Life [30]
Bill and Doris had to get up to some deception, and I feel for Bert if he knew. One of their opportunities was Bert’s passion for tennis. It left Doris and Bill free to have a date out together. Then, according to Bill, they’d somehow get in a position to see Bert leaving the tennis club on his bike and race back in Bill’s taxi to get Doris home before him. Doris reminisced, “When Keith started with the Stones, Bill used to take him here and everywhere. If it wasn’t for Bill, he couldn’t have gone anywhere. Because Keith used to say, ‘Mick says I’ve got to get to so-and-so.’ And I’d say, ‘How are you going to get there, then?’ And Bill would say, ‘I’ll take him.’ ” That’s Bill’s so far unheralded role in the birth of the Rolling Stones.
Still, my dad was my dad, and I was scared shitless of facing him come the day I got expelled, which is why it had to be a long-term campaign—it couldn’t be done in one swift blow. I would just slowly have to build up the bad marks until they realized that the moment had come. I was scared not from any physical threat, just of his disapproval, because he’d send you to Coventry. And suddenly you’re on your own. Not talking to me or even recognizing I was around was his form of discipline. There was nothing to follow it up; he wasn’t going to whip my arse or anything like that; it never came into the equation. The thought of upsetting my dad still makes me cry now. Not living up to his expectations would devastate me.
Once you’d been shunned like that you didn’t want it to happen again. You felt like you were nothing, you didn’t exist. He’d say, “Well, we ain’t going up the heath tomorrow”—on the weekend we used to go up there and kick a football about. When I found out how Bert’s dad treated him, I thought I was very lucky, because Bert never used physical punishment on me at all. He was not one to express his emotions. Which I’m thankful for in a way. Some of the times I pissed him off, if he had been that kind of guy, I’d have been getting beatings, like most of the other kids around me at that time. My mum was the only one that laid a hand on me now and again, round the back of the legs, and I deserved it. But I never lived in fear of corporal punishment. It was psychological. Even after a twenty-year gap, when I hadn’t seen Bert for all that time and when I was preparing for our historic reunion, I was still scared of that. He had a lot to disapprove of in the intervening twenty years. But that’s a later story.
The final action that got me expelled was when Terry and I decided not to go to assembly on the last day of the school year. We’d been to so many and we wanted to have a smoke, so we just didn’t go. And that I believe was the actual final nail in the coffin of getting me expelled. At which of course my dad nearly blew up. But by then, I think he’d written me off as any use to society. Because by then I was playing guitar, and Bert wasn’t artistically minded and the only thing I’m good at is music and art.
The person I have to thank at this point—who saved me from the dung heap, from serial relegation—is the fabulous art instructor Mrs. Mountjoy. She put in a good word for me to the headmaster. They were going to dump me onto the labor exchange, and the headmaster asked, “What’s he good at?” “Well, he can draw.” And so I went to Sidcup Art College, class of 1959—the musical intake.
Bert didn’t take it well. “Get a solid job.” “What, like making lightbulbs, Dad?” And I started to get sarcastic with him. I wish I hadn’t. “Making valves and lightbulbs?”
By then I had big ideas, even though I had no idea how to put them into operation. That required meeting a few other people later on. I just felt that I was smart enough, one way or another, to wriggle out of this social net and playing the game. My parents were brought up in the Depression,