Mick Jagger Read Online Free PDF Page B

self-conscious and shy in front of strangers, and mortified with embarrassment when Eva pushed him forward to say hello or shake hands.
    The year of the family’s move to Wilmington, he sat the Eleven Plus, the exam with which British state education preemptively sorted its eleven-year-olds into successes and failures. The bright ones went on to grammar schools, often the equal of any exclusive, fee-paying institutions, while the less bright went to secondary moderns and the dullards to technical schools in hope of at least acquiring some useful manual trade. For Mike Jagger, there was no risk of either of these latter options. He passed the exam easily and in September 1954 started at Dartford Grammar School on the town’s West Hill.
    His father could not have been better pleased. Founded in the eighteenth century, Dartford Grammar was the best school of its kind in the district, aspiring to the same standards and observing the same traditions that cost other parents dear at establishments like Eton and Harrow. It had a coat of arms and a Latin motto, Ora et Labora (Pray and Work); it had “masters” rather than mere teachers, clad in scholastic black gowns; most important for Joe, it placed as much emphasis on sports and physical development as on academic achievement. Its alumni included the Indian Mutiny hero Sir Henry Havelock, and the great novelist Thomas Hardy, originally an architect, had worked on one of its nineteenth-century extensions.
    In these new surroundings, however, Mike did not shine nearly as brightly as before. His Eleven Plus results had put him into the “A” stream of specially promising pupils, headed for good all-round results in the GCE O-level exams, followed by two years in the sixth form and probable university entrance. He was naturally good at English, had something of a passion for history (thanks to an inspirational teacher named Walter Wilkinson), and spoke French with an accent superior to most of his classmates’. But science subjects, like math, physics, and chemistry, bored him, and he made little or no effort with them. In the form order, calculated on aggregate marks, he usually figured about halfway. “I wasn’t a swot and I wasn’t a dunce,” he would recall of himself. “I was always in the middle ground.”
    At sports, despite his father’s comprehensive coaching, he was equally inconsistent. Summer was no problem, as Dartford Grammar played cricket, something he loved to watch as well as play, and under Joe’s coaching, he could shine in athletics, especially middle-distance running and javelin. But the school’s winter team game was upper-class rugby football rather than proletarian soccer. Fast runner and good catcher that Mike was, he easily made every school rugger side up to the First Fifteen. But he hated being tackled—which often meant crashing onto his face in squelching mud—and would do everything he could to avoid receiving a pass.
    The headmaster, Ronald Loftus Hudson, sarcastically known as “Lofty,” was a tiny man who nonetheless could reduce the rowdiest assembly to pin-drop silence with little more than a raised eyebrow. Under his regime there were myriad petty regulations about dress and conduct, the sternest relating to the fully segregated but tantalizingly near-at-hand Dartford Grammar School for Girls. Boys were forbidden to talk to the girls, even if they happened to meet out of school hours at places like bus stops. The head also used corporal punishment, as most British educators then did, without legal restraint or fear of parental protest—between two and six strokes on the backside with a stick or gym shoe. “You had to wait outside [his] study until the light went on, and then you’d go in,” the Jagger of the future would remember. “And everybody else used to hang about on the stairs to see how many he gave and how bad it was that morning.”
    All the male teachers could administer formal beatings in front of the whole class