THIS BOY: The Early Lives of John Lennon & Paul McCartney, by Ilene Cooper
In the early 1980s I was an English teacher at a high school in Cambridge, England. One parents’ evening, I had just finished talking to a pleasant man called Ivan Vaughan about his clever son when a colleague at the next table leaned over to me. “You know Ivan’s claim to fame?” I shook my head. “He introduced John Lennon to Paul McCartney.” I stared at him. Claim to fame? Vaughan invented fame. Introducing Paul to John was like introducing ketchup to fries, or causing the Big Bang. Vaughan might be the most important person I have ever met.
“This Boy: The Early Lives of John Lennon & Paul McCartney” is a history book for young readers, so of course I had to see a mention of my ex-student’s father to confirm its accuracy and ambition. I needn’t have worried. Its very prologue, “July 6, 1957,” is about the church fete in Woolton, Liverpool, where the introduction was made. Ilene Cooper understands the earth-shattering nature of the event.
“This Boy” is an impressive achievement, especially for an American author, because to tell the story of the young Paul and John is to tell the story of postwar England, in all its benighted misery: Bombed to pieces in the previous decade, the country endured rationing of staples like sugar, meat and coal well into the 1950s. Many people had to leave their houses to use the toilet. By the time John and Paul were 10 and 8, respectively, only 7 percent of 17-year-olds were in school. It was a gray and hopeless place, and Cooper does an excellent job of explaining how the grayness fed into the explosion that was just around the corner. When you have spent half your life waiting at a cold, wet bus stop (no T-Birds, or any cars at all, for British teenagers), Little Richard and Elvis Presley sound thrillingly otherworldly.
Cooper even talks about “The Goon Show,” the surrealistic pre-Python BBC radio comedy starring Peter Sellers that helped forge the Beatles’ sense of humor. (What she doesn’t mention is that if it weren’t for the Goons, the band’s career path might have been very different: Starchy George Martin had never produced a rock ’n’ roll record before he met them, but he had produced Sellers. What was good enough for a Goon was good enough for the Beatles.)
Cooper is equally good on the personal tragedies John and Paul had to contend with, and their importance to the songwriters’ bond. McCartney was 14 when he lost his mother to breast cancer; Lennon’s mother died little more than a year after the fateful fete in Woolton. Lennon was 17, but he had already lived through a chaotic and painful childhood during which he was raised mostly by his Aunt Mimi, while his mother lived a couple of miles away with her new family. His father had disappeared from the picture altogether. John and Paul consoled each other, writing songs “nose to nose” in the McCartneys’ living room.
“This Boy” is a wonderful primer for the kind of kid who is nuts enough about music to want to grasp the social context in which it was made. If the world’s foremost Beatles expert, Mark Lewisohn, currently engaged in writing a monumental three-volume biography of the band, is the Fab Four’s Robert Caro, then Ilene Cooper is their Ernst Gombrich. If your young people are anything like mine, little histories will do nicely, probably for decades to come.
Nick Hornby is the author, most recently, of “Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius.”
THIS BOY: The Early Lives of John Lennon & Paul McCartney | By Ilene Cooper | Illustrated | 192 pp. | Viking | $17.99 | Ages 10 and up
