Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

claim the baby but was rebuffed by Peggy’s mother,
Margaret, as Peggy wasn’t at home at the time.
Rather than waiting, Rosemberg disappeared, his
impatience and urgency surely affected by the
pervasive feelings of doom fast engulfing all of free
Europe.
Distraught, Peggy, like many young British and
American women, went to work in a munitions
factory. She raised Terry with Margaret’s help.
Peggy then entered into a rebound affair with a
factory coworker. This led to another pregnancy, this
time a daughter. Unable to care for both children on
her own, she gave the child over to foster care when
she was three months old and continued to make
bombs and nurse her broken heart. In some ways,
Peggy never got over Jack Rosemberg. He was “the
one that got away,” and this sentiment would foment
a resentment that would compromise the peace and
optimism of Peggy and John’s second-chance home
on Stansfield Road (especially after Terry grew into
a ringer for his estranged biological father).
Compared with the Burns family, David’s father
was from relatively stolid genetic stock. John’s
influence surely had a calming, even a saving effect,
on Peggy and David in both the postwar years as
well as the increasingly chaotic 1960s, when David
rebelled against his class and station and struggled
to find success as a singer and songwriter. John’s
father, Robert Haywood Jones, the source of
David’s middle name, was a boot maker, and his
mother, Zillah Hannah Jones, worked in an industrial