Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ beyond belief, toed the familiar line, Ron going along with this. Anna’s family in Scotland had noted that the previous year the Mellors hadn’t been in touch, failing to send their habitual Christmas cards. ‘As a small boy and later, I remember my mother reading out the greetings from the Mellors’ annual Christmas card, always from somewhere far away and overseas,’ said Iain Gillies. ‘I enjoyed this seasonal ritual. My mother was puzzled that we had not received a Christmas card from the Mellors in December 1970. She commented on this.’

      It was not until over two months later, when Iain Gillies hitch-hiked down to London to check out an art school he was thinking of attending, that the story came out. ‘I went to London to apply to St Martin’s School of Art in early March 1971. I hadn’t seen Aunt Anna and Uncle Ron and cousins David and Johnny in seven or eight years and I wanted to reconnect with them. In the mid-afternoon of the 9th of March 1971 I went to their house and found no one at home. Their neighbour asked me what I wanted. I told her who I was and she said I’d better come across to her house.

      ‘On her front step I mentioned that Uncle Ron and Aunt Anna had two sons, my cousins. “They’ve only got one son now,” she said. I asked what she was talking about. In a very dramatic and hushed voice she said, “David … he took his life.” Those exact words. She invited me into her house where I sat stunned for maybe an hour or so, my mind flicking back to my memories of David. For a few moments I thought she might be deranged and was making this up. Eventually Ron arrived home next door. Ron thanked his neighbour for her hospitality to me.

      ‘Ron was welcoming. As we went into his house Ron said that his neighbour was very kind but I should not start thinking they’re all like that. Meaning, I suppose, the population of the Home Counties. Ron and I sat in the living room. He surmised very quickly that I had been told about David. We then left to collect Anna from her nursing job at the local hospital.

      ‘Anna was surprised to see me. She was friendly and said it was a welcome surprise to have me visit. She told me they had been in contact with David a few days before he died, saying they were going to meet him somewhere in London, but he called to say he had to return to his hostel to pick up a bag. Their meeting didn’t take place. Within five to ten minutes Anna said she couldn’t talk about it any more. Later that evening Aunt Anna said that David had liked to spend time out in “no man’s land”, the bushy area just over their back garden fence. It was indeed a difficult time. I felt very sad for them and all of us. They told me what John was doing. Aunt Anna and Uncle Ron had some charmingly detailed naïf paintings that Johnny had done in Malawi. They said Johnny had enjoyed being there and meeting the people who lived in the mud hut dwellings that were in his paintings. Uncle Ron told me that David had found Malawi to be “troubling”. I stayed the night in David’s old bedroom, which had remained as David had left it. I stayed awake far into the night.’

      Ron and Anna Mellor’s ghastly difficulties over David did not end with his death. Acting with its characteristic blend of insensitivity and profound hypocrisy about the death of one of its parishioners, the local Anglican church at first refused to bury David as he had committed the sin of suicide. ‘Anna had to fight to get David buried,’ remembered Richard Evans. ‘Eventually he was buried in Warlingham.’ Along with Keith Wellsted, a friend of Johnny Mellor with whom he would sometimes stay at half-term at his parents’ home in Suffolk, Ken Powell from CLFS went to the funeral with Johnny to offer support. Some twenty or so mourners were present. ‘I’m sure it affected him, but he wasn’t in pieces,’ said Ken. ‘Whereas Joe was quite ebullient, his brother wasn’t. I can remember going to the house after the funeral, thinking how dreadful it must be for his parents. At the house the sadness was all-pervading.’

      Iain Gillies told me Joe had shown him David’s suicide note: ‘It was the evening of Anna’s funeral, about the 3rd or 4th of January 1987, that Joe and I went up to the loft at Court Farm Road. He passed me a few things to look at and then a piece of folded paper. It was David’s suicide note. I had not known of its existence and I was very surprised at Joe showing it to me. I read it silently, sighed, and handed it back to him. Neither of us said a word about it. We went back downstairs. Thinking back to that day, 9 March 1971, when I was first sitting alone with Uncle Ron in his living room, he did say something about David leaving a note. By the time Joe showed it to me sixteen years later I had forgotten about this and also presumed, perhaps naïvely, that it would have been destroyed. I was asked not to repeat its contents.’

      Two weeks after David’s suicide, his younger brother went on an already planned holiday with Paul Buck. You can imagine the hushed, tearful conversations between the desperate Ron and Anna: ‘Best for him to get out of the house, let’s try and let things get back to normal.’

      Johnny Mellor had booked two ‘berths’ for four nights, beginning on 13 August 1970, for £1 at the Cuckmere camping site near Newhaven in East Sussex. ‘He rang me up and he said his brother had committed suicide and I was shocked,’ said Paul Buck. ‘I think he just wanted to blank off from it. He didn’t really talk about it on that camping trip. Except for one time he came back to the tent and he said, “I’ve just washed with my dead brother’s soap.” I don’t know whether he felt guilty or not. People do, don’t they, family?’

      Johnny ‘Woolly’ Mellor outside a shop in Horam, East Sussex, in 1970. (Pablo Labritain)

      The two teenagers spent a nice time on their camping trip, hitch-hiking the sixty or so miles to the south coast and extending the four days for another three. (‘We weren’t that grown up because I rang my mum and asked if she minded if we stayed a bit longer.’) Yet Paul Buck was aware of the shadow of death that lay over the holiday: ‘Certainly at the time he was in denial. They turned their backs on what had happened to David, but not in a callous way. While we there, all the time we heard this Joni Mitchell line, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone,” from Big Yellow Taxi. That bothered him.’

      There is a picture Paul has of Johnny on the shoreline, looking happily miserable, seeing the irony of the mistake he has just made: he has run into the sea, straight into a submerged boulder, and banged his shin. There’s another one with a nameless pretty girl who had been at CLFS and happened to be staying on the campsite. Johnny and Paul had a little hash with them, and in the evenings would drink in the local pubs and try and get off with girls.

      Did Joe take on some of his brother’s distant role when David committed suicide? People with dead siblings frequently assume something of the role of the deceased. So it is almost certain that whoever Joe was before David died, he had a bit of his brother in him after his death; and at the same time, the death of David represented losing a large part of himself.

      Moreover, considering the extent to which David Mellor was influenced by the National Front and Nazism, is it any surprise that Joe Strummer should have turned so resolutely against fascism? From the time in 1978 that the Clash appeared at the Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park, before an audience of 80,000 people, their front-man was almost indelibly associated with the side of punk rock that had disassociated itself from those flirtations with swastikas espoused by Sid Vicious and Siouxsie. Joe changed that image of punk, becoming rather righteous in his role of tragic, vulnerable spokesman. To what degree, we may ask, was this motivated by his brother’s desperate end?

      Although it could hardly compensate for the tragedy Johnny Mellor and his parents had undergone, at least there was some good news that summer.

      Although his progress in his Advanced level GCEs had been as stumbling as when he had sat his ‘O’ levels – he had passed Art with an ‘E’ grade, the minimum, been given the consolation prize of a further ‘O’ level pass (one step better than a fail) for the English Literature ‘A’ level paper, and failed History – he had been accepted on the strength of his portfolio СКАЧАТЬ