Life Read Online Free PDF

Asylum, which had Gothic gables and a tower and observation post, Victorian-style--where at least one suspect for Jack the Ripper, Jacob Levy, was imprisoned. Some of the nuthouses were for harder cases than others. When we were twelve or thirteen, Mick Jagger had a summer job at the Bexley nuthouse, the Maypole, as it was called. I think they were a bit more upper-class nutters --they got wheelchairs or something--and Mick used to do the catering, taking round their lunches.
    Almost once a week you'd hear sirens going--another loony escaped--and they'd find him in the morning in his little nightshirt, shivering on Dartford Heath. Some of them escaped for quite a while, and you'd see them flitting through the shrubbery. It was a feature of life when I was growing up. You still thought you were at war, because they used the same siren if there was a breakout. You don't realize what a weird place you're growing up in. You'd give people directions: "Go past the loony bin, not the big one, the small one." And they'd look at you as if you were from the loony bin yourself.
    The only other thing that was there was the Wells firework factory, just a few little isolated sheds on the marsh. It blew itself up one night in the '50s, and a few guys with it. Spectacular. As I looked out my window, I thought the war had started again. All the factory was making then was your tuppenny banger, your Roman candles and your golden shower. And your jumping jacks. Everybody from around there remembers that--the explosion that blew the windows out for miles around.
    One thing you've got is your bike. Me and my mate Dave Gibbs, who lived on Temple Hill, decided it would be cool if we put those little cardboard flappers on the back wheel so it sounded like an engine when the spokes went round. We'd hear "Take that bloody thing away. I'm trying to get some sleep around here," so we used to ride down to the marshes and the woods by the Thames. The woods were very dangerous country. There were buggers in there, hard men who'd scream at you. "Fuck off." We took the cardboard flappers out. It was a place of madmen and deserters and tramps. Many of these guys were British Army deserters, a little like the Japanese soldiers who still thought the war was on. Some of them had been living there for five or six years. They'd cobbled together maybe a caravan or some tree house for shelter. Vicious, dirty swine they were too. The first time I got shot was by one of those bastards--a good shot, an air gun pellet on the bum. One of our hangs was a pillbox, an old machine gun post, of which there were many along the tideway. We used to go and pick up the literature, which was always pinups, all crumpled up in the corner.
    One day we found a dead tramp in there, huddled up, covered in bluebottles. A dead para-fin. (Paraffin lamp, rhyming slang for tramp.) Filthy magazines lying around. Used rubbers. Flies buzzing. And this para-fin had croaked. He'd been there for days, weeks even. We never reported it. We ran like the fucking Nile.
    I remember going from Aunt Lil's to infant school, to West Hill school, screaming my head off. "No way, Mum, no way!" Howling and kicking and refusing and refusing to go, but I did go. They had a way about them, grown-ups. I put up a fight, but I knew it was a full-on moment. Doris felt for me, but not that much. "This is life, boy, something we can't fight." I remember my cousin, who was Aunt Lil's son. Big boy. He was at least fifteen, with a charm that cannot be imagined. He was my hero. He had a check shirt! And he went out when he wanted. I think he was called Reg. Cousin Kay was their daughter. She pissed me off because she had really long legs, could always run faster than me. I came in a valiant second every time. She was older than me, though. We rode my first horse together, bareback. A great old white mare that barely knew what was going on, that had been put out to pasture, if you could call it that round where we lived. I was