George Harrison's letter
Downstairs in the warm dining room, toast and bacon smells. Dad munching hastily and listening to the news; small sisters clamouring for cereals. The minute Dad left the house I changed the station over to the Light Programme in the vain hope of hearing a pop record or, if I was really lucky, a Beatles record. But it was usually someone like Perry Como or Matt Monro, neither of whom did a lot for me.
Our house, perched on the top of a hill, was the last port of call for the postman. He would arrive at just the right time for my mother to make herself a coffee, with ginger-nuts ready to dunk, before settling down to read her letters. People wrote a lot more letters then, when it was the main form of communication. There weren’t that many private telephones and email was still many years into the future. Mail nowadays is always a disappointment, just bank statements, bills and big colourful envelopes saying ‘YOU HAVE WON A PRIZE!’ with tempting promises of thousands of pounds so long as you send back the YES sticker. So Mum reads her long ago letters and puts the one for me on top of the piano for when I come home.
At school the day dragged slowly on as days do when you are fourteen and lessons last forever and life is waiting for you just outside the school gates. At lunchtime my friend Pamela and I would daydream about the Beatles. Because we were Beatles fans, serious stuff, heavily involved. We had everything. We had the Official Beatle Fan Club Jumper, which was actually just a plain black polo neck with a little embroidered badge on it saying 'The Beatles' in red silk. We had Beatle stockings patterned all over with beetles – the insects! This was just before the advent of tights. We had suspenders and mini-skirts – imagine! We hardly dared move and definitely never bent over. Every month we bought the Beatle Magazine and would lie on the floor carefully snogging the centrefold photo, wary of catching a staple in our lips. We had all the records and all the posters and little plastic stand-up models in our shrines of bedrooms.
Our daydreaming consisted of imagining the day when we would meet the Beatles. Paul and George would instantly fall in love with us and whisk us away to their Liverpudlian Heaven. Luckily we did not yearn after the same Beatle. My friend Pam, she was all for Paul. He was her Beatle. But my Beatle was George. I just adored him. You never got to see quite so much of George on the telly because Paul and John did most of the singing and George would just get to give the occasional 'Yeah Yeah Yeah' or an 'Ooooooooo'. Then you might be lucky enough to get a quick close up although Paul would nearly always get in it as well with his cheeky grin. It was a bit frustrating being a George fan although it wasn't as bad as being mad about Ringo. You hardly ever saw him at all because he was always stuck behind his drums and sang even less than George. But come to think of it, I never did meet a Ringo fan.
We spent five hours once at the railway crossing just past our school. It was when they were making the film A Hard Day's Night. We heard a rumour their train was going to come through. Every time a train came by we ran and screamed and screamed and sobbed. We never knew whether they went past or not. How the hell can you tell who is aboard when a train is shrieking past at 80mph? But we were satisfied, we felt we had been close to them and eventually went home to our concerned parents, all emotional and weeping happily.
Sometimes when I walked home from school I would see this gorgeous boy called Dave from the boys' grammar. There weren't many gorgeous boys at the grammar and we were all petrified of each other anyway. Boys and Girls. Alien Beings. Not like now when they are all in comprehensive and tumble around together like a big litter of puppies that swear a lot. Dave had a Beatle haircut and very dark hair. If I was lucky I would find myself walking up the long hill behind him. I wouldn't dare speak and I wouldn't overtake because then he would be able to look at my legs, which were far too thin, labouring upwards in front of him.
Nearly home I reached a point where I could see the back door of our house across a little valley. Mum would often appear, a recognisable dot in the distance, waving a tea-towel and I would get that lovely 'coming home' feeling. That house doesn't belong to us now. It was sold during a recession when Dad lost his job and times were hard. I go back there sometimes and walk down that same hill and look across to the back door, really expecting to see my mother there still, with her tea-towel. She isn't of course. I'm not fourteen any more. I'm a mum with a home and a grown-up daughter and a grandchild of my own. It always makes me feel sad though, a kind of lost feeling. I walk up to our old home and past it into the beech woods filled with bluebells and fragile white wood anemones in the spring. I look brazenly through the windows at a stranger's furniture, books, pictures. And I can't go in. I can't step back through time if I pass through that door. My mother went back once with my sisters and they knocked on the door and were welcomed in and shown around. When they left they went to a pub and had a drink and all got a little bit tearful.
So, back to 1964. I walked into the kitchen and threw my satchel on the floor. Big leather satchels then, hard and stiff at first until they were worn in a bit and gradually covered with hearts and arrows and 'I Love George' or 'I Love John' until boyfriends began to appear and real boys' names were inscribed with indelible laundry markers '4 eva and eva'.
'Pick that up!' said Mum. 'By the way there's a letter for you.'
I went to the piano. Letters were always on the piano, which was only ever played by my grandmother. There was this white envelope. Unfamiliar writing. Postmarked York. I turned it over and there was an hotel address printed on the back. Hotel notepaper. From York. And I suddenly got this feeling. It swept over me. And my throat constricted. And my heart was pounding. I was shaking. I still hadn't opened the envelope. Then I did open the envelope. Very carefully. Inside was one sheet of white notepaper. Was it what I thought? A letter – from George Harrison – in my hand. I opened the letter and it was from George. And it was in my hand. And this is what the letter said:
Dear Jennie –[DEAR Jennie!!!]
Thank you for writing and for all the nice things you said about the Beatles, especially about me. I hope we get to play near enough for you to come and see us one day, until then just keep playing the records.
If you really want to marry me then send a photograph, as I can't very well say 'Yes' without even seeing you can I? I will see what can be arranged but I think you had better ask your parents first.
Love [Love Love love Love Love!]
From George.
[And underneath three 3 3 3 kisses]
X X X
Well, can you imagine – can you imagine how I felt, at that age, receiving a letter from the person I thought was possible, just possibly the most important person in the whole history of the world? He had written a letter to me. With his own hand. His own pen. I read it, and I read it and I read it. And I cried and I held it to me. My Mum was delighted. I couldn't wait to tell my friends but like I said, none of us had telephones. Even my pop music-hating Dad was enthusiastic, realising it was quite a momentous occasion. I like to believe he told his friends at work the next day, and said it in a proud kind of way.
I went to my bedroom with my letter. I switched on my little radio. Tuned into Luxembourg, which used to fade in and out, and infuriatingly accompany the music with its own strange whistling noises unless it was the Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson programme when it always seemed to behave perfectly.
So there I was. In the privacy of my Beatle bedroom. With my Beatle letter. Do you know what I did? I looked at the white envelope and thought about George in his hotel room, in York. Locked in because he couldn't go out and wander about like ordinary people because of all the screaming fans. Like me! I thought about him answering my letter and putting it in the envelope – and I thought about him putting the envelope to his mouth and licking the edges – and I put the envelope to my lips and I licked all the sticky stuff off until every little bit had gone. Then I licked the stamp until it was no longer stuck on. I thought about George and how that was probably the closest I would ever get to him. To lick an envelope that he had licked only 24 hours or so before me.
I could not wait for morning. No get up calls needed. I was raring to go. I was going to school with a letter from a Beatle in my satchel. I was going to revel in my glory. I was going to show off big time. I was going to be unbearable!
When I got to school I did revel, I did show off, I was unbearable. It was wonderful. Everyone wanted to see the letter. Everyone. Even the girls in the Upper Sixth who had boyfriends with cars and went out to Berni Inns for meals on Saturday nights. Some of the teachers asked to see it. Amazing! Teachers then in girls grammar schools were really OLD. All Miss and twin sets and thick stockings. You would never dare be familiar or have a laugh like they do now. It was all very serious, very respectful. I was magnanimous in my generosity. I let them all see the letter, even Penny Davis who was my worst enemy. I let them hold it. I let some of them put it under their striped school blouses and lay it against their beating hearts. I even let them kiss it.
But I was the only one who got to lick it.
That was my day of glory, my special red-letter day. George never knew what an effect his letter had on me, at that time, at that age. He never knew how happy it made me, and yet at the same time, incredibly sad. Because it was like – I had almost got THERE. We had made contact. I had existed briefly in his mind as he wrote the words, addressed the envelope. Yet it would never go any further than that. I was never really going to meet him. Go out with him. Marry him.
The letter is in my old scrapbook, stuck in with sellotape that has turned dark brown with time and marked the edges like a frame. I should have kept it in pristine condition encased in plastic. It is still readable, and the envelope addressed to me, Jennie Rose of Ruscombe, all those years ago.
Of course I grew out of my hopeless love affair with George Harrison as more accessible young men appeared in my life. But I will never forget what it was like being in love with the Beatles in those lovely, happy, hopeful times when all my life stretched ahead of me and every dream waited to come true, and my youth would last 'for eva and eva' when everything was Fab.
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