The song topped the charts in both the United Kingdom and the United States when it was released as a single. The American and British singles of ‘A Hard Day's Night’, as well as both the American and British albums of the same title, all held the top position in their respective charts for a couple of weeks in August 1964, the first time any artist had accomplished this feat
The song was the fifth of seven songs by the Beatles to hit Number 1 in a one-year period; an all-time record on the US charts.
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I was living in Canada when this song by the Beatles was first recorded and released. The title of the song brings my thoughts back to a time in my life, when as an 11-year-old boy, I lay awake in a hospital bed night after night in the old Batley Hospital in the dead of night, as nearly all the other patients in the ward slept soundly. Apart from an occasional whimper from another patient experiencing some discomfort farther down the ward, or the shuffling of bedsheets being rearranged as a dead patient was being removed to the hospital morgue before dawn, or a resounding fart being let off by a sound sleeper who’d never learn of his 3:00 am smelly indiscretion, the hospital ward was as quiet as a slumbering church mouse.
I‘d been run over by a large wagon and had incurred life-threatening injuries. Having been wrapped around the main drive shaft of the vehicle that had knocked me down and trapped my body beneath, when I was eventually released and taken to hospital for treatment, I was at death’s door. With a damaged spine, a punctured lung, and every rib (except two) broken in my chest, along with numerous breaks in my arms and legs, my situation remained critical for the first month of my nine-month hospital stay as an inpatient. My parents were informed a number of times during the first fortnight that I wouldn’t make it through the night, and then when my life seemed to be out of danger, they were then told that my spinal and legs injuries meant that I’d never walk again (a situation that prevailed for almost three years before my spine started sending messages to my brain once more).
After coming off the critical list, I found that I could not sleep at night when all the other patients slept. There is nothing lonelier than spending the dark hours wide awake with your own thoughts and nobody awake around you with whom to speak with and to share what you are thinking/fearing.
This nightly experience of not sleeping a wink in a hospital while the rest of the ward slept soundly was to return to me in my 74th year. Just after my 70th birthday, I was diagnosed with terminal blood cancer and for the first three years, I underwent nine months of chemotherapy along with fortnightly blood transfusions weekly, graduating to every two weeks.
Over the following years, I would develop three different cancers in my body (terminal blood cancer, skin cancers, and rectal cancer), along with a Lymphoma in 1916 which nearly killed me twice during the three months I was a hospital inpatient. I also started another six-month course of chemotherapy sessions but was obliged to stop them halfway through. At the time my body was apparently so weak that they feared I’d die and without my knowledge, or that of my wife, I had a ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ placed on me (something, which in certain circumstances, is apparently legally allowed), as I later discovered.
While I never once personally imagined that I was at death’s door, I was in a great deal of pain that kept me awake all night, every night, for almost a month. Although I was in a side ward, the very same experiences I’d had as an 11-year-old boy in Batley Hospital returned to this old man in the wee hours of the early morning in Airedale Hospital in Keighley as a deathly silence crept through the ward.
The only words which came close to describing these two hospital experiences when I couldn’t sleep were having, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.
Love and peace Bill xxx