Free Shout! by Philip Norman Page A

afternoon, when Julia paid her daily visit to Menlove Avenue, she, too, would be entreated to give—even lend—him the money. For Julia, as it happened, could play the banjo a little. John’s father, Freddy, had taught her before disappearing overseas. And Freddy’s father, so he had always said, used to play professionally in America with a group of Kentucky minstrels.
    It was, however, not Julia but Mimi who eventually gave in. One Saturdaymorning, she put on her coat, checked the money in her purse, and told John unceremoniously to come along.
    Hessy’s, the music shop in Whitechapel, central Liverpool, had an abundant stock of guitars. Frank Hessy, the owner, was sending a van regularly down to London to buy up every one to be found in the Soho street markets. Jim Gretty, his showroom manager, was selling roughly one guitar a minute from the hundreds festooned along the narrow shop wall. Jim was himself a guitarist, western-style, and each week held a beginners’ class in an upstairs room, chalking huge elementary chord-shapes on the wall.
    It was Jim who sold Aunt Mimi the guitar that John said he wanted—a little Spanish model with steel strings and a label inside: “Guaranteed not to split.” “It cost me seventeen pounds, I think,” Mimi said. “I know I resented paying that, even though I’d been giving twelve pounds each for his school blazers.”
    From that moment, John was—as they say in Liverpool—“lost.” Nigel Walley, calling round at Mendips, would find him up in his bedroom, oblivious to time or the first soreness of fingertip split by the steel strings. “He’d sit on his bed, just strumming,” Nigel says. “Strumming the banjo chords Julia had shown him, and singing any words that came into his head. After about ten minutes, he’d have got a tune going.”
    When Mimi could no longer stand the noise, or the foot beating time through her ceiling, she would order John out of the house, into the little front porch with its walls of Art Nouveau–patterned glass. “He stood there leaning against the wall so long, I think he wore some of the brickwork away with his behind,” Mimi said. “To me, it was just so much waste of time. I used to tell him so. ‘The guitar’s all very well, John,’ I told him, ‘but you’ll never make a living out of it.’”
    The first skiffle group he formed had only two members: himself on guitar and his crony Pete Shotton on kitchen washboard, crashing its glass ridges with thimble-capped fingers as the two of them tried out “Cumberland Gap,” “Rock Island Line,” “Don’t You Rock Me,” “Daddy-O,” and other skiffle classics. They named themselves, in roughhewn skiffle style, the Quarry Men, after the sandstone quarries dotted around Woolton, and also in unwilling recognition of the school they both attended. The school song contains a reference to “Quarry men oldbefore our birth”—a sentiment chorused lustily by John and Pete, since it invariably figured in the final assembly of term.
    The Quarry Men grew in the image of the gang that had formerly terrorized St. Peter’s Sunday school. Nigel Walley, now a Bluecoat Grammar School boy, and Ivan Vaughan, from the Liverpool Institute, divided the role of tea-chest bass player amicably between them. Nigel’s first Teddy-Boy clothes had been seized by his policeman father and thrown on the fire, so now he kept all his choicer garments down the road at Ivan’s house. Each played bass with the Quarry Men when the other could not be bothered.
    Quarry Bank High School supplied a further recruit in Rod Davis, the earnest, bespectacled boy in 4A whose parents had just bought him a banjo. Another Woolton boy named Eric Griffiths came in on the strength of his new guitar, and because he claimed to know someone on King’s Drive who owned a full-size set of drums. He took the others to meet Colin Hanton, an apprentice upholsterer who had just begun installment plan payments on a