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When Jenny Boyd was 15, and still at school, her elder, model sister Pattie brought a new boyfriend home. He was none other than George Harrison. “We knew he was in this group called The Beatles, but it could have been any new boyfriend coming home to meet us,” recalls Jenny who is now a youthful 75 years old. “Everything is exciting when you are 15, so I wasn’t overawed that he was a musician.”

Pattie, who went on to marry George in 1966 (and later Eric Clapton) moved into his flat in London’s smart Knightsbridge district where he had set up residence with the band’s drummer Ringo Starr. As a little sister, Jenny was a frequent visitor and soon became a member of The Beatles’ inner circle.

By day she was studying for her O-Levels, but by night she was drinking scotch and coke, and tapping ash from Gitanes cigarettes into oversized onyx ashtrays, with the music turned up to full volume.

“I was very aware of how luxurious the flat was, but I didn’t take any of it very seriously and I’d be back to school the next day,” says Jenny, whose beguiling, beautifully written memoir about her extraordinary life is out in paperback on February 23.

Introduced to London’s music and cultural scene via her older sister, she immersed herself in the Swinging 60s, becoming friends and lovers with many of the most famous musicians of the era. Even the title of her memoir – Jennifer Juniper: A Journey Beyond The Muse – is taken from a song written about her by the Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan.

She soon signed up as a dancer on the ITV show Ready Steady Go! where she shared the green room with the likes of Sandie Shaw and Dusty Springfield. Each time she left the studio, she found herself mobbed by Beatles fans desperate for her autograph.

“There were positive and negative implications to having a Beatle as my sister’s boyfriend,” she explains, looking back on her amazing teenage years.

At school, the taunts of female Mods shouting “Beatle lover!” would echo around the corridors. Being a young woman at that time posed other challenges, too. After all, this was long before the #MeToo era.

“I would go to school on the Tube and there was always some man with an umbrella going up my skirt,” she recalls. “I didn’t know you could say ‘Stop it!’ or ‘How dare you!’. In that way, innocence didn’t help. But although there were sleazy guys, I knew to avoid them. Women have a voice now and they speak out. We are at the beginning of a new era.”

With her blonde hair, doe-ish eyes and impeccable connections, Jenny soon fell into modelling. “I wasn’t tall, but I was the spirit of the new look that designers wanted.”

Later, she married Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac – twice, in fact, with a divorce in between. Together they had two daughters, Amelia and Lucy. Jenny’s own upbringing had been very disruptive. Born in Guildford, Surrey, she was just a toddler when her parents separated. Her pilot father suffered what might now be recognised as PTSD following the Second World War, and her mother remarried a man prone to violent rages.

This fractured childhood left her beset with anxiety, vulnerable and may have contributed to her future issues with drugs. She shared her first joint with George and Pattie when she was a teenager.

“I didn’t feel anything from it, so George picked up a wooden animal and held it in front of me, bouncing it up and down and speaking in a funny voice to make me laugh,” she recalls of her first foray into drugs. Years later, addiction would almost cost her her life in a near-drowning incident.

In August 1967, she was with The Beatles when they first met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation, in London. Mick Jagger and his girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull were also there, together with Paul McCartney and his girlfriend Jane Asher.

“Paul was just charming,” she recalls. “Really funny and nice; there was none of the grit that John [Lennon] had, in my view.”

She remembers being very shy of Lennon. “I knew he had a quick wit and I was a bit intimidated by him. He seemed so bright, and I didn’t think I was bright. But he was also very sweet.”

Then 19 years old, Jenny was excited by the Maharishi’s teachings, so when The Beatles asked her to join them on their fabled trip to visit him in India in 1968, she jumped at the chance.

“There was a feeling of absolute camaraderie between the band,” she recalls. “Our little party would spend time sitting on the roof of our bungalow in India. John, Paul, and George playing their guitars and singing their latest songs to each other – songs that were later to be heard on their next album.”

She remembers McCartney and Lennon being of “one mind” at the time. “After all, they had known each other since they were kids. They had been on this journey to fame, and it united them.”

On her return to London, Jenny found herself right at the heart of fashion and pop culture.

“I met the singer Donovan through Pattie, and we chatted for ages about meditation and the Maharishi. And then he asked me for lunch at his manager’s house. He got his guitar and said, ‘I have a song I have to play you’. I didn’t know where to look. It was like a declaration of love, courtly love, and I realised he was talking about me. He was making an overture.”

The song in question was Jennifer Juniper, and inside the box set of Donovan’s album A Gift From A Flower To A Garden there is a photograph of Jenny herself.

Although there was no formal relationship, Jenny does admit to “doing some kissing” with Donovan. “I went to Cornwall with him, but I wasn’t up for a relationship,” she adds. “Although he did later propose to me, after I’d broken up with Mick.”

Jenny had first met Mick Fleetwood – then a fledgling drummer in a teen band –when she was 15 and he was 16. He had spotted her coming back from school in Notting Hill, west London, but at the time she was dating Roger Waters, the musician who would go on to co-found Pink Floyd.

“Mick first asked me to marry him after I got back from India. We had broken up when we were younger.

“But I thought, ‘Gosh, that’s very grown up. Married!’” At the time she was living the hippie lifestyle in Wales. Mick came down to lure her away. “I was playing the part of cooking brown rice on the open fire and weeing outside, even though it was the thick of winter,” she remembers.

“Mick said, ‘What on earth are you doing here? I get that it’s back to nature, but it’s f*****g freezing’.”

They married in 1970, and Jenny joined Fleetwood Mac on the road. “A lot of cheap hotels and driving through blizzards,” is how she recalls those early years as the band built up their reputation.

Jenny has a habit of unspooling her memories in this freeform way. She sounds half her age, and you can imagine her dancing like a winsome flower child, buffeted by the twin forces of love and curiosity, unsure which shore she will wash up upon.

Her tempestuous relationship with Mick – which involved numerous shifts of continent with their two young daughters – was built around their cocaine drug habit.

This span out of control as he went from highly regarded musician to global superstar, and it took a toll on Jenny’s health.

“I would get ill each time we got on the road. I wanted stability,” she confesses. “I always had visions of a little cottage and reading fairy stories with my two young daughters. Instead, we were touring, our nerves on the edge.”

They got divorced in 1974, but were married again briefly in 1977. “Even in the process of getting divorced, we were drawn together,” she explains. “But cocaine is a really evil drug: it kind of chills your heart. Mick was starting to look a bit like Rasputin.”

He had also started an affair with the band’s singer, Stevie Nicks.

“I realised I had to take the children back to England if I wanted them to respect their father,” Jenny adds.

Still a freewheeling force, in 1984, she married Ian Wallace, the drummer in the band King Crimson. On their honeymoon in Hawaii, Jenny went swimming after ingesting synthetic magic mushrooms.

“I thought I could breathe underwater. I was mesmerised by the fish but came up spluttering and very nearly drowned,” she recalls with dread.

She made it back to shore – but reborn as a different version of herself. “I spent the next three months going to schools, talking to children, warning them about drugs and alcohol.” After that she dedicated herself to her studies, achieving a Masters degree in Counselling Psychology followed by a PhD.

“Before I nearly drowned, I had no plan. But it helped me discover who I really was.”

In 1997 she married architect David Levitt who, for the last 25 years, has provided the steadiness and dependability she so obviously craved in her younger years.

“David is fun and he is stable,” Jenny says. “We trust one another, but I will always be friends with Mick.”

• Jennifer Juniper: A Journey Beyond The Muse by Jenny Boyd (Sandstone Press, £12.99) is published in paperback on February 23. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £20

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