The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Stanley Booth

to have sheets,’ she said. ‘Put it in the book.’

      Redlands, a thatch-roofed house in West Witterling, near Chichester in West Sussex, had been Keith Richards’ country home since 1965. In 1967, along with Mick Jagger, he was arrested here. This morning the place seemed, in the pale spring sunlight, like a veterans’ hospital, and Keith and I like two old soldiers, taking frequent medications and talking about the past.

      ‘My great-grandfather’s family came up to London from Wales in the nineteenth century,’ Keith said, ‘and so my grandfather, my father’s father, was a Londoner. His wife, my grandmother, was mayoress of Walthamstow, a borough of London, during the war. It was the height of fame for the family. They were very puritan, very straight people. Both dead now.

      ‘But then you come to Gus: my mother’s father, Theodore Augustus Dupree. He was a complete freak. He used to have a dance band in the thirties, played sax, fiddle, and guitar. The funkiest old coot you could ever meet.

      ‘That side of the family came to England from the Channel Islands. They were Huguenots, French Protestants who were driven out of France in the seventeenth century. And in the mid-nineteenth century Gus’ father came to Wales, to Monmouth.

      ‘Gus was so funny. He had seven daughters, and they used to bring their boyfriends home, and they’d be sitting round all prim and proper, and he’d be upstairs dangling contraceptives out the window. There’s so many stories about him that I don’t remember even one solid story. In the fifties, the late fifties, he was playing fiddle in a country and western band round the U.S. air force bases in England. Real double-string stuff and everything. He’s a friend of Yehudi Menuhin. Gus admired him, got to know him. He’s one of these cats that can always con what he wants. I should imagine he’s a bit like Furry Lewis. And from living with all these women, he has such a sense of humor, because you either go crazy or laugh at it, with eight women in the house. It was his guitar I used to turn on to when I was a kid.

      ‘My grandmother used to play piano with my grandfather until I think one day she caught him playin’ around with some other chick, and she never forgave him, and she refused ever to touch the piano again. And she’s never played it to this day, since the thirties or forties or whatever. I think she’s even refused to fuck him since then. Very strange.

      ‘My mother and father were together for a long time before they got married. I think they met in ’34, maybe even ’33, got married in ’36. They separated in ’63. This is the strange part of the story, far as I’m concerned. They separated right after I left home, virtually within months. Mainly because my old man, I guess, I should imagine, for a woman, he’d be incredibly boring to live with. He worked, still does, I believe, at an electronics factory, as a supervisor or something, he’s worked his way, been there since he was twenty-one or so. Always very straitlaced, prudish – never got drunk, very controlled, very hung up. I should say he was very hung up. And the bastard – what’s really weird about it, because I like him still, I find certain things about him rather endearing – he’s refused to acknowledge me since he split with my mother, because, I think, I was still on friendly terms with my mother after she split. So he immediately gets all uptight, I guess, and thinks – I dunno, I’ve written to him a couple of times. I wrote to him when I got busted, ’cause I wanted to explain that thing to him, I didn’t want him to just get it all out of the newspapers. But I didn’t get an answer, which rather pissed me off. Haven’t heard from him since ’63. Seven years.’

      ‘Were you very close to him as a kid?’

      ‘No, it wasn’t possible to be that close to him, he didn’t know how to open himself up. He was always good to me.’

      ‘Was he strict on things like your going out as you got older?’

      ‘He 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.’

      ‘You turned out to be a Dupree instead of a Richards—’

      ‘Exactly. I really didn’t turn out to be anything like he wanted.’

      ‘Where does he live?’

      ‘As 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.’

      ‘He hasn’t married again?’

      ‘Far 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.)

      ‘How did you feel about school?’

      ‘I 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 primary school 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.

      ‘When 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.

      ‘In 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 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.

      ‘After eleven I lost touch with Mick because he went to a grammer 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