U2 frontman Bono shares meeting his wife, bandmates in new memoir

As U2’s music became the soundtrack for a generation, frontman Bono creates a soundtrack for his own life in his memoir “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.” Each chapter heading is the title of a song pulled from their archive, including 14 studio albums. In this excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 6, titled “Song for Someone,” Bono writes about first meeting his future wife, Ali Stewart — and his soon-to-be U2 bandmates (the band formed when he was 16) — while still in high school.

Song for Someone

You got a face not spoiled by beauty

I have some scars from where I’ve been

You’ve got eyes that can see right through me

You’re not afraid of anything they’ve seen.

In the grounds of the former Mountjoy and Marine boarding school, with its redbrick buildings and clock tower made famous by Christopher Nolan in Under the Eye of the Clock, sits our school. Mount Temple Comprehensive, one of Ireland’s first nondenominational coeducational high schools.

A science block, a maths block, and a small outbuilding for home economics, but the main Mount Temple is a single-story cinderblock building of three corridors — one green, one yellow, one purple — cross-sectioned in the middle by a wider corridor known as the Mall. On the Mall is where I first see Adam Clayton, where I first spy Larry Mullen with his beautiful girlfriend, Ann Acheson, where I first come face-to-face with David Evans, whom no one has yet named the Edge.

September 1973. I am becoming aware that the life of a romantic can sometimes be confusing for the heart. I have evidence, I am reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. I know one thing for a fact: despite all the hormoaning and teenage angst, girls are more interesting than boys, mentally, physically, spiritually. I am wowed as I enter my second year at Mount Temple and determined the wowing would turn into wooing. It’s the first week back from school holidays when I notice two pretty first years heading to their class and throw myself in their way.

“Do you know the way to the science lab?”

“No, we’re first years. We’ve just got here. Aren’t you a second year?”

“I’m lost,” I reply. “I’ll probably always be lost.”

The girls laugh the way that girls laugh at stupid boys who say stupid things, and they walk off. I don’t let myself notice the lack of interest and instead ponder whether the blond one and I had some chemistry. Maybe not. Her friend? Definitely not. Her friend with dark curls, an orange sweater that must have been knit by her mother, a tartan skirt, and Wellington boots. Who dresses like that?

She is not demure but seems to demand that no one notice her, including me. This is the first time I’ve set eyes on Alison Stewart, but I do not know she already has eyes for me, that her friend Sharon has been winding her up for a year, telling her that she and I were born to be together.

I have no hint of that on this first encounter, but something has me enchanted. Her brown eyes brought me somewhere else, her skin tone suggesting farther-flung places than the normal Spanish explanation for the “dark Irish.” She looks brainy too. I know I fancy bookish girls. Girls who look as if they do their homework, who might develop a fine sheen of perspiration in the overheated library. Girls who look as if they might do my homework.

It took a few terms, but eventually I asked Alison — Ali, she prefers — to our youth club in St. Canice’s parish. We called our Friday nights the Web, which is what it was, an equal-opportunity trap because the girls were just as interested in the passing prey as the boys. The Web because we disguised it being a church hall by hanging large nets and lighting it with a single red bulb. I suggested the catchphrase “Get your fly caught in the web.” (I know.)

Another Friday night, not long after, under a concrete awning on the school playground, when I first kissed Alison Stewart. Pure joy. If slightly desperate. Kissing was not on the school curriculum, but I figured it was something you could get better at if you found the right accomplice. Alison seemed to suggest there might be room for improvement.

It had been only months since Iris (Bono’s mother) had died, and I had no inkling that her departure would leave me in the hands of another spirit guide, a perfect soul to make my own imperfections my strength. The atom having been split, the force was being released, but in that moment next to the bicycle shed West Finglas looked not one tiny bit moved or changed. Neither did Alison Stewart.

We didn’t go out.

I told myself I was still getting over the rector’s daughter. And, anyway, I was actually going out with Cheryl.

And I fancied Wendy and Pamela. And Susan.

Bottom line? My mother’s death, an event I was in denial about. My heart had broken down, and after these months of grief it was starting to go to sleep. I didn’t want somebody waking it up.

In the next couple of years Ali and I shared a few intimate moments, but epiphany did not arrive until I was sixteen, in fifth year. My friend Reggie Manuel, who believed in Ali and me, was giving me a lift home on the back of his Yamaha 100, when I saw a kind of vision of Alison Stewart crossing the school square. Maybe it was the exhaust fumes of the two-stroke petrol engine refracting the image, but she appeared to float, turning to water in my mind, the coolest, clearest, stillest water. The heat haze made a mirage of her, and in that moment I was in the desert, a parched, wayward soldier like those I’d seen in some art movie about the French Foreign Legion. As if on horseback, I rode out of the gates of Mount Temple holding on tight to Reggie’s good judgment. It was a different song in my head that day, probably “School’s Out” by Alice Cooper, but please substitute The Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks” if you need a soundtrack for this moment. I knew I had to ask the future out on a date.

An adult date.

In those few years since we’d met, I’d never forgotten our first desperate kiss, but as my schoolwork had tumbled and my personality soured, something inside me said I wasn’t good enough for Alison Stewart. The only thing keeping me keeping on, as Bob Dylan sang to me in “Tangled Up in Blue,” were the songs I was starting to hear in my head and the encouragement of friends like Reggie Manuel the Cocker Spaniel.

It was Reggie again who talked me into turning up at Larry Mullen’s house, one afternoon after Larry had pinned up a notice in school.

Reggie who drove me to Larry’s house on Rosemount Avenue on the back of that Yamaha for a meeting that would define the course of the rest of my life.

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