The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Stanley Booth

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СКАЧАТЬ doing, but the room was capturing all my mind. It contained, besides us and an orange tomcat, typically turgid English furnishings, an old Heathkit record player, an older radio, a black and white television set, a flowering bonsai tree under a glass dome, an American Indian figurine given to each of the Stones in 1964 by the German teen magazine Bravo, and on the mantle over the fireplace, a little rubber doll with bright red trousers and a white mane of spun nylon hair, the most vulgar possible caricature of Brian, and yet it seemed a totem to him, the central object in this tiny grotesque room. The orange cat curled in Mrs Jones’ lap. I asked his name, and she said ‘Jinx.’

      ‘Such a shame,’ Brian’s father was saying. ‘Brian could have been a brilliant journalist, he could always play better chess than anyone else at school, so much talent wasted.’ He put his back teeth together and grimaced as if a horrible transformation was taking place.

      Mrs Jones asked, ‘Did you have a good supper tonight, love?’

      I thought of the supper I had tonight and other suppers missed and other things than suppers missed and some of the things not missed, all because of what I had seen in her son’s eyes. ‘Fine, thanks,’ I said. Then I started asking questions.

      Mr and Mrs Jones met in South Wales, where they were living with their parents. Mr Jones’ parents were school-teachers. His father sang in opera societies and led the choir at church. Mrs Jones’ father was for over fifty years a master builder and church organist near Cardiff. Mrs Jones’ mother was sickly and so didn’t train for anything and was now quite well at eighty-three. Her parents were living, his were dead.

      Mr Jones studied engineering at Leeds University, then married and started working for Rolls-Royce. In 1939, with the war under way, he was transferred to Cheltenham, where he and Mrs Jones had lived ever since, he working as an aeronautical engineer, she giving piano lessons.

      Brian was born on the last day of February 1942. The Joneses’ second child, a daughter, died at about the age of two.

      ‘How did she die?’ I asked as gently as possible.

      ‘She died, and that’s all I’ll say about it,’ Mr Jones said. I tried to explain again why I was asking questions, but Mr Jones had been hurt too many times by lies and by the truth in print, and he was nowhere near ready to trust a writer. He told me that their youngest child, Barbara, born in 1946, now a physical education teacher, wanted no part of anything to do with Brian, and he asked me to leave her alone. He ground his teeth again. But he couldn’t stop himself from talking and bringing out family photograph albums.

      One photograph showed Brian about five years old, playing with a grey tabby cat.

      ‘One day when both Brian and the cat were very young, Brian announced that the cat’s name was Rolobur,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘“That’s Rolobur,” he said. Don’t know whether he was trying to say something else and it came out Rolobur, or what. He painted it blue once.’

      ‘The cat?’

      ‘With no idea to hurt it,’ Mr Jones said. ‘Which he didn’t, he used food coloring that soon came off, and the cat lived with us for about sixteen years.’

      ‘Brian was a strange child,’ his mother said.

      She started giving Brian piano lessons when he was six, and he studied it until he was fourteen. ‘But he wasn’t terribly interested,’ she said. ‘Then he started playing the clarinet.’

      ‘Which didn’t help his asthma any,’ Mr Jones said. ‘Brian had croup when he was four, and it left him with asthma. He had terrible asthma attacks. It was always bad when he went to the beach on holiday, and he’d been having bad attacks down at Cotchford, very bad attacks down there just before his death.’

      Cotchford Farm was once the home of A. A. Milne; Pooh Bear lived in its Hefalump Wood. It seemed right that Brian should have the place, where he died so soon, less than a year after he bought it. Many things had hurt him by then, and Mr Jones could not stop going over them, trying to find where things went wrong, where to place the blame. ‘I was down there with him, in a sort of junk room there at Cotchford, not long before he died. He came across a photograph of Anita and just stood for a moment looking at it. He said, “Anita,” almost as if he were talking to himself, as if he’d forgotten I was there. Then he put the photograph down and we went on talking, doing what we’d been doing. The loss of Anita upset him terribly. Nothing was the same for Brian after that. Then the drug charges, all that trouble. I didn’t know how to help him. We were close when he was young, but later we had . . . differences of opinion.’

      So much promise . . . a choirboy . . . first-chair clarinet . . . now old friends were saying, Well, it’s about time you retired, isn’t it? He stared at the cold fire, clenching his teeth, then went on talking.

      ‘Brian rejected all discipline. He was suspended from school twice. Once when he was in the sixth form he and some of the other lads used their mortarboards as boomerangs, sailing them up in the air. Brian’s came apart, and he refused to wear it. They suspended him. ‘A most salutary experience’ for Brian, a week’s suspension, according to that twit of a headmaster. Brian spent the whole week down at the Cheltenham Lido, swimming, and came back a hero to all the other boys. I hardly knew how to deal with him. The head-master would complain about him, and I’d become very serious and sit Brian down for a talk. ‘Why is the headmaster always writing us with complaints? Why do you disobey them?’ And Brian would say, ‘Look, Dad, they’re only teachers. They’ve never done anything. You want me to do the things you did, but I can’t be like you. I have to live my own life.’ He was terribly logical about it all. I could hardly get anywhere trying to argue with him.

      ‘Brian simply loathed school, the exams, the discipline, all that. He made his O levels and A levels in spite of himself. At eighteen he left school. He wouldn’t consider going to university. He had a dread of going to university and couldn’t face years of study before he could be self-supporting. He hated the idea of being twenty-five or twenty-six before he could start earning his own living. For a while he was keen on dentistry, but after he left school, he decided to go to work in London for an ophthalmic firm. There was an ophthalmic college affiliated with the firm, and Brian studied there for a while, at the same time he was working. The firm had a branch in Newport, but Brian wanted to go to London. He wanted the London nightlife, the jazz clubs, all that. He loved jazz, Stan Kenton, that sort of thing.

      ‘I took him to London for an interview with the ophthalmic firm. He put on quite a good show, and we left, and I said, ‘Well, what train shall we take home, the five o’clock?’ And he said, ‘No, Dad, I want to go to some jazz clubs before we go home, would you like to come along?’ I told him, ‘No, no, I don’t want to go.’ Brian said, ‘I’ll come home on a later train.’ He’d been to London more often than I’d known, hitchhiking, going to these clubs. I came on home and Brian stayed in London. He came home about six a.m. He bought me a hamburger that night in London. I don’t know why I should remember that. I suppose it was the first time he ever bought me a meal.

      ‘Brian was obsessed with music. He used to play these, what are they, Modern Jazz Quartet records—’

      ‘The reverberations used to drive me crazy,’ Mrs Jones said.

      ‘These records were playing morning, noon, and night,’ Mr Jones said. ‘I saw it as a positive evil in his life, undermining a quite good career. Maybe music was his eventual downfall, but at the time I saw it as an evil because he was so obsessed. Music had driven out all thoughts of a conventional career. His involvement with music and London life, the life of the nightclubs, all that, ruined his career at the ophthalmic firm and school. He threw school and his job over and came back СКАЧАТЬ