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  There were darker shadows in Peggy’s past, too. In 1986 her sister Pat – ‘the frightful aunt’ as Bowie later termed her – went on the record to detail the troubled history of the Burns family. Peggy and Pat’s siblings included three sisters – Nora, Una and Vivienne – who, according to Pat, suffered from degrees of mental instability; what one writer termed the Burns’ ‘family affliction’. This history later inspired the theory that David Jones was forced to construct alter-egos to distance himself from the madness within. Ken Pitt, David’s future manager, knew David, Peggy and Pat as well as anyone, and describes this theory as ‘unconvincing’. Although David would later gleefully celebrate his family, announcing, ‘most of them are nutty – in, just out of, or going into an institution’, most people who knew them considered Haywood friendly and sincere and found Peggy talkative once you got to know her, with many traces of her former vivaciousness.

  Peggy had a third child, Myra Ann, born in August 1941, before she met Haywood – the result of another wartime romance. The child was given up for adoption and by the time she met Haywood, Peggy was ready to settle down to a conventional life and agreed to marry the Yorkshireman on the condition that he accept Terence as his son. So for the first nine years of his life, David had an elder brother to look up to; and when Terry left home in 1956 to join the Royal Air Force, he remained the object of David’s hero-worship. The messy, confused nature of the Jones household was hardly unusual – illegitimate births had soared in wartime Britain; some historians blame a shortage of rubber and hence a fall in condom production. David’s troubled relationship with his mother echoed that of contemporaries like John Lennon and Eric Clapton, both of whom were raised in households that today would have a social worker knocking on the door.

  As David grew into a toddler, austerity continued to keep a tight grip, but glimmers of hope started to appear. 1953, a year treasured by many kids, marked an end to sweet rationing and the advent of television. Haywood Jones was one of thousands who bought a new set so the family could watch the coronation of the glamorous young Queen Elizabeth. Just a few weeks later, the six-year-old David snuck downstairs for another TV landmark – The Quatermass Experiment, a pioneering BBC science-fiction series that had all of Britain glued to the screen. This ‘tremendous series’ would leave its mark on David, who remembers how he’d watch each Saturday night ‘from behind the sofa when my parents had thought I had gone to bed. After each episode I would tiptoe back to my bedroom rigid with fear, so powerful did the action seem.’ The programme sparked a lifelong fascination with science fiction and – through its theme tune: the dark, sinister, Mars, The Bringer of War from Holst’s ‘Planet Suite’ – the emotional effect of music.

  Brixton was the perfect breeding ground for a future Ziggy Stardust. Waterloo, the Mecca of music-hall artists for a century or more, was just down the road, while Brixton’s own Empress Theatre hosted Tony Hancock, Laurel and Hardy, and countless other Variety stars. ‘Show business people were scattered all the way from Kennington to Streatham,’ says David’s near-neighbour, the photographer Val Wilmer. Many locals still talked of Charlie Chaplin, who had grown up just north of Brixton; Sharon Osbourne, five years younger than David, lived on the other side of Brixton Road with her father Don Arden, a failed nightclub singer and comedian, and she remembers being surrounded by ‘all the Vaudeville artists’. Kids could look out of the window and see comedians chatting in the corner shop, racy characters in cheap suits and hats, carrying cases that might contain a ventriloquist’s dummy, a banjo or a set of knives for their knife-throwing act, on their way to or from a show.

  David’s home at 40 Stansfield Road was a roomy, three-storey terraced Victorian house, shared, during most of their eight years in Brixton, with two other families. In later years, with conventional rock-star spin, David Bowie described his Brixton youth like a walk on the wild side, with gangs roaming the street. The local kids did indeed wander around the area freely, but their prey was butterflies, tadpoles and other urban wildlife. ‘It was unbelievable,’ says David’s neighbour and schoolmate Sue Larner, ‘there were these huge spaces from the bomb sites, and ruined houses, which seemed like mountains to us, covered in buddleia: they were our playgrounds.’ Derelict buildings at the bottom of Stansfield Road were sinister, yet fragrant – kids scampered around the sweet-smelling blooms with nets, for there were more butterflies around than before or since, while the many pools and ponds in south London’s abandoned bomb sites were packed with tadpoles and newts. Rats also meandered casually through the abandoned buildings, and local kids still remember the sound of mice scurrying around the draughty, un-carpeted Victorian houses at night, as they clutched a hot water bottle for warmth and comfort.

  In those early years, the Jones family kept themselves to themselves. Most local kids played out on the street, but David generally remained with his mum, and Haywood spent his days at Barnardo’s in Stepney. In 1951, David started school at Stockwell Infants, three minutes walk away from home on Stockwell Road, one of Brixton’s main streets. He remembers wetting his pants on the first day; happily, friendly milk lady Bertha Douglas kept a supply of clean knickers for such everyday emergencies. Stockwell Infants’ lofty Victorian building looked severe, with its characteristic aroma of disinfectant and rubber plimsolls, but the staff were mostly loving and kind. ‘It was a sweet, friendly school; small and cosy,’ remembers schoolmate Suzanne Liritis. ‘The teachers used to tell us things like, “you’re special, Jesus loves you”,’ says her friend, Sue Larner.

  Behind the Victorian primness, things were more exotic than they seemed. The headmistress, Miss Douglas, was tall and thin with severe, scraped-back grey hair. This formidable woman lived with Miss Justin, who taught in the Junior School. Only later did Sue and her friends conclude ‘they were obviously a sweet lesbian couple’. If any parents suspected a relationship, they were unconcerned, for as Larner points out, ‘Lots of women had lost their beaus in the war.’ They took the conventional British attitude: exotic sexuality was fine, as long as it was kept behind closed doors. Don’t frighten the horses, as the saying went.

  Most of the families around Stansfield Road were large, with kids invariably accompanied on their adventures by brothers and sisters. Maybe it’s for that reason that few of them remember David. Sue Larner was one of the only children who did notice him; now a sculptor, she recalls noticing the nice-looking, well-scrubbed boy’s skill at art. ‘None of us had much to do with boys, but I do remember showing him a few tricks on the drawing board – and he showed me even more. He showed me how to draw a woman’s bonnet, with the neck, without having to draw a face first. He was good.’

  At weekends, or after school, the five-year-old David’s universe was bounded by the bomb sites on Chantrey Road and the far side of Stockwell Road, where all kids played: turning left on Stockwell Road, he’d immediately reach the school playground; turning right, he’d walk past two sweet shops, the nearest overseen by a kindly, camp gentleman. Further down Stockwell Road was the Astoria: later a famed rock venue – the Academy – whose attractions would include David Bowie, in the fifties it was still a thriving local cinema, with morning matinees featuring cowboy movies, Zorro or Laurel and Hardy. On the way to the cinema, a book-shop sprawled out onto the pavement, filled with comics and kids’ books. There was a large dairy, with horse-drawn carts, but the main feature that dominated Stockwell Road was Pride and Clarke’s, a celebrated motorbike and car showroom that sprawled across a row of maroon-painted buildings, later immortalised in Antonioni’s Blowup. This was where David, the future petrol-head, could ogle BSAs, Rileys and other legendary British bikes and cars.

  As for another intrinsic part of Brixton’s appeal, the sound of calypso and the smell of curried goat, these were things David would only have got a whiff of. For in 1954, Haywood Jones and family packed up for suburbia.

  It was John Betjeman, the beloved poet laureate, who described the suburbs as the home of ‘a new kind of citizen’.
As fitting proof of its futurism, David’s new home, Bromley, was also the birthplace of H. G. Wells. From the 1950s onwards, the suburbs were an object of both horror and aspiration – the upper classes despised the prim, mock-Tudor houses, while the middle classes flocked to such neatly manicured streets. Today, like many English market towns, Bromley is bland and overrun by chain stores: Wells’ birthplace is now a Primark clothing outlet. But in the fifties it was a place in flux – a short train ride from London, but smaller and friendlier. ‘It was actually quite charming,’ says David’s boyhood friend, Geoff MacCormack, ‘even soulful.’

  The move to Bromley marked Haywood’s promotion from board secretary to Public Relations Officer. Haywood’s colleagues regarded him as ‘unassuming but cheerful – good company’. The Jones’ new home, a small but neat Edwardian terraced house in Plaistow Grove – a cul-desac near the railway line – was perfectly in keeping with the family’s modestly respectable status.

  Parts of Bromley were middle-class enclaves –1930s fake Tudor with leaded windows to proclaim their superior status – but poverty was never far away. Children and their parents were encouraged to save 6d a week in the Burnt Ash School Boot Club – to help them buy adequate footwear – and there was no shortage of Dickensian sights. A costermonger, or rag-and-bone man, walked the streets, uttering the ‘Any old iron’ cry familiar from Victorian times. Several streets still boasted gas lighting, and in most parts of Bromley there was hardly a car to be seen parked at the curbside. United Dairies, which had a yard behind Burnt Ash School, still used horses to deliver milk, which was deposited on everybody’s doorstep each morning. Even in the 1950s, electrical supplies were erratic; radios or record players were usually plugged into the light socket in the ceiling, while electric clocks often slowed down in the afternoon, at the time of heavy demand, then would speed up again at night. Few people owned telephones – the Joneses were an exception.

  David joined Burnt Ash School a couple of years after most of his classmates and didn’t particularly stand out during the first few terms. Within a year or so, however, David was part of a small gang, including Dudley Chapman and John Barrance, who lived nearby and were invited to David’s eighth birthday party. Even at this age, many kids noted the cramped interior of the Jones’ modest two-up, two-down house. John Barrance thought the family seemed restrained, quiet. ‘They were perfectly pleasant, but I think they had a “don’t touch this, don’t touch that” attitude.’ David’s friend Max Batten shared more easygoing times with him, enjoying lollipops, chatting with Mrs Jones and, one memorable afternoon, sneaking upstairs and unwrapping Haywood’s service revolver. The two boys played with it furtively, before carefully replacing it in the drawer where it had been concealed.

  Though few of his contemporaries remember it as being anything out of the ordinary, in later years David’s background would be portrayed as dysfunctional – mostly by David himself. In the mid-seventies, when he was in his most flamboyantly deranged phase, he loved to proclaim, ‘everyone finds empathy in a nutty family’. Peggy, in particular, was singled out as the perfect exemplar of repression and eccentricity, but the most damning recollection of others is that she was a snob. In general, it was only the more middle-class children were treated to a welcome and a cup of tea at Plaistow Grove, and David seemed to learn which of his friends should be ushered in the front door and which ones were worthy only to wait at the garden gate. In fairness, it’s possible Peggy simply preferred boys who, like David, were trained to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. John Hutchinson, a well-brought-up Yorkshire lad who enjoyed sitting in the back room with its cosy fireplace and photos on the mantelpiece, maintains that, ‘she was nice’, remembering how in future years she would knit outfits for his young son, Christian. Some of the tensions between Peggy and David were simply due, says Hutchinson, to the generational shift that would soon grip the country, the advent of the teenager and the fact that, as he puts it, ‘it became cool to put down your parents’. In future years, Peggy’s sister Pat bore witness to other tensions within the family. In their first year in Bromley, Terry was apparently left behind in Brixton, which was thought to be more convenient for his job as a clerk in Southwark. Later he rejoined David, Peggy and Haywood at Plaistow Grove, but his presence – before he left to prepare for National Service in 1955 – was brief; not one of David’s friends remember seeing him at the Jones’ house. If parents ‘fuck you up’, as David put it, then undoubtedly Terry suffered more than his brother.

  Peggy’s own friends, such as Aubrey Goodchild, maintain David’s mum was ‘good company. Forthright, though. And conservative in her politics.’ And David wasn’t the only one who felt frustrated or hemmed in by his family. Compared to America, with its consumer boom, movies and comic-book heroes, Britain was staid and its kids felt suffocated. ‘We were shabby,’ says Bromley schoolgirl Dorothy Bass. ‘Everything seemed grey,’ remembers another contemporary, Peter Prickett. ‘We wore short grey flannel trousers of a thick and rough material, grey socks and grey shirts. The roads were grey, the prefabs were grey and there were still quite a few bomb sites around in 1956 – these also seemed to be made of grey rubble.’ Life was predictable, defined by rituals. Some of them were oddly comforting, like the tiny glass bottles of free milk handed out at school every morning at 11 o’clock, the National Anthem that was played on BBC radio and TV before they closed down for the night, or David’s volunteer job at school – putting up the climbing ropes in the playground each morning.

  For its time, Burnt Ash was a modern school, with an emphasis on art – particularly in the form of Music and Movement classes, during which the pupils were encouraged to express themselves, dancing around in their underwear. No one owned a PE kit. In other respects it followed fifties norms: a strict uniform policy, formal assemblies with hymns and the cane for misbehaving boys.

  Headmaster George Lloyd was, in the words of one pupil, ‘interesting’. Slightly portly, and jolly, he took classes in music and reading, individually tutoring his pupils one-on-one. He was ‘gentle’, affectionate with the children, and often sat alongside boys as they read, putting his arm around the favoured pupil. There were a few boys for whom he seemed to have real affection, ‘and one of them,’ says a schoolmate, ‘was David. He definitely did like David.’

  At ten or eleven, David had delicate, almost elfin features, hair cut in bangs, was average in height and slightly skinny. But there was an energy and enthusiasm about him that seemed to win over George Lloyd and others, the beginnings of a knack of charming people. He was a good-looking boy – a fact his female classmates noticed later – and even by his teens he was developing a talent for using charm ‘as a weapon’, says a later confidante, writer Charles Shaar Murray. ‘Even if you’d fallen out, when you met David again you’d be convinced within five minutes that he had barely been able to function in the years he hadn’t seen you. I know for a time, I developed a kind of platonic man-love for him.’

  It was this charm, this ability to be whoever his confidante wanted him to be, that would be the making of David Bowie; it’s what brought him his breaks, the opportunities his ever-active mind worked out how to exploit. In these early days, that charm was not deployed so intensely, or so ruthlessly. Still, ‘he was just, somehow, one of the kids you noticed,’ says schoolmate Jan Powling, ‘bright, quite funny, with oodles of personality.’ He was invariably neatly dressed, more so than his classmates: ‘always well scrubbed, with clean fingernails,’ says Powling. ‘In short, the kind of boy that if you were his mum, you would have been really proud of him.’

  Well scrubbed, polite, every suburban mother’s dream son, the ten-year-old David Jones also stuck to middle-class conventions by enrolling in the local Scout Pack and Church of England choir. ‘We were slung in,’ says fellow cub scout Geoff MacCormack, ‘because that’s what parents did with kids then. We didn’t kick up a fuss, we just got on with it.’ Like Keith Richards, one of Baden-Powell’s unlikeliest champions, the kids la
pped up the outdoors adventures. The weekly pack meets and services became a crucial part of David’s life, because it was there that he met MacCormack and George Underwood, who would prove the most enduring friends of his life. Together, the three donned cassocks, surplices and ruffles for church services, as well as the frequent weddings that would become the future David Bowie’s first paying gigs as a singer. ‘Not only were you paid five shillings – a princely sum in those days,’ says MacCormack, ‘but if the ceremony took place in the week you got a day off school.’

  George Underwood’s family lived on the other side of Bromley, so he was enrolled at a different primary school. Tall for his age, good-looking with an easy, relaxed but passionate air about him, he would become the closest friend of David’s youth. Their relationship would go through some rocky patches, but would be a formative one in their lives. For the glue that held their friendship together was rock ‘n’ roll.

  For most of David and George’s generation there was a ‘Eureka!’ moment, the instant when rock ‘n’ roll exploded into their consciousness: an escape route from their grey world. For both boys, that moment hit in 1955. Towards the end of that year, the movie Blackboard Jungle caused a sensation in the UK, generating widespread outrage as politicians denounced the baleful influence of the rock ‘n’ rollers, like Bill Haley, that it celebrated. Around the same time, Haywood arrived home from Stepney Causeway one evening with a bag full of singles which he’d been given. That night, David played each of the records: Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers. ‘Then,’ he says, ‘I hit gold: “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard – my heart nearly burst with excitement. I’d never heard anything even resembling this. It filled the room with energy and colour and outrageous defiance. I had heard God.’ More than anyone else, Little Richard would be a touchstone, an embodiment of sex, glamour and cranked-up music, of the future David Bowie’s career: ‘I always wanted to be Little Richard – he was my idol.’