‘When he was away during the First World War, my mother became a lamplighter herself. She was up a lamppost one day and somebody accidentally took the ladder away. She was left hanging by her hands from the bar and had to fall in the end. She was eight months pregnant as well. But the baby was lovely. Nine pounds.’
Harold and Louise moved into 12 Arnold Grove, Wavertree, when they got married and lived there for 18 years. It was a simple terrace house, two up and two down, and cost ten shillings a week. It is just a few miles away from the areas in which John Lennon and Paul McCartney were living.
Harold was still at sea and Louise was working as an assistant in a greengrocer’s shop, a job she kept up until shortly before the birth of their first child Louise in 1931. Their second child, Harold, was born in 1934. Not long after, Harold decided to leave the Merchant Navy. He was fed up anyway, but most of all he wanted to see more of his children.
‘I was by then a first-class steward on £7 7s. a month. Twenty-five shillings of that a week was sent home for my wife. I never had enough money, even when we got some “good bloods” on board. I did a lot of cruises and this is what we called people with money who gave us big tips. In my spare time I used to cut people’s hair. I was trying to save up in order to come ashore and look for a job.’
‘He used to write home and tell me how hard the life was,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘He would take his trousers off at night, hang them on the line, but before they’d stop swinging, he was in them again.’
Harold came ashore in 1936. There was a slump on. He was on the dole for 15 months. ‘With two kids, I was allowed 23 bob a week. Out of that there was the ten bob rent to pay, plus coal, and food for all of us.’
In 1937 he managed to get a job as a bus conductor and in 1938 became a bus driver. In 1940 their third child Peter was born and in 1944 along came George, the fourth child and third son.
‘I went upstairs to see him that first day,’ says Mr Harrison. ‘I couldn’t get over it. There he was, a miniature version of me. Oh no, I thought. We just couldn’t be so alike.’
‘George was always very independent,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘He never wanted any assistance of any kind. When we used to send him to Mrs Quirk’s the butcher’s we’d give him a note but he’d throw it away the minute he got outside our house. Mrs Quirk used to see his little face coming over the counter and know who it was. “Haven’t you got a note?” she would say. “I don’t need one,” George’d say. “Three-quarters of best pork sausages please.” He’d not be much more than two and a half when he did that. All the neighbours knew him.’
They had a great deal of trouble getting George into primary school. The worst of the bulge years were starting. All the schools were full. ‘I tried a Roman Catholic school. He’d been baptized a Catholic. But they said I’d have to keep him at home till he was six, then they might be able to take him. He was so intelligent and advanced, so I just sent him to an ordinary state primary school.’
This was Dovedale Primary. The same school that John Lennon was already at. He was two and a half years older and three classes ahead of George. They never met. But Peter Harrison, one of George’s brothers, was in the same year as John Lennon and Jimmy Tarbuck, the Liverpool comedian.
‘I took him to school that first day, across Penny Lane,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘He wanted to stay dinners right from the beginning. The next day, as I was getting my coat off the hanger, he said, “Oh no, I don’t want you to take me!” I said, “Why not?” He said, “I don’t want you to be one of the nosy mothers, standing round the gate talking.” He’s always been against nosy mothers. He used to hate all the neighbours who stood around gossiping.’
George’s first home memory is of buying live chickens for sixpence, along with his brothers Harold and Peter, and bringing them home. ‘Mine and Harold’s both died, but Peter’s was kept in the back yard and grew and grew. It was massive and wild. People were so scared of it they came round to the front door instead of the back. We ate it for Christmas. A fellow came and strangled it for us. I remember it hanging on the line after he’d done it.’
George was six when they moved from Wavertree to a council house in Speke. ‘It was very nice and modern. It seemed fantastic to me, after a two up and two down terrace house. You could go from the hall to the sitting room, then into the kitchen, then into the hall again and back into the sitting room. I just ran round and round it all that first day.’
The house was Number 25 Upton Green, Speke. They’d put their name down for a council house 18 years previously in 1930, when Lou was a baby.
‘It was a brand new house,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘But I hated it from the minute we moved in. We tried to keep the garden nice, but kids just wrecked it. They stole your plants in the middle of the night. It was a sort of slum clearance area, but they’d mixed up the good and bad families together, hoping the good would lift the rest.’
George did fairly well at primary school. ‘After we sat the scholarship exam,’ says George, ‘the teacher asked us who thought they had passed. Only one person put his hand up. He was a little fat lad who smelled. It was very sad, really. He turned out to be about the only one who didn’t pass.
‘Smelly kids like that were the sort teachers made you sit next to as a punishment. So the poor smelly kids really did get screwed up. All teachers are like that. And the more screwed up they are, the more they pass it on to the kids. They’re all ignorant. I always thought that. Yet because they were old and withered you were supposed to believe they weren’t ignorant.’
George started at the Liverpool Institute in 1954. Paul McCartney was already there, in the year ahead. John Lennon was in his fourth year at Quarry Bank High School.
‘I was sad leaving Dovedale. The headmaster, Pop Evans, told us that we may feel smart big boys now, but at the next school we’d be the little boys once again. It seemed such a waste. After all that hustling to be one of the big lads.
‘The first day at the Institute Tony Workman leapt on my back from behind a door and said, “Do you want a fight, lad?”’
After a short spell of feeling lost and out of it, during which he tried to do a bit of homework and fit in, George gave up being interested in school work. ‘I hated being dictated to. Some schizophrenic jerk, just out of training college, would just read out notes to you which you were expected to take down. I couldn’t read them afterwards anyway. They never fooled me. Useless, the lot of them.
‘That’s when things go wrong, when you’re quietly growing up and they start trying to force being part of society down your throat. They’re all trying to transfigure you from the pure way of thought as a child, forcing their illusions on you. All those things annoyed me. I was just trying to be myself. They were trying to turn everybody into rows of little toffees.’
At the Institute, George was known from the beginning as a way-out dresser. Michael McCartney, Paul’s brother, was a year below him. He remembers George always having long hair, years before anybody else did.
John Lennon’s rebellion took the form of fighting and causing trouble. George did it by his dress, which annoyed masters just as much.
But one of the reasons George had long hair was that he always hated getting his hair cut. To save money, his father had continued to cut the family’s hair, as he had done in the navy. By this time the shears were old and blunt. ‘He used to hurt them,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘And they hated it.’ ‘Yes, perhaps they were a bit rough,’ says Mr Harrison. ‘Rough? You’re joking, boy,’ says his wife.
‘George used to go to school with his school cap sitting high on top of his hair,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘And very tight trousers. Unknown to me, he’d run them up on my machine to make them even tighter. I bought him a brand new pair once and the first thing he did was tighten them. When his dad found out, he told him to unpick them at once. “I can’t, Dad,” he said. “I’ve cut the pieces off.” George always had an answer. He once went to school with a canary-yellow waistcoat under his school blazer. It belonged to his brother Harry, but George thought he looked terrific in it.’