It seems that McCartney was liked by everybody. Trusted by the teachers and popular with his peers, Peter Ames Carlin’s “Paul McCartney: A Life,” states that he “serve[d] as a kind of ambassador between students and their teachers.”
He was no teacher’s pet, though, reportedly charming and distracting them mid-lesson and leading them on a tangent when he and his friends tired of lessons. When McCartney was 14 years old, his mother’s breast cancer began to spread and she was taken for an urgent mastectomy in October 1956. Her death the next day affected McCartney profoundly, and this difficult period saw his education take a toll as he grieved.
The very next year, Biography reports, he met John Lennon at a village festival and was soon invited to join his new friend’s band, The Quarrymen. The musical McCartney recognized his true passion and the next step in his career when he saw it. Though he had been encouraged by staff at the Liverpool Institute to become a teacher (and had successfully applied for a place at a teaching college, per Carlin), he seemed to have had his fill of education. Instead, though he didn’t know it yet, he started along the road that would lead to global superstardom with the Beatles.
