Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I Read Free

Nourse) had initially accompanied her sons Christopher and David to Sunday School classes from a sense of parental obligation, but in the wake of the dissolution of her first marriage, Virgil Hetfield’s calm, thoughtful meditations on suffering and strength in adversity began to chime within her with a profound resonance. Romancesoon blossomed. When the couple married in Nevada on July 8, 1961, Cynthia thanked her Lord and Saviour for delivering unto her a second chance of happiness.
    On the face of it, the newly-weds were very different people. California-born Cynthia was vivacious, creative and liberal-minded , a thirty-one-year-old artist and graphic designer with a love of light opera and musical theatre; five years her senior, Virgil was taciturn, reserved and conservative, a broad-shouldered Nebraska-born grafter whose sole indulgence of frippery came in the form of his meticulously maintained goatee beard. But the couple shared an adherence to the Christian Science belief system, a curious blend of olde worlde Puritanism and superstitious mumbo-jumbo relying heavily upon faith in the healing power of Christ. They viewed their union as being part of God’s preordained plan.
    Situated fifteen miles south-east of Hollywood, Downey at the dawn of the 1960s was, as now, a wholly unremarkable little town, devoid of glamour or intrigue, which suited Virgil and Cynthia just fine. But in the year of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, with civil unrest spreading from state to state as the nascent civil rights movement gathered momentum, few American citizens were immune to escalating national tensions. From the moment baby James left hospital, then, his doting parents sought to cocoon him in cotton wool, as if their blue-eyed angel was made of fine bone china and Downey’s quiet suburban streets were under threat of invasion by barbarians wielding hammers. Where other truck drivers took their offspring on drives across state lines, bonding over AM radio songs as the asphalt rolled beneath their wheels, Virgil Hetfield determined that his son’s world should be safe, sheltered and snow-globe small. Each morning Cynthia clutched James to her side for the three-minute walk to Rio San Gabriel Elementary School; each afternoon she would be in place at its gates as classes discharged,shepherding her boy away from his classmates for the short walk home, lest a single misdirected strand of school yard badinage might despoil her child’s innocence.
    Rio San Gabriel’s curriculum presented an early test to the family’s religious convictions. As Christian Scientists Cynthia and Virgil were duty bound to forswear health education, as their faith contends that the human body is merely the vessel that houses the soul of the believer: consequently, James’s teachers were informed that their son would not be permitted to attend health class, the school’s introductory science course. In place of this, each afternoon the youngster would be required to stand alone in the school hallway, or outside the principal’s office, drawing unwanted attention as passing students wondered aloud as to the nature of the actions that had resulted in this punishment. Word soon got around that young Hetfield was ‘different’, a tag no child welcomes.
    ‘That alienated me from a lot of the kids at school,’ Hetfield recalled. ‘Like when I wanted to get involved with something like football. You needed a physical from a doctor, and I would be like, “I don’t believe in this, I have this little waiver saying I don’t need this.” In a way, it was going against the rules, which I kinda like. But as a child, it really fucked with me as far as being different from other kids. You wanna be part of the gang, you wanna do the things they do.’
    Virgil and Cynthia were largely too preoccupied to notice James’s growing isolation from his peers and the attendant anxiety this engendered. With the arrival of their first daughter, Deanna, in