60 Years Ago Today by Peter Leyland

60 Years Ago Today

 

Memory is notoriously selective. In 1963 in the UK it was the coldest winter anyone could remember and my father had died the previous year. Talking this over with my brother recently, he remembers fondly how we made a fabulous slide from frozen snow in the side passage of our house - and of course1963 was also the year that The Beatles released Please, Please Me and began to take over the musical world. As Annie Ernaux says in her memoir, The Years (2017) – ‘Just listening to them you wanted to be happy’.

 

The Beatles: I have this idea about the circular nature of time and how we are able to revisit ourselves as we get older. This happened again when I caught sight of an article in my Sunday paper, ‘Why lost Beatles school gig tape could be saved for the nation’. It was an article about how The Beatles had played a gig at Stowe School in April 1963 and it featured the story of how 15 year old John Bloomfield had made a tape recording of the show at the time. The ancient 60 year old tape was about to be reclaimed using the technology that is now available to achieve such things. The article also contained the set list which included Please, Please Me, Thank You Girl, and Anna, (of which more later).

 

Well, knowing as you do that I am Liverpudlian born and bred, and that I now live about twenty minutes walk away from Stowe in Buckinghamshire, you can imagine that my memory went into overdrive. First of all, I wondered inexplicably why I hadn’t been there at Stowe School at the time, forgetting of course that I had never even heard of the place until we came to live here; next I cursed myself that I had never ever seen The Beatles live, (except for that brief meeting with Paul McCartney reliably transcribed in these pages*); and finally, how was it that my Liverpool friends weren’t now beating on my door saying, “Come on Pete. Let’s have another celebration!”

 

After a deep breath I continued reading the paper and I came across another piece about the Beatles at Stowe in the opinion pages. Samira Ahmed, presenter of Radio 4’s Front Row, is telling us that ‘schoolboy’s tape of the Beatles transports us to an era of optimism’. I learned from this that it was Samira herself who discovered the story - the scoop of her career, she says. She had been visiting the school and had discovered the blue plaque on the school’s Roxborough Hall Theatre commemorating the visit. 

 

Well, despite my current despairing mood over the state of the nation, I now had something to celebrate. Time passes and the events that one has been a part of – World War II in my parents’ case, and the extraordinary cultural explosion of the sixties in my own – leave an indelible mark. I read through Annie Ernaux's memoir without stopping, gripped by her notion that time can all blend together. She never uses the word I in her book but a collective we that is both impersonal and timeless. Annie Ernaux feels herself in “several different moments of her life that float on top of each other. Time of an unknown nature takes hold of her consciousness and her body too. It is a time in which past and present overlap without bleeding into each other…” She calls it ‘the palimpsest sensation’. Do look that up. I had to. Anyway, through this, body, memory and place exist as one.

 

Despite my start to this piece, the 60s as Samira Ahmed says, was an era of optimism. There was Twiggy and there was Mary Quant who sadly has died recently; 1963 was Annus Mirabillus according to Philip Larkin in his famous poem about the beginning of sexual intercourse; later Terence Stamp, Alan Bates and Peter Finch starred in Far from The Madding Crowd; and there was Julie Christie, a picture of whom was pinned to my bedroom wall, much to the amusement of my mother. She did however buy us Telstar, a big hit for The Tornados in 1962. It was a kind of light at the end of the family tunnel. 

 

And of course in Liverpool there were The Fab Four. I loved the song 'Anna' on Please Please Me and did a bit of research into its origin. It had first been released by Arthur Alexander in 1962 and the Beatles recorded it on their first album. It was a favourite of John Lennon’s, being a song about the renunciation by the singer of a girlfriend who has rejected him for someone else - to whom he (honourably) says, Go to him, but don’t forget to give me the ring back first!

 

I had to smile because the song reminded me of a girl…But no, don't worry. I’m not going to go there. Time and memory have limitations of their own. Do read The Years by Annie Ernaux, though. It’s a great book.

 

References 

Ahmed, S. (2023) It was 60 years ago today...The Observer 4th April

Ernaux, A. (2017) The Years (A.L. Strayer, Trans.). Fitzcarraldo Editions. (Original work published 2008)

Photographs by Dezo Hoffman/@BeatlesPlaces

*"A Meeting with Macca" by Peter Leyland in AuthorsElectric 02/01/2022

SOME GOOD NEWS 

My article about how "Reading books is not just a pleasure: it helps our minds to heal" has just been published by psyche.co a digital magazine to be found online.