Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

2.
T
HE HIGH STREET in the southern London suburb of
Bromley is full of cell-phone shops, Subway
sandwich outlets and Starbucks coffee bars that
renders it indistinguishable from those of Illinois or of
New Jersey: a retail center, narrow, bright and full of
pedestrians in casual uniform. A double-decker bus
passes, carrying more of them home or to work. And
yet there is a pair of favorite Bromley-ite sons who
have done much to widen the gap between such
humdrum environments and the progression of
humankind into a wildly exciting future. In addition to
being the town where David Jones came of age,
Bromley is also the birthplace of Herbert George
Wells, better known as H. G. Wells. Wells, the father
of science fiction, often referred to as “the man who
invented tomorrow,” was a progressive as well as a
futurist. The Island of Dr. Moreau and The War of
the Worlds upstage his essays and less imaginative
works of fiction, but his novels Ann Veronica and
The Passionate Friends championed the kind of
liberated sexuality that David Bowie and his wife
Angie would come to embrace over a half century
later. Like the Bowies’, the Wellses’ marriage was
open (and he and his wife Isabel also grew apart
and divorced after only a few years). Wells enjoyed
dozens of affairs (frequently with much younger