17 August 2023 , 19:17
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Beatle George Harrison’s mother Louise sounds like a very sensible woman.
“Are there others?” some will ask, but you know what I mean. Mum knows best is a good place to start. Louise’s letters to George ’s admirers show concern not just for her famous son, but his fans too. The correspondence will fetch thousands at a memorabilia auction next week. Her common sense is priceless.
After attending a Beatles concert in 1963, when girls screamed all through the act, she wrote to Liverpool teenager Janet Gray: “I was really ashamed I was a female.” Not, you notice, as a mother, or a woman, but as a female, identifying herself as the same sex as those weeping, frenzied teenage victims of Beatlemania.
Louise, a shop assistant of Irish-Catholic descent, probably held old-fashioned views about the way girls should behave. That’s how
we were brought up. But a generosity of spirit in those letters marks her out as an understanding mum. George is home for five days “very thin, but OK,” she writes. And “don’t believe the rot about Paul”.
I’ve done my best in the fatherhood game. Motherhood is still a mystery, and always will be. How do they do it?
I know the kit is self-explanatory. Instinct kicks in. Mother Nature is the ultimate mum. And I hear the miners’ wives who sing: “We are women, we are strong!” But that doesn’t explain how they cope with scary challenges that send men rushing to the pub.
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If Louise was with us today, a popular newspaper like the Mirror would snap her up as a columnist. That’s why we are so lucky to have Val Savage, our Louise, in the paper.