Read Online Shout! by Philip Norman - Free Book Online

the collectors of exercise books and operators of window poles; he was, more or less permanently, head boy in his grade. With his classmates he was popular, if a little reserved. They called him not by his surname or a nickname—just Paul. His close friend Ivan Vaughan was an exception to this attitude of noticeable deference.
    He had been put into the A stream, tending as he moved higher to specialize in history and languages. He found most lessons easy, and could get high marks even in Latin if he bothered to apply his mind. He was nonchalant about homework, an embarrassing obligation in a housing project where other boys could do what they pleased at night. On the morning bus into Liverpool, he could churn out an essay still impressive enough to receive commendation from his English master, “Dusty” Durband. Mr. Durband, even so, was aware of the extent to which Paul relied on facility and bluff to see him through. It sometimes failed him, as when he had been given the task of preparing a talk about the Bodley Head edition of Stephen Leacock’s works. Paul delivered an impromptu stream of nonsense about the Bodley Head’s Elizabethan logo.
    He knew what he wanted and even then would be satisfied with nothing less. When the institute put on Shaw’s St. Joan as its end-of-term play, Paul auditioned keenly for the part of Warwick. He did notget it, and had to be content with the minor role of an inquisitor in the trial scene. The disappointment made him unusually fractious: Mr. Durband, the play’s producer, remembers shouting in exasperation at the medievally hooded figure that persisted in disrupting rehearsals.
    In 1955, when Paul was thirteen, the McCartneys left Speke and its pallid factory smog. Jim had managed to get a council house in Allerton, one of Liverpool’s nearer and better suburbs. It was a definite step up for the family to move into 20 Forthlin Road, a double row of semidetached houses small and neat enough to pass for privately owned villas. Mimi Smith’s home in Woolton was only a mile or so away, if you cut across the golf course.
    For some time, Mary had been troubled by a slight pain in her breast. She did not like to trouble the doctor for fear he would dismiss it as nurse’s hypochondria. As she was now in her mid-forties, she and Jim philosophically concluded that “the change” must be to blame for the small lump that had appeared. The pain was not great but would not seem to go away.
    Paul and Michael were camping with the Boy Scouts that summer. The weather was very wet and cold, and Mary told Bella Johnson, her friend at the school clinic, that she was worried about the boys sleeping under canvas. So one afternoon, Olive took Mary and Jim in her car to visit them. On the way home Mary was in such pain that she had to lie down on the back seat.
    “When she got home, she went straight to bed,” Olive says. “I went up later and found her crying. ‘Oh, Olive,’ she said to me, ‘I don’t want to leave the boys just yet.’”
    After a few days’ rest she felt so much better that she began to think that, after all, the trouble was simply overwork. Then the pain returned so severely that, at last, she consulted a specialist. He sent her at once into hospital—not Walton General but the old city Northern, so that he could keep a close eye on her. Breast cancer was diagnosed. She went into surgery for a mastectomy, which was not carried out: The cancer had already spread too far. A few hours later Bella and Olive Johnson received the news that Mary had died.
    Jim McCartney’s predicament was one calculated to crush a younger as well as wealthier man. At the age of fifty-three he found himself bereft of a loving, capable wife and faced with the task of caring for two adolescent boys, all on a wage that still had need of the extra Mary hadearned. That, indeed, was the first thing fourteen-year-old Paul blurted out in the shock of his mother’s loss: “What are we going to do