Mick Jagger Read Online Free PDF Page A

remained blissfully unaware as a bombed, battered, and stringently rationed nation realized with astonishment that it had not only survived but prevailed. One of his earliest memories is watching his mother remove the heavy blackout curtains from the windows in 1945, signifying no more nighttime fear of air raids.
    By the time his younger brother, Christopher, arrived in 1947, the family was living at number 39 Denver Road, a crescent of white pebble-dashed houses in Dartford’s genteel western quarter. Joe had exchanged day-to-day PT teaching for an administrative job with the Central Council of Physical Recreation, the body overseeing all amateur sports associations throughout Britain. Accomplished track-and-field all-rounder though he still was, his special passion was basketball, a seemingly quintessential American sport that nonetheless had been played in the UK since the 1890s. To Joe, no game was better at fostering the sportsmanship and team spirit to which he was dedicated. He devoted many unpaid hours to encouraging and coaching would-be local teams, and in 1948 launched the first Kent County Basketball League.
    Tolstoy observes at the beginning of Anna Karenina that whereas unhappy families are miserable in highly original and varied ways, happy families tend to be almost boringly alike. Our star, the future symbol of rebellion and iconoclasm, grew up in just such fortunate conformity. His quiet, physically dynamic father and ebullient, socially aspirational mother were a thoroughly compatible couple, devoted to each other and their children. In contrast with many postwar homes, the atmosphere at 39 Denver Road was one of complete security, with meals, bath-and bedtimes at prescribed hours, and values in their correct order. Joe’s modest stipend and personal abstinence—he neither drank nor smoked—were enough to keep a wife and two boys in relative affluence as wartime rationing gradually disappeared and meat, butter, sugar, and fresh fruit became plentiful once more.
    There is an idealized image of a little British boy in the early 1950s, before television, computer games, and too-early sexualization did away with childhood innocence. He is dressed, not like a miniature New York street gangster or jungle guerrilla but unequivocally as a boy—porous white Aertex short-sleeved shirt, baggy khaki shorts, an elasticized belt fastening with an Sshaped metal clasp. He has tousled hair, a broad, breezy smile, and eyes unclouded by fear or premature sexuality, squinted against the sun. He is Mike Jagger, as the world then knew him, aged about seven, photographed with a group of classmates at his first school, Maypole Infants. The name could not be more atmospheric in its suggestion of springtime and kindly fun, of pure-hearted lads and lasses dancing round a beribboned pole to welcome the darling buds.
    At Maypole he was a star pupil, top of the class or near it in every subject. As was soon evident, he possessed his father’s all-round aptitude for sports, dominating the school’s miniature games of soccer and cricket and its egg-and-spoon or sack-racing athletics. One of his teachers, Ken Llewellyn, would remember him as the most engaging as well as brightest boy in his year, “an irrepressible bundle of energy” whom it was “a pleasure to teach.” In this seven-year-old paragon, however, there was already a touch of the subversive. He had a sharp ear for the way that grown-ups talked, and could mold his voice into an impressive range of accents. His imitations of teachers like the Welsh Mr. Llewellyn went down even better with classmates than his triumphs on the games field.
    At the age of eight he moved on to Wentworth County Primary, a more serious place, not so much about maypole dancing as surviving in the playground. Here he met a boy born at Livingstone Hospital like himself but five months later; an ill-favored little fellow with the protruding ears and hollow cheeks of some Dickensian workhouse