Read Online True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth - Free Book Online

your going out as you got older?”
    â€œHe tried to be, but he kind of gave up, you know? I think because of my mother, who had this tendency to give in to me, especially as I got older. And also because—I think he just gave up on me. I’ve disappointed him incredibly.”
    â€œYou turned out to be a Dupree instead of a Richards—”
    â€œExactly. I really didn’t turn out to be anything like he wanted.”
    â€œWhere does he live?”
    â€œAs far as I know, he still lives in, where we all used to live, this fucking horrible council house in Dartford. It’s eighteen miles to the east on the edge of London, just outside the suburbs where the country starts creeping in. He really had no sense of taking a gamble on anything. Fucking soul-destroying council estate. A mixture of terrible apartment blocks and horrible new streets full of semi-detached houses, all in a row, all new, a real concrete jungle, a really disgusting place. And because he wouldn’t take a chance on anything, he wouldn’t try to get us out of there, which is what I think eventually did my mother in as far as he was concerned. I’m gonna have to go and see him one day, just because I’m not gonna be as stubborn as him. One day I’m just gonna get hold of him and try to make contact, whether he likes it or not.”
    â€œHe hasn’t married again?”
    â€œFar as I know, no. I can’t even imagine him gettin’ himself together to find another woman. He’d just rather stay bitter and feel sorry for himself. It’s a shame. As far as I’m concerned, I’d like to have him down here. He’s a gardener, he could look after the place, and he’d love to do it if he was really honest with himself. And I’d really dig it if he’d just live here and look after this place.”
    (Ten years later, Keith would make his father part of the family again, but with no false feeling on either side. When, in 1983, Bert Richards answered the phone at Keith’s house in Jamaica, the friend calling said, “You must be so proud of him.” “Well . . .” Keith’s father said, refusing to commit himself.)
    â€œHow did you feel about school?”
    â€œI wanted to get the fuck out of there. The older I got, the more I wanted to get out. I just knew I wasn’t gonna make it. In primaryschool you didn’t do that much, but later, when I went to that fucking technical school in Dartford, the indoctrination was blatantly apparent. I went to primary school, which in England is called, or was then, infant school, from five to seven. When I started going to school, just after the war, they taught you the basics, but mainly it was indoctrination in the way schools were run, who’s to say yes to who and how to find your place in class. It’s what you’ve let yourself in for for the next ten years.
    â€œWhen you’re seven you go to junior school. They had just started building a few new schools by the time we’d finished the first one, so we went to a new one nearer where we lived. That’s where I met Mick, ’cause that’s where he went too, Wentworth County Primary School. He happened to live near by me, I used to see him around . . . on our tricycles.
    â€œIn junior school they start grading you each school year, each section of kids into three sections, fast, average, and slow. When you’re eleven you take an examination called the eleven plus, which is the big trauma, because this virtually dictates the rest of your life as far as the system goes. It probably includes more psychology now, but then they were just trying to see how much you knew and how quick you learned it and whether you could write it down. That decided whether you went to grammar school, which is where you receive a sort of semiclassical education for the masses, or to what they call a technical school, which I ended up in, which is actually