Life (3 page)
Police Chief:
I got ’em here and I’m holding ’em. I want these limeys, these little fairies. Who do they think they are?
Carter:
You want to start a riot? You seen outside? You wave one pair of handcuffs and you will lose control of this crowd. This is the Rolling Stones, for Christ sakes.
Police Chief:
And your little boys will go behind bars.
Judge
[returned from interview]: What’s that?
Judge’s Brother
[taking him aside]: Tom, we need to confer. There is no legal cause to hold them. We will have all hell to pay if we don’t follow the law here.
Judge:
I know it. Sure thing. Yes. Yes. Mr. Carrrer. You will all approach the bench.
The fire had gone out of all except Chief Gober. The search had revealed nothing that they could legally use. There was nothing to charge us with. The cocaine belonged to Freddie the hitchhiker and it had been illegally discovered. The state police were mostly now on Carter’s side. With much conferring and words in the ear, Carter and the other lawyers made a deal with the judge. Very simple. The judge would like to keep the hunting knife and drop the charge on that—it hangs in the courtroom to this day. He would reduce the reckless driving to a misdemeanor, nothing more than a parking ticket for which I would pay $162.50. With the $50,000 in cash that Carter had brought down with him, he paid a bond of $5,000 for Freddie and the cocaine, and it was agreed that Carter would file to have it dismissed on legal grounds later—so Freddie was free to go too. But there was one last condition. We had to give a press conference before we went and be photographed with our arms around the judge. Ronnie and I conducted our press conference from the bench. I was wearing a fireman’s hat by this time and I was filmed pounding the gavel and announcing to the press, “Case closed.” Phew!
I
t was a classic
outcome for the Stones. The choice always was a tricky one for the authorities who arrested us. Do you want to lock them up, or have your photograph taken with them and give them a motorcade to see them on their way? There’s votes either way. In Fordyce, by the skin of our teeth, we got the motorcade. The state police had to escort us through the crowds to the airport at around two in the morning, where our plane, well stocked with Jack Daniel’s, was revved up and waiting.
In 2006, the political ambitions of Governor Huckabee of Arkansas, who was going to stand in the primaries as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, extended to granting me a pardon for my misdemeanor of thirty years previous. Governor Huckabee also thinks of himself as a guitar player. I think he even has a band. In fact there was nothing to pardon. There was no crime on the slate in Fordyce, but that didn’t matter, I got pardoned anyway. But what the hell happened to that car? We left it in this garage loaded with dope. I’d like to know what happened to that stuff. Maybe they never took the panels off. Maybe someone’s still driving it around, still filled with shit.
Growing up an only child on the Dartford marshes. Camping holidays in Dorset with my parents, Bert and Doris. Adventures with my grandfather Gus and Mr. Thompson Wooft. Gus teaches me my first guitar lick. I learn to take beatings at school and later vanquish the Dartford Tech bully. Doris trains my ears with Django Reinhardt and I discover Elvis via Radio Luxembourg. I morph from choirboy to school rebel and get expelled.
F
or many years I slept, on average, twice a week. This means that I have been conscious for at least three lifetimes. And before those lifetimes there was my childhood, which I ground out east of London in Dartford, along the Thames, where I was born. December 18, 1943. According to my mother, Doris, that happened during an air raid. I can’t argue. All four lips are sealed. But the first flash of memory I have is of lying on the grass in our backyard, pointing at the droning airplane in the blue sky above our heads, and Doris saying, “Spitfire.” The war was over by then, but where I grew up you’d turn a corner and see horizon, wasteland, weeds, maybe one or two of those odd Hitchcock-looking houses that somehow miraculously survived. Our street took a near hit from a doodlebug, but we weren’t there. Doris said it bounced along the curbstones and killed everyone on either side of our house. A brick or two landed in my cot. That was evidence that Hitler was on my trail. Then he went to plan B. After that, my mum thought Dartford was a bit dangerous, bless her.
Doris and my father, Bert, had moved to Morland Avenue in Dartford from Walthamstow to be near my aunt Lil, Bert’s sister, while Bert was called up. Lil’s husband was a milkman, who’d been moved there on his new round. Then, when the bomb hit that end of Morland Avenue, our house wasn’t considered safe and we moved in with Lil. When we came out of the shelter after a raid one day, Lil’s roof was on fire, Doris told me. But that’s where our families were all stuck together, after the war, in Morland Avenue. The house that we used to live in was still there when I first remember the street, but about a third of the street was just a crater, grass and flowers. That was our playground. I was born in the Livingstone Hospital, to the sound of the “all clear”—another of Doris’s versions. I’ll have to believe Doris on that one. I wasn’t really counting from day one.
My mother had thought she was going somewhere safe, moving to Dartford from Walthamstow. So she had moved us to the Darent Valley. Bomb Alley! It contained the biggest arm of Vickers-Armstrongs, which was pretty much a bull’s-eye, and the Burroughs Wellcome chemical firm. And on top of that it was around Dartford where German bombers would get cold feet and just drop their bombs and turn around. “Too heavy round here.”
BOOM
. It’s a miracle we didn’t get it. The sound of a siren still makes the hair on the back of my neck curl, and that must be from being put in the shelter with Mum and the family. When the sound of that siren goes off, it’s automatic, an instinctive reaction. I watch many war movies and documentaries, so I hear it all the time, but it always does the trick.
My earliest memories are the standard postwar memories in London. Landscapes of rubble, half a street’s disappeared. Some of it stayed like that for ten years. The main effect of the war on me was just that phrase, “Before the War.” Because you’d hear grown-ups talking about it. “Oh, it wasn’t like this before the war.” Otherwise I wasn’t particularly affected. I suppose no sugar, no sweets and candies, was a good thing, but I wasn’t happy about it. I’ve always had trouble scoring. Lower East Side or the sweet shop in East Wittering, near my home in West Sussex. That’s the closest I get nowadays to visiting the dealer—the old Candies sweet shop. I drove over there at 8:30 one morning not long ago with my mate Alan Clayton, singer of the Dirty Strangers. We’d been up all night and we’d got the sugar craving. We had to wait outside for half an hour until it opened. We bought Candy Twirls and Bull’s-Eyes and Licorice & Blackcurrant. We weren’t going to lower ourselves and score at the supermarket, were we?
The fact that I couldn’t buy a bag of sweets until 1954 says a lot about the upheavals and changes that last for so many years after a war. The war had been over for nine years before I could actually, if I had the money, go and say, “I’ll have a bag of
them
”—toffees and Aniseed Twists. Otherwise it was “You got your ration stamp book?” The sound of those stamps stamping. Your ration was your ration. One little brown paper bag—a tiny one—a
week
.
Bert and Doris had met working in the same factory in Edmonton—Bert a printer and Doris working in the office—and they had started out together living at Walthamstow. They had done a lot of cycling and camping during their courtship before the war. It brought them together. They bought a tandem and used to go riding into Essex and camping with their friends. So when I came along, as soon as they could, they used to take me on the back of their tandem. It must have been very soon after the war, or maybe even during the war. I can imagine them driving through an air raid, plowing ahead. Bert in front, Mum behind and me on the back, on the baby seat, mercilessly exposed to the sun’s rays, throwing up from sunstroke. It’s been the story of my life ever since—on the road again.
In the early part of the war—before my arrival—Doris drove a van for the Co-op bakers, even though she told them she couldn’t drive. Luckily, in those days there were almost no cars on the road. She drove the van into a wall when she was using it illegally to visit a friend, and they still didn’t fire her. She also drove a horse and cart for bread deliveries closer to the Co-op, to save the wartime fuel. Doris was in charge of cake distribution for a big area. Half a dozen cakes for three hundred people. And she would be the decider of who would get them. “Can I have a cake next week?” “Well, you had one last week, didn’t you?” A heroic war. Bert was in a protected job, in valve manufacturing, until D-day. He was a dispatch rider in Normandy just after the invasion, and got blown up in a mortar attack, his mates killed around him. He was the only survivor of that particular little foray, and it left a very nasty gash, a livid scar all the way up his left thigh. I always wanted to get one when I grew up. I’d say, “Dad, what’s that?” And he’d say, “It got me out the war, son.” It left him with nightmares for the rest of his life. My son Marlon lived a lot with Bert in America for some years, while Marlon was growing up, and they used to go camping together. Marlon says Bert would wake up in the middle of the night, shouting, “Look out, Charlie, here it comes. We’re all goners! We’re all goners! Fuck this shit.”
Everyone from Dartford is a thief. It runs in the blood. The old rhyme commemorates the unchanging character of the place: “Sutton for mutton, Kirkby for beef, South Darne for gingerbread, Dartford for a thief.” Dartford’s big money used to come from sticking up the stagecoach from Dover to London along the old Roman road, Watling Street. East Hill is very steep. Then suddenly you’re in the valley over the River Darent. It’s only a minor stream, but then you’ve got the short High Street and you’ve got to go up West Hill, where the horses would drag. Whichever way you’re coming, it’s the perfect ambush point. The drivers didn’t stop and argue—part of the fare would be the Dartford fine, to keep the journey going smoothly. They’d just toss out a bag of coins. Because if you didn’t pay going down East Hill, they’d signal ahead. One gunshot—he didn’t pay —and they’d stop you at West Hill. So it’s a double stickup. You can’t get out of it. That notion had pretty much stopped when trains and cars took over, so probably by the middle of the nineteenth century they’re looking for something else to do, some way of carrying on the tradition. And Dartford has developed an incredible criminal network—you could ask some members of my extended family. It goes with life. There’s always something fallen off the back of a lorry. You don’t ask. If somebody’s just got a nice pair of diamond somethings, you never ask, “Where did they come from?”
For over a year, when I was nine or ten, I was waylaid, Dartford-style, almost every day on my way home from school. I know what it is like to be a coward. I will
never
go back there. As easy as it is to turn tail, I took the beatings. I told my mum that I had fallen off my bike again. To which she replied, “Stay off your bike, son.” Sooner or later we all get beaten. Rather sooner. One half are losers, the other half bullies. It had a powerful effect on me and taught me some lessons for when I grew big enough to use them. Mostly to know how to employ that thing little fuckers have, which is called speed. Which is usually “run away.” But you get sick of running away. It was the old Dartford stickup. They have the Dartford tunnel now with tollbooths, which is where all the traffic from Dover to London still has to go. It’s legal to take the money and the bullies have uniforms. You pay, one way or another.
My backyard was the Dartford marshes, a no-man’s-land that stretches three miles on either side along the Thames. A frightening place and fascinating at the same time, but desolate. When I was growing up, as kids we’d go down to the riverbank, a good half an hour ride on a bike. Essex County was on the other side of the river, the northern shore, and it might as well have been France. You could see the smoke of Dagenham, the Ford plant, and on our side the Gravesend cement plant. They didn’t call it Gravesend for nothing. Everything unwanted by anyone else had been dumped in Dartford since the late nineteenth century —isolation and smallpox hospitals, leper colonies, gunpowder factories, lunatic asylums—a nice mixture. Dartford was the main place for smallpox treatment for all of England from the time of the epidemic of the 1880s. The river hospitals overflowed into ships anchored at Long Reach—a grim sight in the photographs, or if you were sailing up the estuary into London. But the lunatic asylums were what Dartford and its environs were famous for—the various projects run by the dreaded Metropolitan Asylums Board for the mentally unprepared people, or whatever they call it these days. The deficient in brain. The asylums drew a belt around the area, as if somebody had decided, “Right. This is where we’re going to put the loonies.” There was a massive one, very grim, called Darenth Park, which was a kind of labor camp for backward children until quite recent times. There was Stone House Hospital, whose name had been changed to something more genteel than the City of London Lunatic Asylum, which had Gothic gables and a tower and observation post, Victorian-style—where at least one suspect for Jack the Ripper, Jacob Levy, was imprisoned. Some of the nuthouses were for harder cases than others. When we were twelve or thirteen, Mick Jagger had a summer job at the Bexley nuthouse, the Maypole, as it was called. I think they were a bit more upper-class nutters —they got wheelchairs or something—and Mick used to do the catering, taking round their lunches.
Almost once a week you’d hear sirens going—another loony escaped—and they’d find him in the morning in his little nightshirt, shivering on Dartford Heath. Some of them escaped for quite a while, and you’d see them flitting through the shrubbery. It was a feature of life when I was growing up. You still thought you were at war, because they used the same siren if there was a breakout. You don’t realize what a weird place you’re growing up in. You’d give people directions: “Go past the loony bin, not the big one, the small one.” And they’d look at you as if you were from the loony bin yourself.
The only other thing that was there was the Wells firework factory, just a few little isolated sheds on the marsh. It blew itself up one night in the ’50s, and a few guys with it. Spectacular. As I looked out my window, I thought the war had started again. All the factory was making then was your tuppenny banger, your Roman candles and your golden shower. And your jumping jacks. Everybody from around there remembers that—the explosion that blew the windows out for miles around.
One thing you’ve got is your bike. Me and my mate Dave Gibbs, who lived on Temple Hill, decided it would be cool if we put those little cardboard flappers on the back wheel so it sounded like an engine when the spokes went round. We’d hear “Take that bloody thing away. I’m trying to get some sleep around here,” so we used to ride down to the marshes and the woods by the Thames. The woods were very dangerous country. There were buggers in there, hard men who’d scream at you.
“Fuck off.”
We took the cardboard flappers out. It was a place of madmen and deserters and tramps. Many of these guys were British Army deserters, a little like the Japanese soldiers who still thought the war was on. Some of them had been living there for five or six years. They’d cobbled together maybe a caravan or some tree house for shelter. Vicious, dirty swine they were too. The first time I got shot was by one of those bastards—a good shot, an air gun pellet on the bum. One of our hangs was a pillbox, an old machine gun post, of which there were many along the tideway. We used to go and pick up the literature, which was always pinups, all crumpled up in the corner.
One day we found a dead tramp in there, huddled up, covered in bluebottles. A dead para-fin. (Paraffin lamp, rhyming slang for tramp.) Filthy magazines lying around. Used rubbers. Flies buzzing. And this para-fin had croaked. He’d been there for days, weeks even. We never reported it. We ran like the fucking Nile.