It was unfortunate for Julian. I’d been fortunate to be around a lot of kids. I’m from a big family so your cousins would dump a baby on you and you’d know you have to jiggle him on your knee. You couldn’t go, ‘Oh no, I’m scared of babies!’ You had to jiggle it and you became good at it. I used to like playing with kids a lot. One of my enduring memories of when the Beatles first hit… you’d go to people’s houses and they’d say, ‘Would you just say good night to the kids? Would you? The babies won’t go to sleep till you do.’ So I’d always go up and say, ‘Good night, sleep well.’ I enjoyed it, it was a very calm, fulfilling role for me. I’ve enjoyed being a parent, just never had a problem with it, touch wood. I’ve had problems with parenthood, like anyone does, but my mind was never set against children or kids, they never frightened me, whereas I think they did with John, even his own son.
We’d gone on this Greek holiday once to buy an island and Julian and I spent a lot time playing around on the boat. I used to play cowboys and Indians with him, and he’d love it: a grown-up who would go, ‘Now you chase me, and I’ll chase you, but after you’ve caught me, not before, okay?’ And you were totally in this mad magic game. I remember John coming up to me once and he took me aside and said, ‘How do you do it?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?” He said, ‘With Julian. How do you play with kids like that?’ I remember feeling a wave of sorrow coming over me, like uhh, I’d love to be able to tell you. Then I tried to give like the potted version, you know, ‘Play, pretend you’re a kid. Play with him.’ But John never got it. Never got the hang of it. John was always a man. I see a lot of parents like that, still, to this day. They can’t make the break to realise that it’s great to give so much of yourself to a kid, because you get it all back in triplicate. Some people just don’t know that. John was a single child so he didn’t necessarily know that and he didn’t get much education afterwards.
When we saw him with May Pang, I remember him coming up to me and hugging. He said, ‘Touching is good. Touching’s good,’ and if I ever hug anyone now, that’s a little thing that sticks in my mind. He was right, but the thing is, I actually knew it more than John did. He only was saying it because he was discovering it. I don’t think he had a lot of cuddling, certainly not from his mother, because he wasn’t even allowed to live with her.
Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now
In Their Own Words 