Dorothy Rhone was a naïve, introspective grammar school girl, born of Jessie and Tom Rhone. She lived in a strict home in middle-class Childwall with three elder siblings, Billy, Anne and Barbara, all of whom were terrified of their father Tom - a timekeeper on the Liverpool Docks - who would come home drunk every night, ranting at them and their careworn mother. It was a tense, miserable existance and as a result she became "painfully shy and had no confidence. I’d never speak to people if I didn’t know them, especially boys, because I had no contact with boys."
She was a student at the Liverpool Institute High School for Girls where talking to boys was so expressly forbidden that they would be let out early in order to be out of the way before the boys across the road (including Paul McCartney and George Harrison) began to leave their last lessons of the day.
"I was way behind, I didn’t go to my first dance until I was maybe 15. My friends were a lot more advanced than I was. I didn’t know anything about anything." She grew up to be a very pretty young girl but was convinced that she was ugly. "I never thought I was pretty at school because my sister always said my nose would spread all over my face because it was too pudgy. One night I actually went to bed with a clothes peg on my nose to try to make it narrower, but it was too painful." She was forever worrying, and was so nervous on her first date that she was nearly physically sick.
A short while after that first date when the summer of 1959 was drawing to a close, Dot was out with her friends at the Casbah club, dancing The Shake in her modest knee length skirt and sweater while a young band called The Quarry Men played on stage. Two of their guitarists had their eye on her as she danced, and the moment their set was over they homed in and tried to work their charms. "They were so fast on their feet, sparking off each other with jokes and cracks," she remembered, "it was impossible to keep up." She immediately fell for one of them, the one named John Lennon. "I liked his face, I thought he was rugged-looking. Paul was handsome in a softer way. John was also the dominant one, a very different personality. He gave me the nickname bubbles for some reason and we got along really well. I know Paul is always painted as the nice, kind one, but to me John was more compassionate. He wasn’t as mean as they make out."
Dot soon discovered that John already had a girlfriend named Cynthia, whom she quickly became good friends with, and who remembers Dot as a "gentle soul who spoke in whispers and blushed frequently". Seeing as her favourite was already taken, she turned her attention towards Paul who was a little slow asking her out, so she worked out a way of getting him on his own. "We were sitting around talking and I said I felt a bit woozy, that I might faint, and went outside into the garden. Paul came out after me to see if I was all right and it was then that he said ‘D’you fancy going out?’ This had been my plan and it worked a treat. But although I had moments of being very bold, all the doubts then came out. Anyway, I said yes, and we agreed to meet somewhere. It could have been Penny Lane which was roughly half way between our houses. The first date was the pictures. We didn’t have any money to go anywhere else."
Dot was very nervous about the date after the way she had felt on the last one, but Paul soon put her at her ease, telling her horr