A new group of popular musicians, called the Beatles, appeared at the Sunderland Empire. A group of schoolgirls, called Anne, Susan and Jane went on the bus and in defiance of health and safety regulations, which fortunately hadn’t been invented yet, stood on their tip-up chairs and screamed their lungs out in a hail of jelly babies and afterwards, going home, on the number 14, shouted at each other with their ears ringing as if they had just spent a week in the swimming baths instead of an hour at a musical soiree.
Rarely do you get the chance to be in the place where history is being made without bad stuff being in attendance or a gilt edged invitation. I was 12 and teenagers had just been invented. There was about us the lingering whiff of Young Elizabethans, raised in austerity, lucky to have missed the war, destined to be the mothers of a new generation of peace, progress and polite Tupperware parties. I wore Inner Raise shoes for my flat feet and went to school in a heavy Harris Tweed coat, impossible to stand up in when rain-soaked. My blouse had a Peter Pan collar buttoned right up to the neck, always, because no gel would have worn the school uniform any other way. It was one rule of many. We were so indoctrinated that a teacher terrified us easily with a political rant; for months I worried about the threat of Communism. I wasn’t even terribly sure what boys were; it was an all-girls school. Crossing your legs, even at the ankle, was considered racy. I was terrified of authority, struggling with quadratic equations and longing for a transistor radio but unable to ask in case it was too expensive, too modern or too subversive.
I was 12 going on 108 and likely to have staid that way.
Then out burst the Beatles and we knew the new religion the minute it arrived on stage. It had springs in its heels to propel it beyond the future and into the stratosphere. A girl in a box dropped a scarf on Paul, he nodded his head and I, looking up, on the ground floor under the balcony, caught in the act of ascending my chair, goodness knows why, was instantly and irrevocably in love for ever. I, who had attended elocution lessons from the age of seven, was in no doubt of the appropriate response in this act of worship, I stood up for what I now believed in and screamed away a lifetime of buttoned-up repression.
They were on for the second half. At the time, needing more, much, much more, I wondered why. With hindsight I think they only had half an hour’s worth of songs to sing. The energy was volcanic, the melody messianic, the love instant and eternal devotion guaranteed. We had no doubt that a fuse had been lit and the explosion of creativity that would rock us off our socks was sizzling in the ether, waiting to be sucked into the Great Big Bang.
It was 1963 when the Beatles set me free. Put your hands on your head and go EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
