YESTERDAY

A suburb of the City of Leicester in 1964. The Beatles have burst onto the World Stage, and Deirdre Barker has walked into my life. I’m completely and utterly in love with the music of John, Paul, George and Ringo - and I’m totally besotted with Deirdre. But as yet, neither the Beatles nor Deirdre know the depths of my feelings.

Then the secret’s out. To my closest school friends, I confess my love for the elf-like skinny one with the soft brown eyes and the voice like Fenella Fielding. No, not Paul McCartney - Deirdre Barker. I believe that my ten-year old peers will never divulge such a secret to all and sundry. Wrong! The secret spreads round the classroom like scarlet fever, and before the day’s out even our teacher knows. How embarrassing! And worse still, Deirdre knows too.

But the good news is that my feelings are reciprocated. Deirdre actually likes me! The Beatles sing: ‘She Loves You, yeah, yeah yeah’.


Deirdre and I exchange more than just knowing glances and smiles. I crumble at the sound of her voice as she greets me in the cloakroom with her trademark sexy: ‘Morning’. I begin to have erotic dreams about her, even though I’ve no idea what erotic means. The Beatles sing: ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’

It’s 1965. I discover that my best friend, Gordon Cockroft, fancies classmate Jane Nourish. The four of us arrange a clandestine rendezvous at the local park, where the girls lie down submissively on the grass and let us kiss them. Wow! Gordon asks me why I’ve brought my football with me. I have to explain that I’ve told my parents I’ve gone to play football - they’d kill me if they knew the truth. The girl’s aren’t the only ones lying.

‘Help!’ the movie comes out, and John Lennon tells me ‘You’re Gonna Lose that Girl.’ He’s spot on: Deirdre passes her eleven plus and wings off to Wyggeston Girls’ Grammar School, whilst I (an eleven-plus borderline failure), get shunted off to Lancaster Boys’ Secondary Modern. Even though her house is only four hundred yards from mine, we lose contact. We’re living in two different universes now.

The next three years are a nightmare as I undergo the transformation from child to adolescent. It’s not a pretty sight. Lancaster Boys is Hell on Earth. Not even the Beatles can save me now, though I’m comforted by a ‘Little Help from My Friends’.

Then one day in early February, as I’m looking out of my window contemplating my pathetic little life, Fenella Fielding rides past my house on her Moulton bike. My legs turn to jelly and my heart beats faster than a Ringo drum roll. I’m captivated. The skinny elf has turned into a gorgeous creature, and Paul McCartney screams into my ear: ‘Got to Get You Into my Life.’ Two Valentine’s cards later, we’re holding hands in the same park where we played as kids four years earlier. And once more, I’m completely and utterly in love.

But the Deirdre I rediscover at fourteen is now an alien creature to me. Mountains have grown where before was flat terrain, and what’s that on her face? Makeup, a friend tells me. She really is from outer space. The little girl I knew is now a young lady, and I have no experience of dealing with young ladies.


She talks about things at school like Latin. She tries to explain it, but I say it just sounds like a foreign language to me. Our two universes impinge, coalesce and - at times - envelope each other. We embrace passionately in the streets, loving the contact and loving each other. And yet we are from different worlds.

Deirdre is an only child; I have a younger brother and older sister. Her parents are liberal and understanding; mine are authoritarian and rigid. She rides a bike and stays out until ten; I have to travel with my feet firmly on the ground and return home by eight. I swallow the humiliation of being walked home by my bike-riding, worldly-wise goddess, exasperated by my choice of parents. I really want to give them an end of year report: ‘Could do better - much better’.

For English literature, Deirdre studies ‘A Midsummer Nights Dream’, and it just so happens that a film of the play is showing at a cinema in Leicester. Deirdre asks me to go with her - on a real date!. Although this means staying out until after 8 pm, my parents, surprisingly, agree - but only on the condition that my father drives us there and back. It isn’t ideal, but it’s that or nothing; so the lift it is.

Deirdre has her hair done specially in curls and looks like a princess - a fact which I, foolishly, never compliment her on. In the cinema, we sit in fluffy red seats, holding hands, and I awkwardly put my arm around her. We feel and look like a proper couple, albeit a rather young one.


The film ends, and my father’s waiting to take us back. It’s well after ten and he wants to take me straight home after dropping Deirdre at her house. But she asks me in for a drink, and I persuade my father to leave us - saying I won’t be long. He says something about ten minutes, but I’m not really listening. I’m in love.

She pours two glasses of Coca-Cola, and puts on the Beatles ‘Abbey Road’. George Harrison sings ‘Something,’ a song I think he must have written for Deirdre, and she impulsively grabs my hand and takes me upstairs to show me some of her secret possessions: old photographs and her pony tail that she’d kept from Primary school. I can’t believe that she’s actually kept her old hair! It only confirmed that she was indeed an alien being.

Then, just to embarrass me to bits, my father’s at the door. I hadn’t been straight back and he’s furious. I’m not too pleased either, and I won’t go with him. I stay another couple of minutes with Deirdre, then go home.

The next day, my parents and I have a ‘discussion’. An argument about my freedom. I haggle for staying out till ten, but in the end have to settle for nine. Why were they being so protective - didn’t they trust me to behave? Had they brought me up so badly that I was going to rape my girlfriend, or go rampaging through the streets of Leicester?

It was only years later that I discovered the reason for their attitude. My uncle John had been friendly with a Dutch girl called Jonni when he was sixteen. She was a year older. Jonni became pregnant, and her mother found out that John was the father. The two families got together and decided that the best thing for all concerned (the ‘all’ being the parents) was that John and Jonni should marry. Neither of them wanted to; but they agreed to stay together until the child was grown up. My parents were afraid that the same thing could happen to me.

After two months of being with Deirdre, the bubble bursts. Or rather, it slowly deflates. I never stop loving her, but I think she’s gone off me. And she thinks I like someone else better - a neighbour called Debbie Branston. It isn’t true.

John Lennon urges Deirdre and I to ‘Come Together’, but I don’t have the words, or the way to explain how I feel to her. There are no ‘O’ levels in ‘Love’ or ‘Relationships’ at my school, and my parents don’t know what to say to help. Perhaps they think I’ll grow out of it.

And then the Beatles split up. It’s as if they knew about Deirdre and me and decided to call it a day too. After all, they only wrote songs for us, didn’t they? Paul, John, George, Ringo and Deirdre go off on their own individual projects. Deirdre’s is someone called Nick Berkeley - an independent, darkly handsome type who makes me feel inadequate. I had hoped to get back with Deirdre, but Paul tells me to ‘Let it Be’. And so I do.

John Lennon was murdered in 1980 and (I later discover) Deirdre left the Earth in the same decade. She and the Beatles were so much a part of my life in the 1960’s that I can never forget about her - or them; they’ll always be a part of my ‘Yesterday’.

And in the end,
The love you take
Is equal to the love
You make
(The Beatles, Abbey Road, 1969)