The house is guarded by a high brick wall and large double black gates, which are controlled from the house. You speak into a microphone, someone inside answers and, if you say the right thing, the doors swing open and then clank shut again to keep out the fans.
All the Beatle homes have fans hanging around, but Paul has most, being Paul and also being in London. They keep up a permanent watch outside, usually sitting in rows on the wall of the house opposite. From there they can just see over the wall and make out any movements around the front door. Coming into the street you can tell Paul’s house by the rows of girls hanging precariously from his wall, a couple of feet off the ground, craning to look over.
The basement of the house contains a staff flat. He had a couple for a long time, Mr and Mrs Kelly, who both lived there. She did the housekeeping and he was the sort of butler, but both really mucked in and were just there. Since them, he’s had a succession of people. They just seem to arrive at random and he keeps them on sometimes, however unsuitable. He could really do with a secretary, to organize his house and his visitors, but he says he would never do that. Very often he has nobody living in the house, and when he’s been abroad his dad Jim sometimes has come down to look after the house and Martha.
Not that Paul worries about it. It doesn’t bother him that people he’s promised to see arrive, and he’s gone off to Africa or America. All he likes around is a nice motherly lady to serve up a fried breakfast at about one o’clock and at other hours of the day as required. When Jane is not working, she does a lot of the cooking and is very good.
The ground floor contains the kitchen, which is very large and well appointed, a large haughty dining room which looks completely unused, and his living room at the back, which is the most used of any Beatle room. This is very large and comfy with French windows opening on to the back garden. It has a large soft green Edwardian suite, nicely faded. There is a large wooden table in this living room where most meals are served, rather than in the dining-room. It is usually covered with a white lace tablecloth, very working-class posh. The room is usually in chaos, with stuff piled everywhere, ornaments, flashing lights, packages, newspapers and bits of equipment. This is where the Beatles and Mal and Neil and others congregate before recording sessions and, in fact, most times they are in London. It has an unpretentious lived-in feeling. ‘Everywhere I’ve lived always ends up like this. At Forthlin it was the same. Things might look a bit different now, like a big colour TV, but the atmosphere’s always the same.’
On the first floor is his bedroom, a large L-shaped room with an extravagant bed with a large carved headboard. Jane helped him to furnish this room. There are two other bedrooms. On the top floor is his work room, where he and John do most of their hard slog together when they need some more songs to fill up an album. This is where he has the Paolozzi sculpture. Very interesting, that piece. Paolozzi was Stu Sutcliffe’s hero and teacher.
The famous Martha (if you don’t think she’s famous you should read Beatles Monthly) is a very large, shaggy, good-natured old English sheep dog. She’s good-natured even when she has a few fleas. She has her own trap door into the garden for her regular prowls, but Paul tries to take her for a proper walk as often as he can. He usually goes to Primrose Hill or Regent’s Park. He did go to Hampstead Heath once, but Martha had a fit and he hasn’t taken her back. There are also several cats, and kittens, which seem to vary in number from day to day. All the Beatles have cats, and all their births are faithfully reported in Beatles Monthly.
Paul manages his walks with Martha with surprising lack of recognition. The fans never realize where he’s going, when he rushes out. And in the park, he usually has his jacket collar up and walks round the remotest parts with Martha, meeting only elderly dog lovers who are more interested in the enormous Martha than Paul.
He exchanges the time of day with other people and makes polite dog chat. He even shouts out at people he vaguely recognizes, something the other Beatles wouldn’t do, not being as sociable as Paul. He was on the top of Primrose Hill one day when he saw an actor he slightly knew. He shouted at him, but the actor walked past, as if to say I don’t know you, so please don’t shout, there’s a good chap. He was a terribly upper-class young English type actor. He gave a great backwards Hello, when he at last recognized Paul. Paul had met him once through Jane. He’d been acting in the same play and had invited Jane and Paul to his house for dinner.
Paul asked him how he was doing, then. The actor said, very coyly, that he had a chance of a play in New York. ‘Oh aye,’ said Paul. ‘What?’
‘Can’t tell,’ said the actor, going even coyer. ‘Sorry. Never do. When there’s something in the offing one might spoil it by talking about it, mightn’t one? Don’t you find that, hmm?’ Paul smiled and said yeh, he supposed so. ‘Well, bye then,’ said the actor. He breezed off, swinging his arms, looking up and breathing heavily at the lovely day. You could almost see him reading the stage directions.
‘Strange, isn’t it,’ said Paul, walking back to the car. ‘How somebody like that just can’t relax. It’s impossible for him to be natural. Yet he’s OK, he’s a nice enough bloke, once he relaxes and has a few drinks. By the end of that dinner we had with him he was almost normal. I feel sorry for people like that, really. It’s the way they’ve been conditioned.
‘When I was a kid of 16, all adolescent and awkward and shy, I was dying to be an actor like that, all smooth and in command, always coming on dead confident. But it was worth going through that awkward stage, just to be natural now. Jane has a little bit of the same trouble, with her background. She can’t help it. It’s how they’ve been brought up.’
Jane and Paul make a very loving and lovely couple. Everyone agrees on this. From the very beginning, Jim said nothing would make him happier than their marriage.
Jane Asher comes from a professional London family. Her father is a doctor. Her mother, a professor of music, taught George Martin to play the oboe. Jane began acting, in films and on stage, as a child. She met Paul in May 1963 at a pop concert at the Albert Hall. She was then 17, and had been appearing on the TV pop record programme Juke Box Jury. The Radio Times asked her to go along to the concert with a reporter and give her comments, as a teenager, on the groups. She said the only one worth screaming over was the Beatles. The Beatle she liked the look of most, when she caught sight of them in the corridors afterwards, was George.
But it was Paul, who always was a star spotter, who recognized her and shouted after her, which brought the rest of them rushing round her, chatting her up. ‘We all said, “Will you marry me?”’ says Paul, ‘which was what we said to every girl at the time.’ They invited her back to their hotel, the Royal Court, for a drink. ‘A rave London bird, the sort we’d always heard about. We thought we were set.’
The others left Paul alone in the bedroom with Jane, after a lot of winking. They spent the evening talking about gravy and what their favourite meal was. ‘I realized this was the girl for me. I hadn’t tried to grab her or make her. I told her, “It appears you’re a nice girl.”’