Like everyone in the Dartford area, Joe and Eva spent many tense nights listening for the whine of the V-1’s motor that cut out just before it struck its target. Later, and even more terrifyingly, came the V-2, a jet-propelled bomb that travelled faster than the speed of sound and so gave no warning of its approach.
Michael Philip, of course, remained blissfully unaware as a bombed, battered and stringently rationed nation realised 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 idealised image of a little British boy in the early 1950s, before television, computer games and too-early sexualisation 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 elasticised belt fastening with an S-shaped 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 mould 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-favoured little fellow with the protruding ears and hollow cheeks of some Dickensian workhouse waif, though he came from a good enough home. His name was Keith Richards.
For British eight-year-olds in this era, the chief fantasy figures were American cowboy movie heroes like Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy, whose Western raiment was flashingly gorgeous, and who would periodically sheathe their pearl-handled six-shooters and warble ballads to their own guitar accompaniment. In the Wentworth playground one day, Keith confided to Mike Jagger that when he grew up he wanted to be like Roy Rogers, the self-styled ‘King of the Cowboys’, and play a guitar.
Mike was indifferent to the King of the Cowboys – he was already good at being indifferent – but the idea of the guitar, and of this little imp with sticky-out ears strumming one, did pique his interest. However, their acquaintanceship did not ripen: it would be more than a decade before they explored the subject further.
At the Jaggers’, like every other British household, music was constantly in the air, pumped out of bulky valve-operated radio sets by the BBC’s Light Programme in every form from dance bands to operetta. Mike enjoyed mimicking American crooners he heard – like Johnnie Ray blubbing through ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain’ and ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’ – but did not attract any special notice in school singing lessons or in the church choir to which he and his brother Chris both belonged. Chris, at that stage, seemed more of a natural performer, having won a prize at Maypole Infants School for singing ‘The Deadwood Stage’ from the film Calamity Jane. The musical entertainments that appealed most to Mike were the professional Christmas pantomimes staged at larger theatres in the area – corny shows based on fairy tales like Mother Goose or ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, but with an intriguing whiff of sex and gender blurring, the rouged and wisecracking ‘dame’ traditionally played by a man, the ‘principal boy’ by a leggy young woman.
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.
