Is there something about you most people don't know?

In November 1979 I met in person Paul and Linda McCartney. The story behind it is this.

Our daughter Donna was born with Cystic Fibrosis. At about 3 years old she became fascinated with Paul McCartney and his music. She was Paul McCartney mad! I bought her lots of Wings records and albums and at about four years old she started making a scrapbook of any newspaper cuttings and magazine pictures she could find.

Up until this time the drug regime and treatment were working well and from two years old remained very healthy and energetic and a little monkey at times I might add but overall she was just like any other child of her age. But then she started slowly deteriorating. In that summer of '79 she caught a virus which attacked her heart and we were given the heartbreaking news that she only had about six months to live.

As you can imagine Rita and I were devastated we just couldn't believe we were going to lose our gorgeous little girl. I started to think what I could do to make her last months of her life as happy as possible. She had become too weak to ravel to somewhere like Disneyland. At this time it just happened that Paul McCartney and Wings were on tour in England and they would be appearing at the Manchester Apollo in the November for two nights.

So I wrote a letter to him explaining the situation and said how it would make her day to meet him took it to the theatre on the first night and gave it a doorman to give to him. The next day we got a phone call to say 'Be at the theatre for 5.30 pm and we can all meet him after the sound check.'

We sat through the sound check and eventually were lead backstage to meet the great man himself. I think Rita and I were more gobsmacked than Donna because we were almost speechless at first but she chatted away to him from the word go so naturally. While Donna and I were talking to Paul, Rita and Linda McCartney struck up a conversation which sounded like they were old friends. They were both so kind and approachable.

I'm so glad we did that for her because six weeks later she sadly passed away age 4 & half

I'll always remember the hilariously innocent thing she said as we were coming away from the venue. She said 'Mummy, why has Paul got a prettier face than Daddy?'

We'll never forget her and though we were young enough to get over it and eventually get on with our lives we still can't reconcile it and it will always be there. We decided not to have any more children because CF is an hereditary disease and there is a 1 in 4 chance of another child being born with CF. There's no way we would have risked it.

I have some pictures somewhere of the meeting and I'll try and dig them out and post them.