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English Channel its southern one), moved to Clarence Road, Bromley. Finally, in 1955, David and his family moved to 4 Plaistow Grove, Sundridge Park, Bromley, a terraced house with four rooms, a kitchen, and an attic, where they would remain for fifteen years.
    David’s bedroom overlooked the back of a pub, but even though the noise of carousers could be deafening, especially on a Saturday night, he could always lose himself in his dreams, and in reading. “I was a kid that loved being in my room reading books and entertaining ideas. I lived a lot in my imagination. It was a real effort to become a social animal,” he said.
    When he was ten, he enrolled at Burnt Ash Primary School, in Bromley, joined the church choir, and was popular with classmates, who dubbed him a leader, not a follower, and he refused to take part in roughhousing with the other boys.
    “I felt very protective toward him,” said his neighbor, Barrie Jackson, who lived across the street from him. “He was very small and when all the boys gathered together . . . telling rude jokes, David sat in the corner mostly, not at all impressed.”
    Rude jokes might not have impressed him, but at the young age of ten, he was already aware of girls, and claims to have fallen head-over-heels in love with one of them. “She was the first girl in the class to get tits,” he said succinctly: Clearly, he always remembered her—and them. “I went out with her years later, when we were about eighteen—butI fucked it up. On our second date, she found out that I’d been with another girl. I could not keep it zipped,” he said.
    Although David’s thoughts may have started to stray toward girls when he was very young, those thoughts and anything else in his life were dwarfed by his rising passion for rock music. David was eight years old when Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” hit the top of the charts and swept Britain with its revolutionary sound, aimed exclusively at teenagers. And young as he was, David was set on fire by “Rock Around the Clock.” As a result, he fixed his already considerable will on amassing a record collection. Fortunately for David, unlike most kids in Britain at that time, most of whom had to save up six shillings and eight pence in order to buy a 45 rpm of their chosen hit, he was in the privileged position of getting them for free, as his father, chief publicist at Dr. Barnardo’s Homes, routinely brought him the latest records that well-wishers had donated to the charity.
    And when Little Richard (complete with gold lamé suit, glittering from top to toe with gold jewelry) broke into the hit parade with “Tutti Frutti,” David was in the seventh heaven when his father presented him with the disc. Little Richard became his idol, and David remained true to him and as an adult would always cite him as of one of his favorite artists.
    Little Richard and the other American singers whose discs John Jones gave David also provided him with his first taste of America, that far-off wonderland that seemed a million miles away from Britain. “I had America mania when I was a kid,” David recalled, adding, “but I loved all the things that America rejects; it was black music, it was the beatnik poets, it was all the stuff that I thought was the true rebellious subversive side. What makes America great is its pioneer, independent spirit.”
    From the time when he received his first Little Richard disc from his father, America became his fantasy home, and from then on, at night he would often slide under the covers and listen to the American Forces Network radio station playing the top ten records and broadcasting playsbased in Springtown, USA. “I would put myself into the play in my head and be living there, and drink sodas and drive a Cadillac and play sax in Little Richard’s band and all that,” he once said.
    Little Richard didn’t just represent the advent of rock and roll in Britain, or personify America for