Bowie: A Biography Read Online Free PDF Page A

by all as an infant, but as he grew, outward displays of love came only from Terry. Terry himself was not shown much affection. He was fed, cared for and enrolled in Henry Thornton School in Clapham Common, a mile away. But the older child was treated by his mother andstepfather with a form of cold kindness. Much was left unsaid inside 40 Stansfield Road.
    As late as 1949, rubble from the Nazi air strikes could still be seen on city blocks of Brixton. Even those untouched by tragedy in any direct way were made to suffer well beyond the war’s end thanks to the inflated cost of living and scarcity of essential supplies like gasoline, food and material goods. The phones seldom worked and electrical power was unreliable. Following the Nazis’ formal surrender on May 8, 1945, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 of 1945, the United States became the world’s sole atomic superpower and overtook British culture as a spoil of war. American pop—jazz, Hollywood films, pulp novels—lacked the class of dance, theater and Romantic poetry, but soon the spoils of U.S. power would see them elevated and, inside of a decade, all but render the classic forms quaint and dusty. In one way or another, the global youth of the first postwar generation would be annexed by the booming pop nation that America had become.
    The atomic age changed the language and culture in a profound and enduring way. Russia grew vast and wealthy in the postwar years, and by August of 1949, it too was a nuclear superpower. No longer a necessary ally of the Americans, Russia, under the paranoid and xenophobic Joseph Stalin, disengaged. Stalin was no fan of Frank Sinatra, Mickey Mouse or Coca-Cola, which were considered corruptive. Victory and quieted munitions only seemed to illuminate the differences between America and Russia. The arms race between these rivals would, for all their cooperative war efforts, now end in mutually assured destruction if one or both giants pushed the conflict to the brink. Nearly a quarter of a million people were killed in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The stalemate between the former allies promised to vaporize millions more in the same amount of time. The uncertainty of any future at all coupled with tales of horror and cruelty brought back by surviving soldiers elevated pop pleasures to a greater level of importance than they’d ever been. Cheap, fast pleasures became, for many, especially the young, the only pleasures that made sense during the Cold War years. This was the atmosphere that every child of David Jones’s age in England and America would grow up in. Sensory overload seemed newly practical. For his generation, pop was a powerful salve. Pop was everything.

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    T HE H IGH S TREET in the southern London suburb of Bromley is full of cell-phone shops, Subway sandwich outlets and Starbucks coffee bars that renders it indistinguishable from those of Illinois or of New Jersey: a retail center, narrow, bright and full of pedestrians in casual uniform. A double-decker bus passes, carrying more of them home or to work. And yet there is a pair of favorite Bromley-ite sons who have done much to widen the gap between such humdrum environments and the progression of humankind into a wildly exciting future. In addition to being the town where David Jones came of age, Bromley is also the birthplace of Herbert George Wells, better known as H. G. Wells. Wells, the father of science fiction, often referred to as “the man who invented tomorrow,” was a progressive as well as a futurist.
The Island of Dr. Moreau
and
The War of the Worlds
upstage his essays and less imaginative works of fiction, but his novels
Ann Veronica
and
The Passionate Friends
championed the kind of liberated sexuality that David Bowie and his wife Angie would come to embrace over a half century later. Like the Bowies’, the Wellses’ marriage was open (and he and his wife Isabel also grew apart and divorced after only a few