David Kirby

If There’s Anything That You Want

It’s February 11, 1963. You leave bread and butter sandwiches
and milk beside your sleeping children and return to the kitchen
to seal the door with tape and turn on the oven and lay
a folded towel inside and put your head on it. A mile away,
four young musicians at 3 Abbey Road are thirty minutes
into a studio session that will result in Please Please Me,
their debut album. In 1963, music isn’t in the air—
music is the air. Not far away, the Rolling Stones are turning
the blues into dance tunes, as are the Kinks, the Hollies,
the Who. If only you could hear them. But it’s the coldest
winter of the century, and you’ve sealed the window, too.
If only the four friends from Liverpool could float over the city
like figures in children’s books. Paul’s the practical one.
He turns the gas off, closes the oven door, puts the kettle on.
John drapes his jacket over your shoulders. Ringo turns
the radio dial in search of, not rock ‘n’ roll—it doesn’t exist yet,
at least in England—but Handel, say, who also left his native
country for a better life here. And George is rummaging
in the fridge. He was just seventeen when he left with
the rest of the band for Hamburg two years earlier, afraid
that he wouldn’t like the food, and then photographer
Astrid Kirchherr meets the lads and takes them to her
mother’s house for tea and ham sandwiches. Children grow
up. People fall in and out of love. Someone has everything
that you want, like a heart that’s oh so true.
“Ham sarnies!” says George. “I didn’t know the Germans
had ham sarnies.” They did, though, didn’t they? Still do.