The TV show that reminds Paul McCartney of his mother
The loss of his mother when he was 14 ripped Paul McCartney’s life in half, and from that moment, his childhood was over. The next few years were grief-stricken for McCartney, and it was a travesty that Mary was never able to see him become a crucial part of the world’s most important band, The Beatles.
McCartney’s mother, Mary, developed breast cancer and died of an embolism from surgery which was supposed to stop the spreading of the disease. Tragically, years later, breast cancer would again cause a travesty in his personal life when it took the life of his wife, Linda. Since then, McCartney has carried out a wealth of work for breast cancer awareness.
“I didn’t think it had affected me musically,” he recalled on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2019. “I just knew it was a tragedy. … And to lose your mum at 14 is, you know, not easy. So it was just very difficult for a few years to try and come to terms with it, but then I discovered music.”
Meanwhile, an article about his relationship with his mother by the Express quotes McCartney as saying: “She was very hardworking, my mum. She wanted the best for us. We weren’t a well-off family – we didn’t have a car, we just about had a television – so both my parents went out to work. At night when mum came home, she would cook, so we didn’t have a lot of time with each other, but she was just a very comforting presence in my life.”
McCartney’s mother worked as a midwife, and according to the same article, the former Beatle is a fan of the BBC period drama, Call The Midwife because it reminds him of his late parent. The programme was launched in 2012 and has currently run for eleven seasons. Furthermore, it was originally set in 1957, a similar time to when Mary McCartney was also working as a cycling midwife. According to the Express, Call The Midwife takes Paul back to his childhood.
Mary has been a constant source of influence upon his songwriting, most notably inspiring him to write, ‘Let It Be’. Additionally, losing his mother cemented McCartney’s bond with John Lennon, who also went through the same trauma.
In Anthology, McCartney said: “That became a very big bond between John and me because he lost his mum early on, too. We both had this emotional turmoil which we had to deal with, and, being teenagers, we had to deal with it very quickly. We both understood that something had happened that you couldn’t talk about – but we could laugh about it because each of us had gone through it. It wasn’t OK for anyone else”.
Adding: “We could both laugh at death – but only on the surface. John went through hell, but young people don’t show grief – they’d rather not. Occasionally, once or twice in later years, it would hit in. We’d be sitting around, and we’d have a cry together; not often, but it was good.”
Listen below to ‘Let It Be’, a song that McCartney wrote after his mother visited him in a dream.
