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and most, in addition, practiced a casual, even jocular physical violence that today would instantly land them in court for assault. Any who showed weakness (like the English teacher, “sweet, gentle Mr. Brandon”) were mercilessly ragged and aped by Jagger, the class mimic, behind their backs or to their faces. “There were guerrilla skirmishes on all fronts, with civil disobedience and undeclared war; [the teachers] threw blackboard rubbers at us and we threw them back,” he would recall. “There were some who’d just punch you out. They’d slap your face so hard, you’d go down. Others would twist your ear and drag you along until it was red and stinging.” So that line from “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “I was schooled with a strap right across my back,” may not be as fanciful as it has always seemed.
    At number 23 The Close lived a boy named Alan Etherington, who was the same age as Mike and also went to Dartford Grammar. The two quickly chummed up, biking to school together each morning and going to tea at each other’s house. “There was a standing joke with us that if Mike appeared, he was trying to get out of chores his parents had given him, like washing up or mowing the lawn,” Etherington remembers. House-proud Eva could be a little intimidating, but Joe, despite his “quiet authority,” created an atmosphere of healthy fun. When Etherington dropped by, there would usually be a pickup game of cricket or rounders or an impromptu weight-training session on the lawn. Sometimes, as a special treat, Joe would produce a javelin, take the boys to the open green space at the top of The Close, and under his careful supervision, allow them to practice a few throws.
    Having a father so closely connected to the teaching world meant that Mike’s daily release from school was not as complete as other boys’. Joe knew several of the staff at Dartford Grammar, and so could keep close watch on both his academic performance and conduct. There also could be no shirking of homework: he would later remember getting up at 6 A.M. to finish some essay or exercise, having fallen asleep over his books the night before. But in other ways, Joe’s links with the school were an advantage. Arthur Page, the sports master—and a celebrated local cricketer—was a family friend who gave Mike special attention in batting practice at the school nets. Likewise as a favor to his father, one of the mathematics staff agreed to help him with his weakest subject even though he wasn’t in the teacher’s usual set.
    Eventually, Joe himself became a part-time instructor at Dartford Grammar, coming in each Tuesday evening to coach in his beloved basketball. And there was one game, at least, where Mike’s enthusiasm, and application, fully matched his father’s. In basketball one could run and weave and catch and shoot with no risk of being pushed into mud; best of all, despite Joe’s patient exposition of its long British history, it felt glamorously and exotically American. Its most famous exponents were the all-black Harlem Globetrotters, whose displays of almost magical ball control, to the whistled strains of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” gave Mike Jagger and countless other British boys their earliest inklings of “cool.” He became secretary of the school basketball society that evolved from Joe’s visits, and never missed a session. While his friends played in ordinary gym shoes, he had proper black-and-white canvas basketball boots, which not only enhanced performance on the court but were stunningly chic juvenile footwear off it.
    Otherwise, he was an inconspicuous member of the school community, winning neither special distinction nor special censure, offering no challenge to the status quo, using his considerable wits to avoid trouble with chalk-throwing, ear-twisting masters rather than provoke it. His school friend John Spinks remembers him as “an India-rubber character” who could “bend every way to stay out of