risers, teachers and pupils, and the breakfast bell at 8.00.

I sat on the back stairs with Jeppy, scrutinising the pages of the New Musical Express, dropped breathlessly at the side door by Chrissie as he rushed the news of the day to the staffroom. Jeppy and I awaited with increasing impatience and dwindling hope the triumphant return of full-blown grease-and-denim rock’n’roll, searching for news amongst the schmaltzy dross for mention of Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, Fats Domino and the late and deeply lamented Eddy Cochran and Buddy Holly. 

But the only evidence that chilly morning of any diversion from the increasingly rapid downhill slither into a mediocrity of silver strings and neat haircuts was a small photo on an inside page. It featured four youths posed in artful disarray, standing, it seemed, on top of a pile of musical instruments. Only one was looking directly at the camera, a faint sneer on his girlish face. The other three gazed into the existentialist middle distance. Mockery, disdain and an indefinable sense of iconoclasm radiated from the grainy picture. Studied against the other photos on the page – Cliff Richard opening a youth club, Elvis in a still from Girls! Girls! Girls!, the cast of a West End musical feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square – The Beatles might well have just transported in from Alpha Centauri.

Within a week, during a Half Term visit to friends, I was hunched in front of a TV in a Wallasey sitting room watching The Beatles singing Twist and Shout. And while parents scoffed, Sian and I fell in love, she with Paul McCartney and I with John Lennon. As we left the house that evening, I looked across the suburban rooftops to the River Mersey to where the lights were just going on in Liverpool.

:::

 DECEMBER 7th 1980

Clive Grigson was a strange little boy, huddled and secretive, most of him hidden inside a huge, shapeless anorak. His two passions were, inexplicably, drama (for in every acting exercise he played, uniquely and thus unerringly, from within the folds and creases of his anorak, the role of Clive Grigson) and John Lennon.  A secondary allegiance was to me, as his drama teacher and (after an injudicious admission of my adolescent fixation) fellow John Lennon acolyte. Ashamed but unhesitating, if I saw him before he saw me I would duck into the nearest doorway. Caught unawares, I would be subjected to an intensive ten-minute interrogation on the subject that Clive saw as our bonding obsession.

Everyone was deeply shocked at the killing. Alan, the Headmaster, even made it the subject of his address in Morning Talk, our pre-school assembly. For all the contradictions and absurdities that attended Lennon’s post-Beatle years, he had, for better and worse, been accorded the status of working class hero and even those for whom The Beatles had been (or, more modishly, were now) beyond the cultural pale felt touched by the event.

Shaken though I was that morning, my more immediate concern was for Clive. Isolated as he was in a boarding school a long way from his equally challenging parents, I wondered how he was coping with the news. I had no lesson with him until the following day and I decided that I would seek him out during First Break and try to administer whatever comfort might be necessary.

I took a deep breath and eased myself out from behind my desk. My office and the Drama Studio were a five minute walk from the main school and I had just left the building to make my way up the lane when Clive appeared around the corner. Encumbered by the enormous anorak, his normal gait was a sort of rolling hedgehog shuffle. But now his stride was purposeful and direct. Somehow he seemed to have grown within the bell tent of the garment and as he saw me his pace quickened. I stopped, preparing myself for the counselling that must surely be required. Clive approached me, his beaky face pale but his expression steadfast and resolute. With a firm hand he clasped my forearm and peering up searchingly through his heavy spectacles, he said: “I just needed to know you were all right”.