Paul McCartney on Writing “Day Tripper”
When I was growing up, the cost of a plan ticket was prohibitive, well beyond our budget so a ‘day trip’ was much more likely for us. Wealthy people might go to the seaside for a week or two and live it up in a hotel or boarding house, but people like us would mostly just go off somewhere for the day. The idea of the day trip was something that had a new lease of life after the Second World War. It was a way of having a break. An inexpensive holiday. If you didn’t have enough time or money, you just went out for the day and it often involved a charabanc, the old term for a bus or coach. You’d all just get on that and go for a trip. If anyone had a car – though in my family I was the first to buy one – then you could drive somewhere too.
On the way out of Liverpool, we might head ‘left’ to Wales. Maybe we’d get as far as the market town called Mold, where one of my aunties lived. The name Mold might sound a little off-putting, but it’s lovely countryside round that way. That part of the country is also full of ruins and there’s a castle in Mold that we’d go and explore. Even though we were a bit disappointed that it was mostly just a little hillock with some standing stones, it was so different to what we knew in Liverpool, which was still full of bomb sites from the war.
Source: Paul McCartney/vanityfair.com
