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Mick Jagger and Keith Richards about World War II
Mick: “A lot of children, like in the United States, don’t remember the real horror of World War II, because they never had to, as they do in Europe and Russia and so on. I’m not saying America didn’t have a terrible experience, but it never came home to them that way. You had rationing and shortages, and people got killed and coffins came home. But you didn’t have the experience of the block opposite being destroyed when you got up in the morning.” Keith: “Yeah. Today, if I’m walking down a hotel corridor and somebody has the TV on and it’s playing one of those blitz movies, English war movies, and I hear that siren, the hair goes up on the back of my head and I get goose bumps. I don’t know if it’s a memory – it’s a reaction, something I picked up in the first 18 months of my life… My first actual memory was after the war was over – not more than a few months looking up in the sky and pointing and my mom saying, That’s a Spitfire. After that, I guess the memories start when I was 3 or 4 years old; I remember London, huge areas of rubble and grass growing. World War II went on there for another 9 years after it finished everywhere…
…When I first went to school, for months and months, you got a medicine bottle of concentrated orange juice to prevent scurvy – that was the only time I saw it… It took us to 1953 or 1954 to get a new house after the old one got blown up by a V1, a buzz bomb… We went up the road and lived with my auntie. Dartford is a few miles from the Thames. We used to go down the river and play in these machine-gun bunkers where weird hobos would be living; that was our playground.”
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