The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ also worked as a lecturer with the nascent British Sports Council. His speciality was basketball, an American sport not much in vogue in mid-Fifties Britain. Joe Jagger was among the pioneers of the British basketball movement and was the author of what remains the definitive book on the subject, published by Faber and Faber in 1962.

      His wife Eva was a lively and energetic person whose vivacity at times seemed to verge on the domineering. Eva had always been secretly rather ashamed of her Australian origin, with its implied stigma of roughness and unsophistication. Marriage to Joe, with his markedly superior social standing and education, increased her determination to show herself the equal of any true ‘Brit’. Their small house, in Denver Road, Dartford, was scoured by Eva into a spotless state the equal of any neighbour’s. Joe and Eva’s whole life as a young married couple was dictated by consideration of what those ever-vigilant neighbours might think.

      Their first son, Michael Philip, was born on July 26, 1943. The tide of the Second World War had long since turned in the Allies’ favour, but Britain was still an embattled redoubt of air-raid precautions, white-helmeted wardens, clothing coupons and butcher-shop queues. Though the RAF nightly pounded Hamburg and Essen in ‘thousand-bomber raids’, attacks by the German Luftwaffe on London continued. The Kent suburbs heard the distant thunder and saw the horizontal flashes as the poor old East End caught it from the sky again.

      Michael Jagger was a child of absolutely conventional beauty, with chubby cheeks, guileless eyes and hair that assumed a reddish tinge. As a toddler, he proved amiable and obedient, though prone to boisterous spirits that could sometimes go too far. Once, on holiday at the seaside, his mother remembers, he marched along the beach, deliberately kicking down every other child’s sandcastle in his path. His reign as an adored only child lasted until 1947, when Eva presented him with a younger brother, Christopher.

      Home life for the Jagger brothers was pervaded by their mother’s house-proud fastidiousness and their father’s devotion to physical fitness. Their Denver Road neighbours were accustomed to seeing the small back garden of the Jagger house littered with sports equipment – weight-training barbells, cricket stumps and archery targets. Other children asked home to tea by Mike or Chris were somewhat intimidated by the schoolmasterly regimen, which included Grace before meals and a system of fixed penalties and punishments for misbehaviour.

      Mike’s physical prowess showed through early at Maypole infants’ school and afterwards at Wentworth County Primary, to which his Maypole teacher, Ken Llewellyn, an expatriate Welshman, had also transferred. Mr Llewellyn remembers him fondly as one of an outstanding junior class whose ascent to grammar school and university seemed assured. ‘It was a joy to teach them. They were full of life, full of all sorts of questions. I took them for games as well. Mike was already looking like a useful cricketer. If I remember him at all, it’s running in from the playground with both knees grazed and a great big smile on his face.’

      John Spinks lived in Heather Drive, Dartford, not far from the Jaggers in Denver Road. He was Mike’s playmate in the sandpit that lay between their houses. When Mike accidentally impaled a hand on a spiked metal railing, it was John Spinks who, with praiseworthy coolness, pulled it free. To John, he seemed at times almost too conventionally law-abiding and obedient. ‘I always thought he was a bit of a mother’s boy. He did everything he was told at home. He was an indiarubber character, really. He could bend any way to stay out of trouble.’

      Even as a small boy, his other friend Robert Wallis remembers, he had a strangely remote, abstracted quality – a sense of being preoccupied with matters far weightier than their schoolboy games together. Joe Jagger was currently acting as adviser to a commercial TV programme called Seeing Sport, designed to promote physical fitness in children. Once a week, he would take his elder son with him to the studios, to act as model for instruction about athletics or camping. ‘Mike is going to show you how to light the fire,’ the voiceover would say, or: ‘Here’s Mike, getting into the tent.’ ‘He became a bit of a star for doing that,’ Robert Wallis says. ‘He always had some interest outside the ones we had as a group. He gave the idea the he’d sooner be somewhere else than with us, doing far more glamorous things.’

      Robert, John and Mike took the eleven-plus exam together, passing it as effortlessly as Ken Llewellyn had predicted. This crucial step determined whether they would go on to receive a mundane basic education at a secondary modern or be admitted to the far superior privileges of Dartford Grammar. Eva Jagger had every reason to be proud of her boy in his smart new uniform of gold-trimmed maroon blazer and cap.

      Dartford Grammar School, when Mike Jagger arrived there in the early Fifties, possessed most features of an English public school – masters in gowns, house captains, societies, ceremonial Speech Days, ritualized athletics and sport. As its school magazine, The Dartfordian, attests, scholarship was generally excellent, yielding an unusually large annual export to Britain’s redbrick universities. Prominent in the school curriculum was the Army Cadet Force, designed to cushion the shock of the two years’ compulsory National Service each boy would face before embarking on his chosen career.

      At Dartford Grammar, Mike Jagger’s academic promise – and his buoyant enthusiasm – mysteriously evaporated. From the first form to the fifth he merely coasted, doing only enough work to stay out of trouble. It became a sore provocation to the several teachers in whose subjects he was obviously gifted. The senior languages master, Dr Bennett, particularly resented his indifference, for – aided by unusual powers of mimicry – he showed all the signs of a first-class linguist. ‘There was one occasion when I spoke to him about his attitude very severely,’ Dr Bennett says. ‘He was so deliberately insulting that I simply knocked him down.’

      His apathy extended even to sport. He seemed to lose interest in cricket after discovering he was not the deadly spin bowler he had supposed himself at Wentworth. The only sport he played regularly was basketball, his father’s speciality. Joe Jagger, in fact, introduced the sport to Dartford Grammar and helped coach the Basketball Society, of which Mike was Hon. Sec. ‘He was most keen on that, I think, because it was American,’ Robert Wallis says. ‘Mike was the one who had real American basketball boots to play in when the rest of us only had gym shoes.’

      His appearance, from the age of fourteen onward, seemed to reflect his slack and insubordinate attitude. The chubby, laughing schoolboy of Ken Llewellyn’s class had grown into an adolescent whose skinny frame, hovering on the edge of effeteness, caused uniform distaste among his teachers. Likewise his face, with its somnolent eyes, its retroussé nose; most of all, the wide, sagging lips, set in what seemed a permanent grimace of either scorn or dumb insolence.

      As he moved higher in the school, he became adept at flouting its dress regulations. Instead of the prescribed black lace-up shoes, he would arrive for class in French slip-on moccasins. In place of his blazer, he acquired a black, gold-threaded ‘Teddy boy’ jacket, which, to Dr Bennett’s annoyance, he wore even to the annual Founder’s Day ceremony.

      He was already a source of much discussion at the nearby girls’ grammar school, where opinion as to his attractiveness remained sharply divided. In terms of conventional handsomeness he was obviously a non-starter. Yet some of the very girls who dismissed him as ugly or ‘a weed’ still looked for him in the after-school swarm and made bold attempts to talk to him – since he seemed uninterested in talking to them. It became almost a competition to pierce that scornful reserve and bring forth that rare smile which could split open the sullen face, making him look still the happy schoolboy who had laughed into the sun.

      In 1955 came the plague called rock ’n’ roll. Bill Haley and the Comets invaded Britain’s sleepy hit parade with Rock Around the Clock, See You Later, Alligator, Everybody Razzle Dazzle and Rockin’ Through the Rye. Britain’s regimented teenage boys awoke to the sound of a braying sax, a slapping, spinning double bass, a voice that did not croon but jerked and jogged and hiccupped and jumped. What Haley was in fact playing СКАЧАТЬ