“Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes
There beneath the blue suburban skies
I sit and meanwhile back….. (trumpet fanfare)”
The Beatles, 1967.
On the 28th of April 1980, I emigrated to Calgary, Canada from England. It took six months to build a credit rating good enough to lease a television from Granada. One of the first news items I watched was John Lennon’s assassination on December 8th. A date I could never forget, being the birthdate of both my father and son.
The music of John and the Beatles punctuated so many of my formative years. Leaving England, where I was studying, to visit my family in Africa during the summer break, ‘Eight Days a Week’ played on the radio each Sunday from the local ‘Top of the Pops’ countdown. That song remained number 1 for two whole years.
In England, I was given my first LP-‘A Hard Day’s Night’ -on my ninth birthday. On my twelfth birthday, mum gave me a portable cassette recorder and player, as heavy as a safe, the length of an egg carton and twice as wide. My first recording was ‘All You Need is Love’- a musical rage at the time, blending classical music with pop.
A few years ago, I spent a couple of days in Liverpool. “You must take a London cab tour of all the Beatles’ haunts,” exhorted the captivating, young, petite, blonde receptionist. I couldn’t refuse her.
As the driver cruised past Strawberry Field (not Fields), an orphan home whose grounds John would play in, the taxi boomed its tribute to The Fab Four. They had a break in a church graveyard where John would skive off to smoke a cigarette or two. The guide pointed to the grave of Eleanor Rigby.
Rain streamed down as we navigated Penny Lane, a bus terminal where the four boys met before deciding whose home they should go to. Nearly all the shops referred to on the record still existed. The characters mentioned were all real too, according to my guide.
The grand finale: a row of council houses where Paul McCartney had lived as a boy and where John wrote songs with him.
Post World War II homes made of flint and stone brought tears to my eyes. They were identical to the home I was brought up in so many years ago in Ellington Park, North Maidenhead, Berkshire, thirty miles southwest of London.
In front of the homes, coach upon coach were parked one behind the other, in a narrow, one lane cul-de-sac. Out poured hundreds of Asian tourists led by flag-waving guides screeching Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese (so far as I could recognize), all storming into this little home as though they were charging onto a Cathay Pacific plane on its first boarding announcement.
This brought further tears to my eyes, wondering what it would feel like if they overran my old home in Ellington Park. I wept inside for those halcyon days living with the Asletts who fostered me. As in Penny Lane I remembered the characters along the street I lived in: Mr. Field, the shy, beefy, ruddy-faced butcher sprinkling sawdust on the floor, instructed by Flo never to serve me unless I said “please”; Lulu, my English great grand mum, whom I would visit every day after school, always saying “Tell Flo I’m at the end of me tether” as she handed me a comic and a penny for my troubles. So many more.
