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You don't know about me, and what is presently more to the point, you don't know about Keith Richards, without your having read a book called The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. It is a mainly true book, with some stretchers, about these English boys, men, who called themselves that and played music and got to be hugely well known. That book has been cannibalized more times and has made more money for everybody save its author than he, that is, I, would care to count.
In his book Keith Richards, The Biography (Poseidon Press, first edition 1992) Victor Bockris tells us that Richards was born on the 18th and 19th of December 1943 (pages 16 and 295; the error was subsequently corrected). For the sake of Keith's mother, born Doris Dupree thirty-three years before the birth of her only child, one hopes December 18 is the correct date.
That soi-disant protracted delivery took place at Livingstone Hospital in the London suburb of Dartford, Kent. Dartford lies fifteen miles to the east and slightly south of London on the way to Canterbury, an easy first stop for London pilgrims. Dartford has been inhabited since the Stone Age; Julius Caesar, following a battle nearby, decided to leave Kent and return to Gaul, and royalty has visited the town many times. Isabella, sister of Henry III,was married by proxy to the Emperor Frederick II of Germany in Dartford Church in 1235. Edward III held a tournament in Dartford in 1331 and later founded there the Dominican Priory. In 1415 Henry V passed through the town on his return from Agincourt, and in 1422, his body rested in the Parish Church on its way to Westminster Abbey. During the Wars of the Roses (1452), Richard of York camped on the Brent and later surrendered to Henry VI at Dartford.
In Tudor times, Henry VIII built a manor house on the site of the Priory and there for some years lived the Lady Anne of Cleves after her divorce. Here, too, Elizabeth "slept at her own house at Dartford," in 1573.
Somehow these visits from royalty did not manage to impart to Dartford the same patina of fashion, elegance, and ease that Cheltenham--Rolling Stone Brian Jones's hometown and another hangout for royals-is considered by many to have. Dartford is just a London suburb rather than a center of vacation landscape, and almost as regularly as there were royal visits there were rebellions. Dartford is closely associated with the Wat Tyler Rebellion of English peasants against the young (fourteen) and inexperienced King Richard II in 1381. (And against most of the clergy, nobles, gentry, ministers, judges, lawyers, foreigners, and anyone who could write a letter-all these were to be killed.) During this civil disturbance, Dartford featured as the rallying point for the rebels on two occasions, and a John Tyler of Dartford is supposed to have killed one of the government tax-collectors. Wat Tyler paid the ultimate price for his rudeness, being dispatched by the scimitar of stalwart John Standwich, one of the king's squires. The other rebel leaders, they who had, accordingto the medieval historian Walsingham, "punished by beheading each and all who were acquainted with the laws of the country," were themselves executed, their severed heads displayed on London Bridge.
During the reign of Mary Tudor, Dartford was one of the many places where martyrs suffered for conscience' sake. The stake was set up at Dartford Brent, about three-quarters of a mile out of the town, along Watling Street. There, on July 17, 1555, Christopher Wade was burned as a heretic; the memory of the Kent martyrs is perpetuated by a monument erected in the old burial ground on East Hill, which was the site of an ancient chapel of St. Edmund the Martyr and a place of pilgrimage in pre-Reformation times. In this reign too, two Dartford men-Robert Rudston and Thomas Fane-became involved in the Wyatt Rebellion and were imprisoned in the Tower of London, where the inscriptions they carved may still be seen. Through the years, Dartford's legacy has been unrest.
During the English Civil War, the Lady Chapel in the Parish Church, which in 1642 had been converted into a powder magazine, was seized by the Kentish Royalists. At the time of the Restoration, Charles II passed through Dartford on his way to London. Stagecoaches started to run to Canterbury in 1670, and by 1815, seventy-two coaches were passing through the town every day. From a population of 2,406 in 1801, Dartford has grown to include over seventy thousand citizens. Its industries include cement manufacture, quarrying chalk, and papermaking; J. & E. Hall of Dartford is the world's foremost manufacturer of refrigeration plants for cargo ships, and Dartford is also an important center for the manufactureof drugs, zinc oxide, and fireworks. Almost the same percentage (one-tenth) of land in Dartford as in Cheltenham is devoted to parks and open spaces, but in Dartford most of the open spaces are playing fields, rather than flower gardens.
Few buildings of historical interest remain in Dartford, at least partly because of its having earned the name "Doodlebug Alley," after the German flying bombs during World War II. It was also called "The Graveyard."
Typically, Keith Richards, the ultimate rock 'n' roll survivor, who has been described as looking like an unresur-rected Christ, remembers heroic occurrences from his early youth that didn't exactly happen.
"Even if I'm walking down a hotel corridor," he told me, "and somebody as I'm passing their room has the TV on, and it's playing one of those blitz movies, English war movies, and I hear that siren, there is nothing I can do about it. The hair goes up on the back of my head and I get goose bumps. It's a reaction, something that I picked up from what happened in the first eighteen months of my life, from other people that really knew what was going on. My old man was in the army, and my ma took me out shopping for an hour or two and a VI, you know, the doodlebug ... we came back and the house was destroyed, it landed right on my crib. Adolf was on my tail. The bastard was after me. I went up the road to my auntie's, 'cause we lived on the same street."
The facts are less dramatic: The house was damaged but not destroyed, and it happened after Keith and his mother had been evacuated (an appropriate verb to describe the early activities of an artist never blind to thecloacal vision) to Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, where thirty-seven-year-old Bert Richards--Keith's father, his leg wounded in Normandy--was in hospital. ("Boris and Dirt," Keith gave as his parents' names to a credulous fan mag.) The V1 raids lasted only two and a half months, and then Keith and his mother did go to stay with his aunt. "We went up there," Keith said, "and lived with my aunt for the rest of the war, which was like for another nine months, this happened late '44. After the war was over--my first memory actually is looking up in the sky and sort of pointing up and my mom saying, 'It's a Spitfire.'
"After that I guess the memories start when I was three or four years old. I remember London, seeing these huge areas of rubble and grass growing and absolutely nothing. Dartford then was a very small town. You were on the edge of London but there was still plenty of space; you didn't actually feel part of London even though you were. When I was growing up, in those few years, if you went one way you went straight into the country and if you went towards London then you'd be in the suburbs in five or ten minutes. Dartford is a few miles from the Thames; all that's between Dartford and the river is just marshland. Which nobody has ever been able to do much with. We used to go down to the river when we were kids and play in these machine-gun bunkers and that was our playground, where weirdo...
