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for kids that are usually pretty bright but that just won’t accept discipline very well. The school for kids that don’t stand much of a chance of doing anything except unskilled or semiskilled labor is called secondary modern. For those who had the bread there were plenty of public schools, but this was the system for state education.
    â€œAfter eleven I lost touch with Mick because he went to a grammar school and I went to this technical school. I lost touch with Mick for—it seemed a long time, actually it was about six years.”
    Keith Richards, the youngest of the original Rolling Stones, was born on December 18, 1943. Michael Philip Jagger was born in the same year and the same town, Dartford, on July 26. When she was four years old, Mick’s mother had come to Dartford from Australia, where six generations of her family had lived. “The women in my family went to Australia to get away from the men,” she said. She married Joseph Jagger, a physical education teacher who came to Dartford from a family of strict nondrinking Baptists in the north of England. Their son Michael was from an early age interested in athletics and in earning money.
    â€œWhen I was twelve years old,” Mick said, “I worked on an Americanarmy base near Dartford, giving other kids physical instruction—because I was good at it. I had to learn their games, so I learned football and baseball, all the American games. There was a black cat there named José, a cook, who played R&B records for me. That was the first time I heard black music. In fact that was my first encounter with American thought. They buried a flag, a piece of cloth, with full military honors. I thought it was ridiculous, and said so. They said, ‘How would you feel if we said something about the Queen?’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t mind, you wouldn’t be talking about me. She might mind, but I wouldn’t.’ ”
    We talked in many places—movie sets, motel rooms, airplanes, at Mick’s house on Cheyne Walk, with Marsha Hunt, the Afro-American actress, pregnant with Mick’s first child, wearing her bosom Scotch-taped into a hippie-Indian dress.
    One night at Keith’s London house, a few doors up from Mick’s, Keith, Mick, Anita, and I were talking, and Anita mentioned that Mrs. Jagger often speaks of how Mick used to enjoy camping and the outdoor life. In a high-pitched, proper voice, imitating Mrs. Jagger, I said, “As a child, Mick was very butch.”
    â€œYeah, I was butch,” Mick said. “But she was always butcher.”
    â€œTechnical school was completely the wrong thing for me,” Keith said. “Working with the hands, metalwork. I can’t even measure an inch properly, so they’re forcing me to make a set of drills or something, to a thousandth-of-an-inch accuracy. I did my best to get thrown out of that place. Took me four years, but I made it.”
    â€œYou tried to get yourself thrown out how? By not showing up?”
    â€œNot so much that, because they do too many things to you for doing that. It makes life difficult for you. I was trying to make it easier for me.
    â€œAt this time rock and roll had just hit the scene. That also played a very heavy part in my decision. The first record that really turned me on out of the rock and roll thing was ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ ”
    â€œDid you see
Blackboard Jungle
over here?”
    â€œYeah, that was the first ripping-the-seats-up, Teddy Boys type of scene here. I was very young at that time. I did the first school year, I did the second year, I did the third year, and at the end of the third year I’d fucked up so much that they made me do the third-year course again, which was really to humiliate me. It meant you had to stay down with the younger kids and couldn’t take the G.C.E. examinations, which in this country are very important in getting a job. I didn’t take the fucking