Jo Wood - It's Only Rock 'n' Roll - Thirty Years with a Rolling Stone

If there was one cloud on the otherwise blissfully clear horizon of my childhood, it was school. I hated it with a passion, and would do anything I could to avoid it, until the magical day when I could finally escape at 16. The only reason I learnt to count was so that I could work out how many days I had to endure before I could leave. All that ‘sit up straight, don’t talk, learn this’ just didn’t sit with my dreamy, romantic nature. Even at my primary school, Swan Mead, I would often sneak home for beans on toast, with Mum as my willing accomplice: ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she would say. ‘You can stay and have lunch at home.’ Dad never found out because he was at work.

It was a good job he didn’t: I don’t think he’d have been pleased. Dad was in charge of learning – and he was quite the disciplinarian. I remember him shouting at me because I could not (or would not) understand how to tell the time. When I was struggling to learn my times-tables he wrote them out on rolls of wallpaper and stuck them all around my bedroom so when I lay in bed I could memorize them. I didn’t. Maybe one of the reasons I rebelled against school was because he tried to push me so hard.

Dad and I had a wonderful relationship but, God, he was strict. I think that came from his father, who was extremely tough with him, and Dad’s two years’ national service with the RAF after leaving school. You crossed him at your peril. When I was seven I sneaked a tin of drinking chocolate out of the kitchen cupboard. Dad discovered me eating spoonfuls of it and I got the wooden spoon, seven strokes on my bum, as you always got the same number as your age. Another time, my brother Paul found a crowbar – he was a cheeky little boy and very funny, but always up to mischief. Well, I came round the corner to see him smashing it on the vicarage wall and freaked. ‘Dad’s going to kill us!’ We all got the wooden spoon that time, even though I hadn’t done anything. After another misdemeanour we had to choose our own stick from a tree and then he hit the back of our legs with it. It was absolutely terrifying, the prospect of knowing that this awful thing was about to happen to you – and there was no way you could get out of it.

We were all scared stiff of Dad, even the four-legged family members. I remember once he found Mum’s cat eating food off the kitchen work surface. He picked Fusty up and threw him out of the window. That cat never went near him again. Dad was strict with us, but I learnt discipline, politeness and manners. I had the utmost respect for him.

* * *

I love animals but I’m not good at keeping pets. When I was little I had a rabbit called Snowy, but I soon got bored of taking care of him and forgot to feed him, so Dad told me he was giving him to the postman who lived down the road. ‘Okay.’ I shrugged. After a few days I started to miss Snowy and his soft white fur, so I trotted down the road and knocked on the door.

The postman’s wife answered. ‘Hello, Josephine.’ She smiled at me kindly.

‘I’ve come to see Snowy.’

She looked confused.

‘My rabbit?’ I said.

‘Oh, yes. I’m afraid we’ve eaten him, dear.’

From then on I vowed never to have another pet. I wasn’t going to go through that again.

* * *

Although they were always very sociable, my parents didn’t really drink – apart from maybe a few at Christmas – and Dad never smoked. I remember watching Ready, Steady, Go on telly – I must have been about 10, and the Rolling Stones came on. Dad looked on disapprovingly. ‘Disgusting lads.’ He tutted into his tea. You can imagine how he felt when, years later, I brought one of those very same lads home to Sunday lunch – although by that time I’d caused him and Mum so many anxious, sleepless nights that my dating a rock star probably didn’t seem so terrible, after all.

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