Mick Jagger Read Online Free Page A

ultrarespectable Royal Tunbridge Wells, whose residents are so famously addicted to writing to newspapers that the nom de plume “Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells” has become shorthand for any choleric elderly Briton fulminating against modern morals or manners. (“Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells” will play no small part in the story that follows.)
    In the two thousand years since Julius Caesar’s Roman legions waded ashore on Walmer Beach, Kent has mainly been a place that people pass through—Chaucer’s pilgrims “from every shire’s ende” trudging toward Canterbury, armies bound for European wars, present-day traffic to and from the Channel ports of Dover and Folkestone and the Chunnel. As a result, the true heart of the county is difficult to place. There certainly is a distinctive Kentish burr, subtly different from that of neighboring Sussex, varying from town to town, even village to village, but the predominant accent is dictated by the metropolis that blends seamlessly into its northern margins. The earliest linguistic colonizers were the trainloads of East End Cockneys who arrived each summer to help bring in the hop harvest; since then, proliferating “dormitory towns” for city office workers have made London-speak ubiquitous.
    Jagger is neither a Kentish name nor a London one—despite the City lawyer named Jaggers in Dickens’s Great Expectations—but originated some two hundred miles to the north, around Halifax in Yorkshire. Although its most famous bearer (in his “Street Fighting Man” period) would relish the similarity to jagged, claiming that it once meant “knifer” or “footpad,” it actually derives from the Old English jag for a “pack” or “load,” and denotes a carter, peddler, or hawker. Pre-Mick, it adorned only one minor celebrity, the Victorian engineer Joseph Hobson Jagger, who devised a successful system for winning at roulette and may partly have inspired a famous music-hall song, “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.” The family could thus claim a precedent for hitting the jackpot.
    No such mercenary aims possessed Mick’s father, Basil Fanshawe Jagger—always known as Joe—who was born in 1913 and raised in an atmosphere of clean-living altruism. Joe’s Yorkshireman father, David, was a village school headmaster in days when all the pupils would share a single room, sitting on long wooden forms and writing on slates with chalk. Despite a small, slender build, Joe proved a natural athlete, equally good at all track-and-field sports, with a special flair for gymnastics. Given his background, and idealistic, unselfish temperament, it was natural he should choose a career in what was then known as PT—physical training. He studied at Manchester and London universities and, in 1938, was appointed PT instructor at the state-run East Central School in Dartford, Kent.
    Situated in the far northwest of the county, Dartford is practically an east London suburb, barely thirty minutes by train from the great metropolitan termini of Victoria and Charing Cross. It lies in the valley of the River Darent, on the old pilgrims’ way to Canterbury, and is known to history as the place where Wat Tyler started the Peasants’ Revolt against King Richard II’s poll tax in 1381 (so rabble-rousers in the blood, then). In modern times, almost its only invocation—albeit hundreds of times each day—is in radio traffic reports for the Dartford Tunnel, under the Thames, and adjacent Dartford-Thurrock Crossing, the main escape route from London for south-coast-bound traffic. Otherwise, it is just a name on a road sign or station platform, its centuries as a market and brewing town all but obliterated by office blocks, multiple stores, and even more multiple commuter homes. From the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign, traffic funneled to Dartford was not only vehicular; an outlying village with the serendipitous name of Stone contained a forbidding pile known as the East London