Wildfire ~ George Harrison

Chapter 10: I'm a fool

I had opted out of lunch with the other typists, today, in order to finish a nota I had been working on. By the time I was ready to leave my typewriter there would be no use in joining them in the lunchroom.

Thus I picked up a sandwich from the deli wand walked up the road towards Regent's Park. The contrast of the noise of busy London and the quiet of a park inside the city was immense. It was like I wasn't in the city at all, but in my family's country house.

What was even better was the fact that the people gathering in the park were so diverse. Both George and his housemates had opened up a world for me that my parents had been so desperate to hide from me. Being from an upper class family and having been schooled at one of the beset London private schools meant that I didn't come in contact much with anyone that didn't come from that sort of background. And my parents liked it like that. They didn't want me mingling with the common.

Of course the discovery of that other world started as soon as Kathleen and I moved out, but I hadn't been friends with people that weren't upper class until George moved in. I liked that. It made me feel less entitled, especially when that entitlement was something I had only started to feel when I moved out of my childhood home.

I was curious and pending whatever was left of my lunch hour in a public park gave me the opportunity to fantasise about what their lives were like. What did they have, what didn't they? Would they come home at the end of a long day of work and have the maid ready a plate to eat? Or did they still have to prepare supper for the whole family? Were they used to holidaying all over Europe or had they never left London? Were they even from London?

It was busy in the park with men in suits looking mighty important, nannies ushering young children home to get them down for their nap, teenagers in school uniforms bunking off classes to spend a few precious moments outdoors. It was brilliant to see, but even more brilliant to feel part of it, to feel like I belonged there as well.

I sat there on the grass, eating my sandwich and watching the people walk by when I suddenly saw a face I recognised, George! 'Hey, George,' I exclaimed. 'What are you doing here?'

He shot up and frantically looked around himself, until his eyes landed on me and he calmed down again. 'Charlotte, how are you?' he asked once he had come over. 'You alright?'

I nodded. 'Yeah, just on my lunchbreak. What about you?' I wanted to ask him if he wanted to sit down, but I didn't want to push. What if he was in a hurry and was going to dismiss me? Luckily he sat down on the grass next to me by himself.

He grinned, a beautiful sight, very warm and bright. I wished I could see his eyes to find out if they were smiling too, but a pair of sunglasses blocked the way of looking into them. 'I just wanted to take a walk before recording, y'know. It's going to be a long night.'

Now that I knew that George and his flatmates were in a band called the Beatles, things started to make sense. I already knew that the band was quite famous, but now I noticed them anywhere. I couldn't go into a corner shop without seeing their faces on a magazine or hearing their song on the radio and if that wasn't enough, by the time I went home, the pack of boys would be hanging around the hallway at all hours.

They would often come home well past midnight, in the early hours of the morning, making a hell of a lot of noise when walking up the stairs. I didn't know when they left for work in the morning or afternoon as I would be at work by then, but they must have pretty long days if they weren't coming back until late.

'How are you liking it then?' I asked. In the way he talked about it, I could hear that he loved it, even if he had long days.

'Yeah, it's good. Having a record is all we wanted too and now we've got a contract for more. Living the dream, I guess,' he answered, still with a big smile on his face.