Филип Норман – Mick Jagger (страница 5)

In 1954, the family moved from 39 Denver Road and out of Dartford entirely, to the nearby village of Wilmington. Their house now had a name, ‘Newlands’, and stood in a secluded thoroughfare called The Close, a term usually applied to cathedral precincts. There was a spacious garden where Joe could give his two sons regular PT sessions and practise the diverse sports in which he was coaching them. The neighbours grew accustomed to seeing the grass littered with balls, cricket stumps, and lifting weights, and Mike and Chris swinging like titchy Tarzans from ropes their father had tied to the trees.

For the Jaggers, as for most British families, it was a decade of steadily increasing prosperity, when luxuries barely imaginable before the war became commonplace in almost every home. They acquired a television set, whose minuscule screen showed a bluish rather than black-and-white picture, allowing Mike and Chris to watch Children’s Hour puppets like Muffin the Mule, Mr Turnip and Sooty, and serials like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden and E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children. They took summer holidays in sunny Spain and the South of France rather than Kent’s own numerous, cold-comfort resorts like Margate and Broadstairs. But the boys were never spoiled. Joe in his quiet way was a strict disciplinarian and Eva was equally forceful, particularly over cleanliness and tidiness. From their youngest years, Mike and Chris were expected to do their share of household chores, set out in a school-like timetable.

Mike pulled his weight without complaint. ‘[He] wasn’t a rebellious child at all,’ Joe would later remember. ‘He was a very pleasant boy at home in the family, and he helped to look after his younger brother.’ Indeed, the only shadow on his horizon was that Chris seemed to be his mother’s favourite and he himself never received quite the same level of affection and attention from her. It made him slow to give affection in his turn – a lifelong trait – and also 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 pre-emptively 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 maths, 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 half way. ‘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 tantalisingly 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 and most, in addition, practised a casual, even jocular physical violence that today would instantly land them in court for assault. Any who showed weakness (like the English teacher, ‘sweet, gentle Mr Brandon’) were mercilessly ragged and aped by Jagger, the class mimic, behind their backs or to their faces. ‘There were guerrilla skirmishes on all fronts, with civil disobedience and undeclared war; [the teachers] threw blackboard rubbers at us and we threw them back,’ he would recall. ‘There were some who’d just punch you out. They’d slap your face so hard, you’d go down. Others would twist your ear and drag you along until it was red and stinging.’ So that line from ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘I was schooled with a strap right across my back,’ may not be as fanciful as it has always seemed.

At number 23 The Close lived a boy named Alan Etherington, who was the same age as Mike and also went to Dartford Grammar. The two quickly chummed up, biking to school together each morning and going to tea at each other’s house. ‘There was a standing joke with us that if Mike appeared, he was trying to get out of chores his parents had given him, like washing up or mowing the lawn,’ Etherington remembers. House-proud Eva could be a little intimidating, but Joe, despite his ‘quiet authority’, created an atmosphere of healthy fun. When Etherington dropped by, there would usually be a pick-up game of cricket or rounders or an impromptu weight-training session on the lawn. Sometimes, as a special treat, Joe would produce a javelin, take the boys to the open green space at the top of The Close, and under his careful supervision allow them to practise a few throws.

Having a father so closely connected to the teaching world meant that Mike’s daily release from school was not as complete as other boys’. Joe knew several of the staff at Dartford Grammar, and so could keep close watch on both his academic performance and his conduct. There also could be no shirking of homework: he would later remember getting up at 6 A.M. to finish some essay or exercise, having fallen asleep over his books the night before. But in other ways Joe’s links with the school were an advantage. Arthur Page, the sports master – and a celebrated local cricketer – was a family friend who gave Mike special attention in batting practice at the school nets. Likewise as a favour to his father, one of the mathematics staff agreed to help him with his weakest subject even though he wasn’t in the teacher’s usual set.

Eventually, Joe himself became a part-time instructor at Dartford Grammar, coming in each Tuesday evening to give coaching in his beloved basketball. And there was one game, at least, where Mike’s enthusiasm, and application, fully matched his father’s. In basketball one could run and weave and catch and shoot with no risk of being pushed into mud; best of all, despite Joe’s patient exposition of its long British history, it felt glamorously and exotically American. Its most famous exponents were the all-black Harlem Globetrotters, whose displays of almost magical ball control, to the whistled strains of ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’, gave Mike Jagger and countless other British boys their earliest inklings of ‘cool’. He became secretary of the school basketball society that evolved from Joe’s visits, and never missed a session. While his friends played in ordinary gym shoes, he had proper black-and-white canvas basketball boots, which not only enhanced performance on the court but were stunningly chic juvenile footwear off it.