Take a sad song and make it better

Chapter Twenty Nine

When it rains, it pours.

A truer statement never said.

It was as if Paul and Stuarts little altercation opened up the floodgates for a tsunami of shit to wash The Beatles out of Hamburg.

At first, fate was sneaky and disguised the first disaster as a blessing. The owner of the TopTen club had offered them a job performing at his hugely more successful club after seeing the boys perform one night. Naturally, the Boys all jumped at the opportunity to ditch Bruno Koschmider, contract be damned.

But of course, Koschmider, who was actually quite a devious fellow, wouldn't be double-crossed by a bunch of English hooligans just like that.

A few nights later the German Police received an anonymous tip that a member of an English band playing at The TopTen was underage and thus illegally performing which of course just would not do.

George was deported back to gloomy old England the very next morning, leaving the Band short their most talented guitarist.

Excellent.

Next up to the chopping block was Paul and Pete.

Their exit was done with a little more flair and gravitas than Georges relatively simple deportation.

The pair were retrieving the last of their meager belongings from the Bambi Kino - they were moving on and up to a slightly more upmarket shit hole at the TopTen - when they came across an unused condom, and, Boys being Boys, they had the genius idea to nail it to the wall and set it on fire. Really, what else were they to do with it!?

Cut to a rather dramatic police arrest on the grounds of arson and it was auf wiedersehen to Paul and Pete, back on the next train with a shiny new felony charge under their belts that was sure to make any Parent proud.

That just left John and Stu, all alone in Hamburg. The pair's friendship had been somewhat splintered by the violence that had broken out between Stuart and Paul, but it wasn't anything that a night on the drink and a drunken sob fest of apologies couldn't fix.

Stu had made the decision to stay in Hamburg with his Girlfriend Astrid and go to art school with her, thinking it would be for the best if he were to remove himself from the John, Paul, Stuart triangle that was proving to be detrimental to all of their lives. If Stu wanted a friendship with John he had realised that he couldn't be near Paul - or Paul and John together.

So Stu left John at the train station with the promise to write to him constantly and visit when he could, leaving a forlorn John to make the journey back to Liverpool alone.

Thus was the end of the Beatles reign in Hamburg.

Paul stood on the doorstep of his family home on Forthlin Road. It felt like years since he's last been home, not the few months that had passed.

But Paul was a whole new man now, a worldlier man, he felt years old than his measly 18 years. But no matter how old or worldly Paul felt he felt, he was still terrified to face the wrath of his old man. He could be a 70-year-old Grandfather and still be afraid of disappointing his Dad, and he had really done a bang up job of disappointing Jim McCartney this time around.

Rather timidly Paul knocked on the front door, he figured it would make matters worse if he were to just barge on in as if he were still welcome here - for all he knew he could have been kicked out.

He made a pathetic attempt at straightening out his filthy clothes but immediately dropped his arms to his sides as he heard the sound of soft footsteps approaching.