Michael (left), mother Mary, father Jim and Paul (right)

When Mary would correct his strong Liverpool brogue, he would imitate her deliberately posher accent, and then be upset when she was, understandably, hurt.

And when, one washing day, she found a cartoon of a naked woman he’d drawn to amuse the boys at school in his shirt pocket, she sternly demanded an explanation. He was mortified with shame.

By the mid-Fifties, the McCartneys were doing well and, for Mary, life must have seemed splendid, until in 1956 she began to complain of pains in her chest.

She put it down to the menopause, and her GP agreed. But then the pains got worse, and when 12-year-old Michael one day came home from school and found her crying, she went to see aspecialist. Breast cancer was diagnosed and she was told she would need an immediate operation to remove the tumour.

Despite instructions to rest, the day before she went into hospital she cleaned the house and washed and pressed her sons’ clothes.

She wanted, she told her sister, to leave everything ready, ‘in case I don’t come back’.

The following day, Paul and Michael went to see their mother after the operation. There was blood on the white sheets. ‘It was terrible,’ Paul would remember.

Mary’s condition quickly deteriorated and just an hour after they left, she received the last rites. Her strength ebbing away, she turned to her sister and said: ‘I would have liked to see the boys growing up.’

Jim McCartney was devastated. Seeing him crying was the worst thing for