Problem with continuing to run Getmail

Good day to all.

I've been using Getmail for the last two or three years quite happily. I 
love it's simplicity and reliability.

Now my distribution, Debian Testing, has decided to toss Getmail aside, 
and I see it will be uninstalled at my next update. From a little 
research I understand that this is due to Getmail not being compatible 
with Python 3.

At present I have Getmail 5.13 still working well. Getmail is under 
/usr/bin, and when I run /usr/bin/getmail in a terminal I see :

getmail version 5.13
Copyright (C) 1998-2019 Charles Cazabon.  Licensed under the GNU GPL 
version 2.
SimplePOP3Retriever:[email protected]:110:
   0 messages (0 bytes) retrieved, 0 skipped

That I believe is proper behaviour.

Having seen Charles Cazabon's post to the list on 11th July suggesting 
that a manual install of Getmail was fairly simple, I decided to follow 
this route, as I would dearly love to keep Getmail operational.

And so I downloaded and installed Python-2.7.18.tgz and 
getmail-5.14.tar.gz, No changes or special actions were taken during the 
installs, no errors seen, and the new getmail is in /usr/local/bin/.

Now when I run /usr/local/bin/getmail (with my existing 
~/.getmail/getmailrc in place) I'm seeing :

Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "/usr/local/bin/getmail", line 59, in <module>
     from getmailcore import __version__, retrievers, destinations, 
filters, \
   File 
"/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/getmailcore/retrievers.py", line 
45, in <module>
     from getmailcore._retrieverbases import *
   File 
"/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/getmailcore/_retrieverbases.py", 
line 317, in <module>
     class POP3_SSL_EXTENDED(poplib.POP3_SSL):
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'POP3_SSL'

No mail is fetched. The original /usr/bin/getmail still functions well.

Can anybody please advise what is wrong here, correct me on any 
mis-steps that I may have made, and advise how I can work around the 
problem.

All responses will be gratefully received.

-- 

Chris Dunn