“I realize now I’d met him [Mick] once outside Dartford Town Hall [library] when he was selling ice creams for a summer job. He must have been about fifteen, just before he left school, about three years before we actually started the Stones, because he just happened to mention that he occasionally did a dance there doing Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran stuff. It just clicked my mind that day. I bought a choc ice. I don’t know, it might have been a coronet. I plead the statute of limitations. And then I didn’t see him again until that fateful day on the train.”
-KR
“After a time the council gave us a flat over a greengrocers in a little row of shops in Chastillian Road, two bedrooms and a lounge - still there. Mick lived one street away in Denver Road.”
-KR
“I’ve had some bad things happen, but this is still one of the worst days of my life. The greengrocer used to stack old fruit crates in the back garden, and a mate and I found all these far-gone tomatoes. We just squidged the whole packet up, and we splashed them everywhere, tomatoes all over the place, including all over myself, my mate, the windows, the walls. We are outside but we were bombing each other. “Take that, swine!” Rotten tomatoes in your face. And I went inside and my mum scared the shit out of me. “I’ve called the man.” “What are you talking about?” “I’ve called the man. He’s going to take you away because you’re out of control.” And I broke down. “He’s coming in fifteen minutes… he’ll be here any minute to take you away into the home." ... I was about six or seven. “Oh mum!” I'm on my knees, Im pleading and begging … That was cruel day. She was relentless.”
-KR
“I remember going from aunt Lil’s to infant school, to West Hill School, screaming my head off, “No way, Mum, no way!” Howling and kicking and refusing and refusing to go, but I did go ... I hated infant school. I hated all school. Doris said I was so nervous she remembered bringing me home on her back because I couldn’t walk, I was trembling so hard. And this before the stick ups and the bullying began.”
-KR
“The heath was only a five-minute bike ride away.” “I didn’t feel any nostalgia when I went back to Dartford that day, except for one thing - the smell of the heath… The glory bumps had gone. Or were grown over or weren’t as big as I thought they were, but walking through that braken took me back.”
-KR
“Heather drive was really upscale. This is where Deborah lived. I got this incredible fixation on her when I was eleven or twelve. I used to stand there looking at her bedroom window, like a thief in the night.”
-KR
“The ludicrous side to Dartford Tech was its pretensions to being a public school … The prefects had little gold tassels on their caps; there was an East House and a West House. It was trying to recapture a lost world, as if the war hadn’t happened, of cricket, cups and prizes, schoolboy glory. All of the masters were totally substandard, but they were still aiming for this ideal as if it were Eton or Winchester, as if it were the ‘20s or ‘30s or even the 1890s."
“I had heard rumors, which turned out to be unfounded, that a Keith Richards wing had been opened, without my permission, at Dartford Tech. I was preparing to go by helicopter and daub expelled on the roof”
-KR