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. 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