Mick Jagger Read Online Free Page B

Lunatic Asylum until a more tactful era renamed it “Stone House.”
    Early in 1940, Joe Jagger met Eva Ensley Scutts, a twenty-seven-year-old as vivacious and demonstrative as he was understated and quiet. Eva’s family originally came from Greenhithe, Kent, but had emigrated to New South Wales, Australia, where she was born in the same year as Joe, 1913. Toward the end of the Great War, her mother left her father and brought her and four siblings home to settle in Dartford. Eva was always said to be a little ashamed of her birth “Down Under” and to have assumed an exaggeratedly upper-class accent to hide any lingering Aussie twang. The truth was that in those days, all respectable young girls tried to talk like London debutantes and the royal princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Eva’s work as an office secretary, and later a beautician, made it a professional necessity.
    Joe’s courtship of Eva took place during the Second World War’s grim first act, when Britain stood alone against Hitler’s all-conquering armies in France and the Führer could be seen gazing across the Channel toward the White Cliffs of Dover as smugly as if he owned them already. With summer came the Battle of Britain, scrawling the sunny Kentish skies with white vapor-trail graffiti as British and German fighters dueled above the cornfields and oast houses and gentle green Weald. Though Dartford possessed no vital military installations, it received a constant overspill from Luftwaffe raids on factories and docks in nearby Chatham and Rochester and on London’s East End. The fact that many falling bombs were not aimed at Dartford, but jettisoned by German planes heading home, made the toll even more horrendous. One killed thirteen people in the town’s Kent Road; another hit the county hospital, wiping out two crowded women’s wards.
    Joe and Eva were married on December 7, 1940, at Holy Trinity Church, Dartford, where Eva had sung in the choir. She wore a dress of lavender silk rather than traditional bridal white, and Joe’s brother, Albert, acted as best man. Afterward, there was a reception at the nearby Coneybeare Hall. This being wartime—and Joe wholeheartedly committed to the prevailing ethos of frugality and self-sacrifice—only fifty guests attended, drinking to the newlyweds’ health with brown sherry and munching dainty sandwiches of Spam or powdered egg.
    Joe’s teaching job and work in resettling London evacuee children exempted him from military call-up, so at least there was no traumatic parting as he was sent overseas or to the opposite end of the country. Nor, conversely, was there the urgency to start a family felt by many servicepeople home on leave. Joe and Eva’s first child did not arrive until 1943, when they were both aged thirty. The delivery took place at Dartford’s Livingstone Hospital on July 26, the birthday of George Bernard Shaw, Carl Jung, and Aldous Huxley, and the baby boy was christened Michael Philip. As a possibly more significant omen, the town’s State Cinema that week was showing an Abbott and Costello film entitled Money for Jam.
    His babyhood saw the war gradually turn in the Allies’ favor and Britain fill with American soldiers—a glamorous breed, provided with luxuries the British had almost forgotten, and playing their own infectious dance music—preparatory to the reconquest of Fortress Europe. Defeated though Nazism was, it possessed one last “vengeance weapon” in the pilotless V-1 flying bombs or doodlebugs, launched from France, that inflicted heavy damage and loss of life in London and its environs during the war’s final months. 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 traveled faster than the speed of sound and so gave no warning of its approach.
    Michael Philip, of course,