A Love Story

Although John and the girl spend a lot of time together, they don't spend all the time together.
On the one hand this is due to John's commitment to the band and his songwriting (& relationship) with Paul. On the other hand it is of utmost importance to the girl not to be seen as just John's girlfriend.
She desperately wants to be her own person and as she tells John after Stuart's death, she won't be shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed. That's why she indulges in her own hobbies, tries to curate her own circle of friends and eventually takes up a job at the Robert Fraser gallery.
Of course this causes friction again and again because of John's jealousy and the constant indistinct fear of losing her. Deep down though, John knows that the girl is right - he wouldn't want her to be a subservient homebody. He'd get bored. In a way he likes that she's keeping him on his toes and it's one of the reasons why the relationship works so well for such a long time.

in her room

The girl's bedroom at Hollytree Road is a typical teenager room and not so different from John's at Mendips.
John often notes that the girl is very neat and keeps things tidy, yet she has a lot of stuff and not much storage space.

The room has a bed, a fluffy flokati rug, a nightstand where she burns her incense, a rather large wooden chest of drawers, a small bookshelf, a desk and - quite futuristic - a swivel chair.
On the desk the girl has a stack of Moleskine notebooks - the ones she's read her favourite authors allegedly use - and her leather-bound diary.
She trusts her family and John enough to not read it and up until December 1967 John indeed doesn't betray her.
When she is not at her desk, the chair is sometimes occupied by Winnie, the oversized plush panda bear that John won in a shooting game at the Christmas funfair whilst being drunk and without his glasses.
John thinks of the panda as dead creepy but the girl loves it - after all she named it after John's middle name - and often props it onto her bed and uses it as a gigantic pillow.
The girl owns a Dansette record player, the same John and Stuart have in their flat on Gambier Terrace, several jazz, soul and motown records and a radio, which is tuned to Radio Luxemburg.

The walls are covered in blue floral wallpaper, which the girl despises.
After her visit in Hamburg, she's inspired by Astrid Kirchherr's creativity and eccentric lifestlye. She too wants to paint her room black with little silver foil details on the wall but her mother doesn't allow it.
The girl has the same Elvis Presley poster as John, a Dave Brubeck autograph card, which she ordered by mail and a film poster of Somebody Up There Likes Me, starring Paul Newman.
Since the girl is very interested in graphic design, she also collects the Royal College of Art's ARK magazines and uses them to cover up more of the appaling wallpaper.

On the wall next to her bed the girl has tacked several photostrips of John, a few of his less crude sketches and two of his elaborated drawings of himself as the Mad Hatter and her as Alice.
Aside from that, the girl has a couple of photobooth pictures of John and her kissing sellotaped to the mirror above her chest of drawers with the bottom halves torn off and securely stowed away from Mimi’s curious eyes in John's bedside table drawer.
One photo that John particularly loves is the one he took of the girl and Thelma, his ex-girlfriend, at the Ye Cracke pub.

In the wooden chest of drawers, the girl stores her jumpers, polo neck sweaters, jeans, skirts, nighties and granny knickers, as John likes to call them, but also, hidden in a shoe box, frilly lingerie, hosiery and garter belts which John occasionally acquires in dubious ways.

Shoe boxes are also used for collecting John's letters and cards, both sappy ones as well as the ones John sent during the three month they were separated and the girl refused to talk to him.

The girl frequently receives photos and letters from George as well. One of the earliest colour photos she has is of George showing off his new guitar. Just like John, George likes to adorn his photos and oftentimes signs them with your friend, buddy and pal, which John finds mildly annoying.

John's bedroom at Mendips is a second home for the girl.
When she's on a school trip to London, John notices for the first time just how much of her stuff is scattered all over the place: embroidered handkerchiefs, neckerchiefs, hair ties, books, perfume, mascara, her beloved Nivea cream and various articles of clothing that she either forgot or John borrowed and didn't return, like her black fisherman's cap (or silk knickers...)

scrapbooking

Although the girl likes to surround herself with an aura of cool and nonchalance, she is in fact quite sentimental and constantly collects things that have a special meaning for her.
She keeps all the letters and cards that John writes to her, she never gets rid of the pink scarf that they slightly misappropriate in Hamburg (and that actually belongs to Aunt Mimi), and until the end of their relationship (and beyond?) she wears the cheap ring that John gave her on a whim in Hamburg.

The night John tells the girl about Brian Epstein wanting to meet The Beatles, she's convinced that it's the beginning of something great and she confesses that she's been gathering articles and photos of the group for a while already and that she's planning on going to see John's college friend Bill Harry, founder of the music magazine Mersey Beat, for even more material.
She also chips in with the Cavernite Margaret, who regularly takes photos of John at The Cavern and has them developed in her neighbour's makeshift bathroom photo lab.

As Beatlemania hits and the snipping and glueing becomes too overwhelming, she employs Derek Taylor's clipping service.
Although she tries her hardest to remain impartial, the majority of her collection is about John. She's especially fond of articles about John's books and a prized possesion is John's cover story in Cosmopolitan in '64. Not only is Cosmopolitan one of her favourite magazines but the article is also written by Gloria Steinem, whose career and writings the girl follows closely since her article The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed, that was published in Esquire in 1962.

She also collects articles about herself, the very few home & girlfriend stories that Brian Epstein allows to be published, and the odd articles about the London scene whenever she's mentioned.

John does use clipping services as well to keep up with whatever the girl is up to but most of the time it's rather unnerving to him, especially when he gets to read about her outings whilst he is on tour with The Beatles.

Needless to say that after their separation the girl stops scrapbooking. Still, she's very well informed about John and Yoko - it's hard to ignore anyway since the two seem to be in the papers constantly.
As for John, whilst he does cut the girl from his new life and refuses to even think of her, he has made preparations to be informed about any major events in the girl's life...not that he cares of course...just in case...

happenings

The girl loves coffee and music - and fashions herself to be a Beatnik -, so her natural habit is of course a coffee bar. Since she can't visit the most iconic of all, The Gaslight Cafe in New York City, she sticks to the many coffee bars Liverpool has to offer.

There's The Kinkajou Club, The Majorca Coffee Bar and the El Comunal, a large and trendy coffee shop in Bold Street. All of them great places with no legal age limit and free from the influence of school and church where the girl can meet her friends - disparaging called Coffee Beetles by John (after the rival biker gang in The Wild One of course) - display her French-influenced and elsewhere frowned-upon fashion, watch, listen and sometimes even dance to a range of live acts. Or to just sit down all by herself and write, as one does in hip cafés.
Her most frequented one (together with John as well on date nights) is The Kardoma, a self-service café with resonable pricing and tasty chocolate cake.
The girl does love the rusty charme of those joints and is almost a tad horrified when she finds out that the newly opened coffee club La Bussola, where she spends her birthday, is quite posh, has a rather opulent interior and even waiters.

Most coffee bars begin to move away from exclusively playing jazz by the end of the 50s but instead pick up on folk, R & B and of course Rock 'N ' Roll, with Mona Best's Casbah Coffee Club which John and the girl (and the other Silver Beetles) help to paint before the grand opening and of course Allan Williams' The Jacaranda Club on Slater Street, a quite hip place for members only with a jukebox and an Italian espresso machine.

Being the enthusiastic advocate for all stream of consciousness type of literature, the girl loves poetry readings.
Whilst most of them she attends together with John, she also follows around Mersey poets Roger McGough and Phil Tasker at The Streates in Mount Pleasant or at The Rumbling Tum on Hardman Street with its black and white formica topped tables and walls completely covered by a black and white newspaper collage.

During her stay in London in '61, the girl visits the 2i's Coffee Bar on 59 Old Compton Street in Soho and has a bash at Cy Laurie's Jazz Club off Picadilly Circus.

Once the girl attends the Liverpool College of Art, she briefly becomes a writer for the student newspaper but soon quits after two of her articles get heavily redacted. Instead she joins Bill Harry's film society which specialises on showing French and Polish films such as Stuart Sutcliffe's favourite, Ashes and Diamonds, starring Zbigniew Cybulski.

The girl's penchant for obscure and underground films leads to her meeting Edie Sedgwick during her visit in New York City in early March '65 whilst John is still filming Help! in the Bahamas. Edie at that time is filming Poor Litte Rich Girl.
The girl also visits The Silver Factory, unfortunately on a day Andy Warhol isn't in. But she briefly talks to Valerie Solanas, who tells her about her radical feminist play Up Your Ass.
In April '67 she finally gets to meet Andy Warhol at Baghdad House in London and together with Paul organises a screening of Chelsea Girls at Robert Fraser's flat.

As much as the girl loves films, she never appears in one herself.
Paul wants her to play the part of The Lovely Starlet in Magical Mystery Tours but she declines, still being too upset about Brian Epstein's death.
At the beginning of '68 Robert Fraser and Nik Douglas together with Kenneth Anger and Michael Cooper fly out to Delhi to film Tantra, a project bankrolled by Mick Jagger and - due to the girl's charming persuasiveness - John.
The girl (and John) were supposed to play a small part in it but the film crew never made it to Rishikesh, where she and The Beatles were staying with the Maharishi. On the main night of the Basant Panchami festival a severe thunderstorm killed 50 people which caused Kenneth Anger to pack his camera and leave for Egypt.

At the Jacaranda, the girl meets and befriends Virginia, Bill's girlfriend and writer of Mersey Roundabout, the gossip column in the music newspaper Mersey Beat.
Occassionally the girl accompanies the two when they visit new clubs like The Odd Spot on Bold Street but most of the time her mother doesn't allow for her to go out late at night on her own - a decision which John naturally fully supports. The only exception are jazz nights at the Mardi Gras together with Geoff Mohammed, John's friend, who more than once saved him from being severely beaten up by Teddy Boys and looked like an Arab and talked like a German and was tanned all over.

Due to her friendship with Virginia Harry, the girl is featured once in Mersey Beat's Face Of Beauty column, something she is quite proud of but gets mocked for endlessly by John and Paul.

In '66 the girl is photographed for John d Green's Birds of Britain.
The book features unconventional and witty portraits of all the girls who make London swing – actresses, models, aristocrats, fashion designers, boutique owners and pop singers.
Unlike Pattie Boyd and Jane Asher, the girl's photographs are quite revealing - she poses topless in front of Ed Ruscha's Pussy artwork, a frivolous nod to her work at the Robert Fraser Gallery.
Predictably, John doesn't allow for it to be printed. But he has her pictures framed and hung up in their bedroom.

On October 15th '66 the girl and Paul attend the launch party for the underground newspaper International Times at the Roundhouse in London.
Being a Pop / Op / Costume / Masque / Fantasy-Loon / Blowout / Drag Ball, Paul dresses up as an Arab in a hood, the girl as the Black Swan ballerina and Marianne Faithfull, according to The New Society, as a nun who's habit didnt even cover her bottom.
Sugar cubes, which are assumed to contain LSD, are given to every guest, Pink Floyd and Soft Machine both have their first big gig that evening and as a special guest, artist Yoko Ono stages a Fluxus-style happening where everybody is required to touch the person next to him in complete darkness - something John isn't too happy about when he later learns all about it from both the girl and Paul.

sport

The girl is quite keen on sports and although John admires and compliments her on her shapely figure, he doesn't know much about her athletic hobbies and doesn't really care either since he isn't interested in sports himself.

From an early age on, the girl took ballet classes and continued to do so up until her move to Liverpool.
She is a great admirer of Rudolf Nureyev and very excited for Stuart and Astrid, who had a chance to see him perform in 1961 after he escaped his KGB minders in Paris and defected to the West (something the girl took special interest in since she's also a fan of spy thrillers and Cold War fiction).
In 1965 she finally gets to meet Nureyev when he's photographed by David Bailey for his Box of Pin-Ups series.

Her father instilled in her a liking for boxing, something she only reveals the afternoon before she and The Beatles meet Muhammad Ali in Miami Beach in 1964. John listens quite in awe when she tries to explain to him the difference between an orthodox stance and southpaw and - against all odds - predicts that Ali would win.

The girl, unlike John, never had a bicycle but instead walks briskly around Liverpool, sometimes without minding the traffic. That's why she almost got run over by John on Penny Lane - the beginning of a wonderful love story...

In 1962 she gets roller skates for her birthday and although she feels a bit too cool for it, she succumbs to the roller craze.

Another trend she follows is yoga dancing and the at home body weight and stretching exercises, that are advised for a trim figure and can be found in every teenager magazine and beauty guide.
Picas is a new exercise machine that the girl heard about on the radio but she isn't allowed to try it because a friend of her aunt dislocated her shoulder after a demonstation given to her by Señor Gabriel Alcover Bonnet himself.

The girl is an avid dancer and keeps up with all the new dance trends throughout the 60s.
John likes to watch her doing The Twist when The Beatles perform at The Cavern Club and he also likes to take her dancing himself.
The girl would've loved to be one of the dancers in the Day Tripper video, but she didn't dare to ask, assuming John as well as Brian would've said no anyway.

Both John and the girl love to swim and they frequently do so, either at the swimming baths in Liverpool or later at their own pool in Weybridge.
During their holidays at the seaside, they also quite successfully water ski.

Before The Beatles start filming Help! in Austria, John and the girl take skiing lessons in St. Moritz and during their stay in Obertauern, the girl takes up cross-country skiing and together with John goes tobogganging.

Once she's established herself in the London scene, the girl frequently plays tennis, like lots of her hip (and rich) friends in Mayfair do.