Bowie: A Biography Read Online Free PDF

years). Wells enjoyed dozens of affairs (frequently with much younger women) well into his old age. Like David Bowie, the writer didn’t come from money. His mother and father operated a china shop. Herbert lived in the basement. He lost himself in books and the stars (gazing through a borrowed telescope at the country estate where his mother became a caretaker). Like Bowie, Wells used his discipline and intelligence to lift himself above his working-class station. Like Bowie, he showed discipline and aptitude early; he wrote his first novel,
The Desert Daisy
, at age ten (Bowie was taking lessons with acclaimed jazz saxophonist Ronnie Ross at twelve). Most important, like Bowie, Wells had one aim over all: to eventually find a way out of here.
    “It wasn’t a place of much distinction,” Hanif Kureishi, author of the Bromley-set novel
The Buddha of Suburbia
and another famous son, told me in his clipped, vaguely tough (for a novelist anyway) accent. “AndH. G. Wells was a big source of pride. He was a very hip writer.” To be middle-class in England, I’m also told, is akin to being, say, upper-working-class in America. It essentially means that there is enough money for food and bills but few amenities or luxuries. It means that you can own a small house, as opposed to a tiny flat. Your family might also boast a small tree in the yard, enabling those inside to look out your window and see something green, and ostensibly preventing neighbors from peering in completely.
    In the fifties, Brixton became a place where many West Indian immigrants settled and sought work repairing the war-damaged infrastructure. As Britain’s economy slowly began strengthening in the new postwar decade, many white families like the Joneses drew on their small savings and left the city for the fast-developing suburbs. The same thing happened in America, only the houses were much larger; so were the dreams of leafy safety and modernized comfort, something to which more people felt entitled. Few upwardly mobile American families would settle for a home as boxlike as the one the Joneses moved into at 106 Canon Drive in south Bromley in the winter of 1953, with no driveway in which to park a new Cadillac or Buick. But for the Blitz-scarred English of a certain age, this was a huge step up. The following year the Joneses moved to a slightly larger house, set slightly back among the rows at 23 Clarence Road. Here they enjoyed an even more effective illusion of privacy. Still, one gets the sense, walking past these homes today (like the Brixton homes, they are largely unchanged), that everyone remained very aware of everyone else’s business. Perhaps this is because none of these buildings extend beyond two or three stories and few are farther than fifteen feet apart. For those given to mild claustrophobia, the feeling produced while inside must be akin to quietly choking: inhaling the very same air that your parents and siblings breathe, but also that which your neighbors, tolerated or reviled, breathe. If there’s a message implicit in the energy there, it’s this: there better not be anything funny going on; if there is, we will know about it.
    “In England, the suburbs are a place where people have conservative values,” punk icon Siouxsie Sioux, who grew up in nearby Chislehurst, says. “Keep a stiff upper lip and mind your own business, but they’re also secretly very nosey about everybody else.”
    The Jones family’s third and final residence in Bromley, at 4 Plaistow Grove, sits at the dead end of a curved road, just behind the local Tudor-style pub, known as the Crown. It overlooks a chain-link fence tangled with vegetation and a dark wood railway station. At night, the preadolescent David could hear the pub chatter emanate from the back room, which was directly under his bedroom window, only about fifteen yards or so away beyond a thin plywood fence. The Crown is still there today, offering “good food, and fine ale.” Perhaps