Parents were not allowed to visit their children. It was thought it might disturb them too much. But Ritchie was so seriously ill at one time that they let his mother peep at him in his cot, late at night, when she’d finished working in the bar.
He came out when he was seven and went back to St Silas’s. He was never very quick at lessons, but with the year in hospital he was completely behind and unable to read or write. Without Marie Maguire he thinks he might never ever have learned. Her mother and Ritchie’s mother were lifelong friends. They went out together and left Marie in charge of Ritchie.
‘I was very bossy with him,’ she says, ‘being four years older. He was so much part of our family that people used to come and knock at our door and say “Your Ritchie’s doing so and so.” When he had meals with us and we were having scouse, I always had to pick the onions out for him. He hates onions. I was always cursing him.
‘My very first memory of him was when he must have been about three. There was a terrible thunderstorm and I looked across to his house and I saw him and his mother both huddling in the hall.
‘I started teaching him to read and write when he came out of hospital. He wasn’t stupid. He’d just missed a lot. We had it properly organized. Twice a week I used to give him lessons, and his mother would give me pocket money for doing it. I bought Chambers’s Primary Readers and we used to sit up at his kitchen table and read them.
‘I would look after him on Saturday nights at our house while our mothers were out. They would leave us bottles of lemonade and sweets. He once took his shirt off and I painted all his back with paints. Sounds very primitive, now I think about it. He once brought his girlfriend to see me. He insisted she was called Jellatine.
‘I always liked him. He was just so happy and easy-going, just like his mother. He had lovely big blue eyes. I never ever noticed he had a big nose. It wasn’t till the press pointed it out years later that I realized he had.’
Marie was his closest friend for many years, but he also spent a lot of time at his two grandmothers, when his mother was out working.
‘My Grandmother Gleave, my mother’s mother, lived on her own, but she had this friend called Mr Lester who used to come and play the mouth organ to her. They were both about 60. “Oh aye,” we used to say. “We know what you’re up to, playing the mouth organ to her in the dark.” But she wouldn’t marry him. In the end Mr Lester went off and married someone else.
‘I used to love going to my Grandad Starkey’s when he’d lost a lot of money on the horses. He’d go off his head. They were a great couple. They used to have real fights. He was a boilerman at the docks, a real tough docker, but he used to make me lovely things. He once made me a big train with real fire inside. It caused a riot going down our street. I used to boil apples inside it.’
Ringo has few memories of St Silas’s Primary School, except playing truant or holding up kids in the playground and taking pennies off them. ‘We used to steal bits and pieces from Woolworths. Just silly plastic things you could slip in your pocket.’ Another time his Aunt Nancy found a pearl necklace missing. Ritchie turned up outside a pub in Park Street, offering it for sale for 6s.
At 11 years of age Ringo went to Dingle Vale Secondary Modern School. He didn’t sit the Eleven Plus. He failed the Review, which was an exam to see if you were good enough to sit the Eleven Plus.
‘He liked it in spasms,’ says his mother. ‘Then he’d play truant. He and some others would hang around outside before school till the final bell went and they just wouldn’t go in. They’d maintain they’d been locked out. They would go and spend the afternoon playing in Sefton Park.’
When Ritchie was just over 11 years old, his mother started going out with a Liverpool Corporation painter and decorator called Harry Graves. He was a Londoner, from the Romford area. He’d been ill and his doctor had suggested a change of air. For some inexplicable reason, he decided to try the Liverpool air. He still can’t remember why. He met Elsie through mutual friends, the Maguires. He got on well with Ritchie from the beginning. They went together to the pictures two or three times a week.
‘I told Ritchie that Harry wanted to marry me. If he’d said no, I wouldn’t have done. But he said, “You get married, Mam. I won’t always be little. You don’t want to end up like me grandma.”’ She was the one who hadn’t married Mr Lester and his mouth organ.
Harry Graves and Elsie Starkey were married on 17 April 1953, when Ritchie was coming up for 13. She stopped work soon after. Harry says that he and Ritchie had never had a wrong word between them. Elsie says he was awful. When she used to tell her husband that Ritchie had been giving her cheek he just used to smile and do nothing.
At 13, Ritchie suffered his second major illness. He got a cold, which turned to pleurisy, which in turn affected his lung. He went to Myrtle Street again and then the Heswall Children’s Hospital.
Just to cheer him up and give him an interest, Harry put him in the Arsenal Supporters Club. Again, he can’t quite remember why. Harry himself didn’t think much of Arsenal. He was, and still is, a fanatical supporter of West Ham. ‘But Arsenal had a sort of glamour in them days. I thought the boy would like it.’
While Ritchie was in hospital, Tom Whittaker, then manager of Arsenal, happened to be in Liverpool. Harry wrote to him, saying what a nice gesture it would be if he could visit one of his keenest young supporters who was lying ill in hospital. Mr Whittaker couldn’t make it, but he did write back a nice letter, which Ritchie treasured very much, so Harry says. Ritchie himself can’t remember anything at all about any letter, or ever being in the Arsenal Supporters Club.
But Ritchie had good memories of Harry himself, right from the beginning. ‘He used to bring me lots of Yankee comics. He was great. I did used to take his side if he and me mum had any rows. I thought she was being bossy and felt sorry for Harry. I learned gentleness from Harry. There’s never any need for violence.’
Ritchie was in hospital almost two years this time, from the age of 13 to 15. ‘I was given lots of things to keep my mind occupied, like knitting. I made a big island out of papier-mâché and a farm full of animals. I had a fight in the hospital with another lad. He went berserk and brought a huge tray down on me, just missed smashing me fingers.’
He came out of hospital at 15 which meant that he’d officially finished his school days, though he’d hardly been at school. He had to go back to Dingle Vale Secondary Modern for a report, so that he could use it as a reference for a job. He says that nobody could remember him, he’d been away so long.
He had to stay at home, recuperating, till he was well enough to start thinking about taking jobs. His mother was very worried about what sort of job he could get. She knew he wasn’t strong enough to lift anything heavy and he hadn’t had the education to do anything too clever.
Through the youth employment officer, he eventually secured a job as messenger boy for British Railways at 50 bob a week.
‘I went for me uniform, but all they gave me was the hat. I thought, what a lousy job. You have to be there 20 years before you get the full uniform. I left after six weeks. It wasn’t just not getting the uniform. You have to pass a medical exam and I failed.
‘Then I spent six weeks on board a boat, going back and forward to North Wales as a barman. I went to an all-night party and got drunk and went straight on to work. I gave cheek to the boss and he said, “Get your cards, son.”’
After that he got a job at H. Hunt and Son through friends of Harry. ‘I went to be a joiner. But all I did for two months was go out on me bike taking orders. I’d by this time turned 17 and was getting fed up with not starting my apprenticeship. So I went to see them and they said there were no vacancies as a joiner, would I like to be a fitter, so I said OK. It was a trade. Everyone always said, if you’ve got a trade, you’ll be OK.’