#writing letters home with torches strapped to their heads😭

[muzaktomyears]

Bruno treated us to what for him was a smile. “You boys will make the Indra into another Kaiserkeller,” he said. “No one comes to this place,” he admitted, stating the obvious. “But you’ll make it go when you make show.”

‘Make show’… that was the phrase we were going to have to learn to live with for a long time. Bruno, in his halting English, pronounced it ‘mack show’, which didn’t strike us as being all that amusing as we stood there like sacks of potatoes with our suitcases in hand.

“Where are we staying?” someone asked, trying to change the subject. By this time, we were all anxious to seek some escape in a comfortable night’s sleep in a cosy hotel bed. Misconception number two. Bruno led the way farther along to the wrong end of the street – to a dismal cinema called the Bambi Kino which showed third-rate Westerns and the occasional sex movie. We followed him round a corner to the rear of this drab flea-pit where he opened a door which gave on to nothing but pitch darkness. We trooped through and peering through the blackness made out a light some yards along what turned out to be a gloomy corridor. It came from a solitary light which attracted us towards it like moths; we began to run, leaving Bruno behind.

The light was coming from a room. Lennon got there first, heading the stampede, closely followed by Stu Sutcliffe, who was always somehow near John. George was just behind them and Paul and I were the last in the queue. It wasn’t a pretty sight that greeted us; a scruffy, barren room containing two single beds and an ancient couch.

“What the fucking hell?” Lennon exploded.

“Fuck me!” the rest of us said, almost in unison.

John and Stu commandeered a bed each. George staked his claim on the couch. It was the old story of first come, first served. Paul and I looked at each other, wondering what the floor felt like.

Bruno had caught up with us and tried to charm us with his smile. “But there are two more bedrooms,” he boasted; Paul and I immediately thought that possibly we were the lucky ones after all at the back of the line. A room each, we thought.

We saw them in the flickering glow of matches because these two rooms couldn’t muster a solitary bulb between them. They were two dungeons, which is how we referred to them from that moment. They measured about 5ft by 6ft and most of that was taken up by a single bed on which we dumped our cases.

“You could just about swing a cat in here,” Paul observed drily – “providing it’s got no tail!” We mouthed enough obscenities to paper a wall, but Bruno either didn’t understand or pretended not to. “Only temporary,” he kept saying, “only temporary.”

Paul sat down on his bed in the darkness and I heard the well-worn springs groan pitifully. I knew how they felt. So to bed on our first night in Hamburg, filled with disgust. The big stars from Liverpool… The Beatles!

Even in the daytime, we found, there was no light. Our billet was an extension built onto the rear of the cinema – right next to the toilets! We had to wash and shave in cold water in the cinema urinals – where sometimes the patrons of the Bambi Kino would surprise us and stand and stare at the haggard, black and white apparitions. Lennon, George and Stu were living in comparative luxury in their drab three-bed room some 25 yards along a corridor. Bruno’s ‘only temporary’ promise never did come true. We were doomed to the dungeons, which became home, stacked with guitar and drum cases and a collection of old laundry.

Paul and I never knew if it was night or day. We wrote letters home sitting on our beds with pocket torches strapped around our heads like miners’ lamps. Day after day we all complained to Bruno about the dingy squalor in which we were living. We pointed out that we were, after all, lads from decent middle-class backgrounds whose parents had scrimped and worked to try to give us a good education. What had we done to end up in Germany being treated like a bunch of dossers or winos ready to kip down anywhere for a night? Daily we were given the same smarmy smile and promises, promises. Bruno had once been a clown, we were told, but he certainly didn’t make us laugh.

Beatle! The Pete Best Story, Pete Best and Patrick Doncaster (1985)