Angie McCartney

Angie McCartney was born in Liverpool, England. Now a doctor, she has been described as 'terminally cheerful', and has enjoyed a life of amazing ups and downs. Angie gained a firsthand knowledge of Beatlemania when she married Sir Paul McCartney's father, Jim in 1964, just as Beatlemania began to take the world. She's written two books and is currently working on her third.

Now over 90 years old, she shows no signs of slowing down. Her upcoming work, titled, 'Here, There and Everywhere' will be filled with QR codes which will provide links to interviews and clippings and photos for each chapter that you read. By her side through it all is her only child, daughter Ruth, who greeted her future stepbrother Paul at their first meeting with "I know who you are! You're on my cousin's wallpaper!" What a first impression.

In this interview, Dr McCartney shares a variety of experiences from her life and spills some tea (McCartney now owns an organic tea company).

The soon-to-be Mrs McCartney was aware of The Beatles when she first met her future husband, Paul's father, "they had been very successful in England and Europe for a couple of years before I met Jim in August of 1964... I was a widow with four year old daughter, Ruth. I ran into an old friend with whom I had lost touch for a few years, She, in turn, took me to meet her Uncle Jim (McCartney) and reminded me that I had met him years before along with his wife Mary, and two sons, Paul and Michael. By this time, Paul had become famous due to his success with The Beatles."

In 1964, Beatlemania was very quickly sweeping the globe, and Angie and Ruth were swept up in it, "Beatlemania was like another planet. I tried to keep young Ruth shielded from it as much as possible. But once she started school at The Puddydale in Heswall, it was increasingly difficult, as the older kids (mainly the girls), wanted to invite her to tea and to their birthday parties etc., obviously hoping that they would get a return invitation to our house and hopefully meet Paul. Other kids would steal her lunch, cut off pieces of her hair, cut out the name tags from her coat in the cloakroom, and one kid even peed in her wellies one time. She didn't find this out until she put her foot in one before going home. That was a lesson learned. Always hide your wellies behind your coat and not leave them out for anyone to use as a toilet. One girl who was jealous of her, hit her up both sides of the head one time with two Bibles. We were not quite sure of the significance of that one." But Beatlemania didn't change Paul, "Paul was extremely down to earth, considering his fame, and used to come up from London to visit his Dad at the lovely house he had bought for him on The Wirral Peninsula. Paul's brother, Michael, also lived there. Though we didn't see a great deal of him during Beatlemania, as they were always on tour, travelling, recording in various studios, doing press conferences etc., and there were a lot of demands on their time."

Angie's second book is titled 'Your Mother Should Know', after The Beatles' song from their Magical Mystery Tour album. "I wrote the second book ("Your Mother Should Know"), at the suggestion of many of my Facebook friends. I have several different pages, and people would often ask me to write another book." When I asked what the best parts of it (for her) were, she said, "delving back down memory lane brought some fantastic memories, not all of them happy ones, and appreciating how interesting and diverse my life has become since my early days of sheltering in the air raid shelter behind our council house in Norris Green, Liverpool, when the Luftwaffe were dropping bombs on us every night. Life is good, despite the difficulties we are going through right now. It helps me to stay optimistic about the future." However, perhaps the best parts were the hardest, "I would say the most difficult part was finding how deep down my research seemed to take me. I had many, many dreams of my earlier life, World War 11, air raids, walking around Liverpool the morning after, seeing the smouldering wreckage of homes, shops and schools. I physically left school at the age of 11, when St. Teresa's school was taken over for people to live in whose homes had been bombed. After that, my schooling only consisted of a half a day a week in the home of a neighbour, meeting with our teacher and discussing our lives, ending with a little prayer, and dispersing for another week." Having to take a walk down memory lane is, as I have found, often what people find the most difficult when writing their autobiography, because it can be like a black hole that is almost impossible to find their way out of, very rarely in a bad way. In fact, most people enjoy the reminiscing which comes with writing your memoirs.

As well as being stepmother to one of the world's most beloved musicians - if not the most - Angie was stepmother-in-law to one Mrs Linda McCartney, an American photographer, and Paul's first wife. "Linda was, as I know, a typically American young lady. By that, I mean that, until I met her, I had never known a real, live American. Some of her attitudes and interests surprised me. She was more liberated than other young women of her age I had ever known. But now that I live in America, I appreciate those features more, and it doesn't seem so radical. She was a loving mother, a huge animal lover, a great cook, good horsewoman, brilliant photographer, and above all, a loving wife. She was so many things, and it is so sad that her life ended so young, with all that she had to offer." But in addition to being an avid photographer, a career which she had been doing since before she met McCartney, both Junior and his stepmother, she was an avid cook, and took an interest in Ruth, teaching her how to cook, "[cooking] proved to be a great asset in her life (we now call her Chef Ruth), and the culinary arts loom large in her life. There's nothing she loves more than a day in the kitchen. Baking, creating sauces, soups, trying out new things, and cooking enough to feed a third world country. Well, at least our local area. She cooks and freezes enough meals to provide our neighbours with food to see them through the week. And many of them grow fruits and veggies which mysteriously appear on our front doorstep. Yes, Chef Ruth is a very popular figure. And that is largely due to Linda."