All My Loving

Beth Kaplan

Description

A memoir of the vibrant mid-Sixties that illuminates both the real life and powerful imagination of an articulate Beatlemaniac spending a lonely year in Paris.

She didn’t want to go overseas with her family when her dad takes a sabbatical from his university to study in France. That would mean leaving leaving her school friends in her hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. But when her friends reminded her that she’d be closer to the Beatles, she decides to keep an open mind.

In a series of poignant and humorous diary fantasies about a romance with Paul McCartney, a young Beth Kaplan writes her way into adolescence, the dawning of sexual awareness, and the world of real boys.

Sujets

• Boys
• Beatles
• Nueva Escocia
• Diary
• Fantasy (disambiguation)
• Coming of age
• Memoir
• 1960s
• School
• Nova Scotia
• The Beatles
• Paris
• Halifax
• Nouvelle-Écosse
• Paul McCartney
• France

Informations

• Publié par: BPS Books
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781927483831
• Langue: English

Extrait

All My Loving
All My Loving
Coming of Age with Paul McCartney in Paris

Beth Kaplan
Copyright © 2014 by Beth Kaplan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in 2014 by BPS Books Toronto and New York www.bpsbooks.com A division of Bastian Publishing Services Ltd.
ISBN 978-1-927483-81-7 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-927483-83-1 (ePUB) ISBN 978-1-927483-82-4 (ePDF)
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available from Library and Archives Canada.
Cover: Alanna Cavanagh Text design and typesetting: Tannice Goddard, Soul Oasis Networking
For Eli
Contents
Note to the Reader
1964
1. January
2. February
3. July 1956
4. March
5. May
6. July
7. End of July
8. August
9. September
10. December
1965
11. January
12. March
13. May
14. July
15. September
Acknowledgements
About the Author
NOTE TO THE READER
This memoir is as true as I can make it, which is pretty true because of the voluminous paper trail that follows me wherever I go — a lifetime’s trove of diaries, poems, stories, drawings and letters, saved by my pack rat mother and my pack rat self.
And so, the diary and story excerpts from 1964 and 1965, included here in italics, are quoted verbatim — except for a few instances where, in the interests of good storytelling, time has been telescoped or dates switched, and stories and diary entries pruned. A number of names have been changed and an occasional word or line modified for clarity. The spelling mistakes made then have been retained.
These are my own memories. Others who were there, especially my brother, undoubtedly remember things differently.
FROM THE SCRAPBOOK OF MY WRITINGS
December 1963, age thirteen

QUESTIONS
Will I ever Grow up, as they say? Will the boys Look at me, one day? Will my opinion Be listened to? Will they still say “How you grew!” Will my thoughts Become less wild? Oh, when will I Not be a child?
1964
1

January
W e were eating meatloaf — at least, they were eating and I was pretending to — when Dad shifted the mush in his mouth and turned to me. “Your mother and I have a Ban the Bomb meeting tonight, Pupik,” he said. “I think the snow tires will get us there.”
The most thrilling news! My parents would be going out to save the world from nuclear fallout, and the house, for a few precious hours, would be mine. Except for my little brother, who’d be playing in the snow somewhere and who didn’t matter anyway.
As soon as our Morris Minor sputtered out of the driveway, I rushed back to the kitchen, switched on the radio — the news, “President Johnson blah blah blah” — and twiddled the knob until the speaker sang out “CHNS — 960 on the AM dial.” The cool evening DJ Frank Cameron was announcing a song called “Little Doos Coop.” How odd, I thought, guys singing high, like girls. I didn’t know what a doos coop was, but for sure we didn’t have any in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
I bent way over the red arborite counter, twiddling bits of hair and biting my fingernails, comforting habits that were forbidden when Dad was around, and thought about my school friend Lea with her new very long bangs who always knew what was the next sharp thing. Was that a skill you just had, like being good at arithmetic? If not, how could I get it too? Lea didn’t care what other people thought. She was with it. I envied that.
My parents fought a lot, but when Mozart came on the CBC, they got soft and quiet. My parents would really hate “Little Doos Coop.”
THE DAY BEFORE , as I’d walked into Home Economics class, my mind had changed. Just like that. Listening to Lea cry, “They love jelly babies? What’re jelly babies and where can I get some?” a thought flew at me and hit hard.
“You,” said a voice inside, “should listen to that group too.”
This time, I said yes. It was Monday, January 13, 1964, I was thirteen years, five months and thirteen days old, and yes, I would listen to that group and find out what my friends were going on about.
But how? Unlike my classmates, I didn’t own a transistor radio. The only radio at my house, the square brown Philips on the kitchen counter, was guarded by my parents, always tuned to the CBC with its tweety violins and flutes. How would I get to hear the Hit Parade?
Since December, most of the girls in my class had spent every spare moment oohing and aahing over photographs of four boys with hair covering their foreheads, and swooning over the new group’s songs on the Hit Parade. “Love me do,” I overheard. “Please please me.” “Ask me why.” A bunch of strange orders.
A year younger than my classmates, I had no interest in the Hit Parade. The songs were silly. I mean, “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini…”
“Duke duke duke duke of earl duke duke duke of earl duke duke duke of earl …”
I mean.
When I was twelve, my best friend Vicky, who was thirteen, had begun to spend her allowance on 45s instead of on china horse figurines from Woolworth’s, which we used to buy together. One day she insisted on playing me her new single, “Please Don’t Talk to the Lifeguard.”
“That’s the stupidest song I’ve ever heard,” I said.
“Jeepers, you’re young,” she said, which hurt.
What had happened to her? Why was she snapping her fingers to 45s when we, beautiful orphan sisters, should be leaping onto our horses, hers an appaloosa named Wildfire and mine a palomino named Champ, and galloping bareback around our very own island?
THAT MONDAY NIGHT , snow pelted the bedroom windows as I lay, blankets drawn tight around my neck just the way I liked, reading The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion . Nancy Drew and I, solving mysteries with our friends Bess and George, waiting for our beau Ned Nickerson in his jaunty roadster, and making our lawyer father, dignified Mr. Drew, proud. I read late, clicked off my light and tried to sleep. When we moved into this house seven years ago, after our stay in England, my mother had chosen Twenty Wildflowers wallpaper for my little room. During many sleepless nights — I was not a sleeping kind of person — I’d memorized the pattern of those delicate pink and white flowers, repeated in their ribbony green rectangles round my bed. I traced the flowers as I tossed and turned, listening to the storm outside the house. And the one inside too. My parents, downstairs.
Through that bitter night, there was such a giant snowfall that next morning, oh heaven, school was cancelled. Tuesday, January 14, was a blessed day. After a brief attempt to clean my room, I put on my snow pants and ploughed through waist-high snow to make a snow fort and angels with Carol and her little sister Joanie, the girls next door.
After lunch, I squirrelled myself into a corner of Dad’s living room armchair and re-read one of my favourite books, Little Women . If only I could be Beth, my namesake, dying beautifully, loved by all.
“Beth! Come set the table!” How many times that voice had blasted into my reveries, just at a good bit in a book. Supper was awful, as suppers at our house always were — tonight, meatloaf full of mysterious lumps that I suspected included onions, me swishing little bites through my mouth with lots of milk, my parents nagging about cleaning my plate, piano practice, homework.
And then, they’d gone out to ban the bomb.
FRANK CAMERON ANNOUNCED the drippy singing nun with her guitar. I liked some pop singers, I wasn’t a complete lost cause. In grade five, Scott, the boy I had a crush on, got me to listen to “Teen Angel.” What a tragic song, that poor girl squashed in the train wreck holding her boyfriend’s ring. I liked “Venus in Blue Jeans,” though no one I knew actually owned any blue jeans. Ricky Nelson with his forest of eyelashes and “Hello Mary Lou, Goodbye Heart.” The Everly Brothers with my theme song — “Dre-e-e-e-eam, dreeeeam dream dream…”
“Bobby’s Girl” and “Johnny Get Ang-er-y,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Rhythm of the Rain.” Bobby Curtola. Neil Sedaka. Dion.
But I could only hear the music at my friends’ houses, and anyway, who cared about bop she bop rama dinga ding ding when there were sexy Barbie paper dolls to dress up and take out dancing?
What I did after school, when homework and piano practice were done, was read, write stories and poems and in my diary, invent lives for my paper dolls and cut out and stick pictures in my stack of scrapbooks. There was a kittens and horses scrapbook, one for ballet, one for Hayley Mills — I’d seen The Parent Trap three times. There was a Scrapbook of My Writings , into which I copied out my best work.
A month ago, in December, I’d begun a serious new scrapbook, dedicated to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Handsome President Kennedy was the most important man in the world; beside him, our Canadian Prime Minister, Lester B. Pearson, looked like a woodchuck. On Friday, November 22, 1963, I’d left school to go