Janice Mitchell - 'My Ticket To Ride: How I Ran Away to England to Meet the Beatles and Got Rock and Roll Banned in Cleveland (A True Story from 1964)'

Janice Mitchell's My Ticket To Ride was given to me as a gift, almost. And by Janice herself. I paid, at first, but upon telling her that I intended to review it, Jan insisted that I did not need to pay, and has since returned my money to me. Nevertheless, I want to give my honest opinion of this book.

My Ticket To Ride centres on about a month in the life of Janice Hawkins, a sixteen-year-old girl who would run away to England - or, as she and friend Marty call it, Beatleland - to meet the Fab Four.

She also hung out with the Rolling Stones when they performed in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1964, kissed Bill Wyman and was invited to go on tour with him (she declined).

The story is an adventure from start to finish, and written in an enthralling way which made me believe I was staying in the flat in London with Jan and Marty.

I absolutely adored how Jan described going to the clubs in Soho which she had read The Beatles hung out in and frequented; the 2i's cafe, the Crawdaddy Club and the Flamingo Club just to name a few.

Mick, Janice's Liverpudlian musician boyfriend whom she met whilst in London, seemed as real to me as anybody I had ever met. He seemed dashing and charming, protective and devastatingly handsome, and I was dismayed to hear that Jan never saw him again after returning to Cleveland, and never spoke to him again after a single phone call in America.

I asked her why she had never tried to contact Mick after that first and final phone call; "my life became very hard and chaotic... the phone number was lost... in February [2022], the Liverpool Echo interviewed me about Mick. We hoped that he or someone who knew him would somehow get in touch with him. I hoped he would show up after the convention [International Beatleweek 2022]... but none of those things happened... I wasn't allowed to have any phone calls at my house because of what I did. It was very restrictive... anything is possible, though." Indeed, one of the first posts I saw from Janice was about Mick, asking him to get in touch for the International Beatleweek Convention.

My Ticket To Ride was fast paced and I finished it within one day. It is a story which I had only heard of but had wanted to know more about. The Beatles themselves joined the hunt for the teen runaways in 1964. Jan told it in a way which had me gripping the seat beneath me and urging her to take that extra leap... although a sixteen-year-old Janice was a lot braver than I am now. I would never leave home!