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

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СКАЧАТЬ based, hung in the hallway at Carnmhor for many years.

      David, Johnny’s older brother, was ‘much quieter’, remembered Uncle John. ‘Johnny used to wander around with me when I was working. I had cattle and sheep: he was always watching them with me. He’d help with what he called the “hoos coo”, milking it. I never saw him play a guitar. I heard his music often. I saw them on the TV as well. They were oot of my mind altogether – the young people liked them.’ But he remembered a surprise phone-call from Joe in Japan in 1982: ‘He was just blathering away. “I’m looking for a job, teaching rock’n’roll,” he said to me, joking of course.

      ‘He was here for a long while on the Sunday with his wife,’ said Uncle John. ‘He was very reluctant leaving. If anyone had said two words to him he’d have stayed. He said, “I’m bringing my two daughters up in the summertime.” But it never came to pass.’

      The visit in the summer of 1960 marked the first time that Alasdair’s brother Iain had met Johnny. From their home in Glasgow, the Gillies family – with Joe’s four cousins Iain, Anna, Alasdair and Rona – had also gone up to Bonar Bridge, as they did every year without fail, and both families were crammed into Carnmhor. With Johnny, Iain would play in the barn, swinging on the rope and rolling on the piles of corn. Together they caught newts from the stream in jam jars, releasing those still left alive. In a pillbox concrete bunker on the farm they discovered left-over boot polish. ‘We probably showed off too much that we thought we were from somewhere else. Johnny seemed to me to be very lively, funny and inventive. David was quiet. I recall Johnny being the organizer and the one who dictated the plans for our games and general mischief-making. He was a bit pugnacious and always insouciant. On the first day we met at the croft, Johnny started a pebble-throwing fight. It was Johnny and David versus me. I was two years younger than Johnny and three younger than David, so I was a bit concerned at first. As the stone-throwing got more vicious I could tell that David’s heart wasn’t really in it, and it tailed off into a draw. Johnny said, “We won that battle, didn’t we, Dave?” In retrospect, I think, to gee David up, give him succour.’ The lines of battle, claimed Anna, were drawn between the Scots and the English. ‘Because I was a girl I wasn’t even recruited for that,’ she complained. ‘In the living room at the farm,’ said Iain, ‘Johnny recited some scurrilous rhyme that he knew, the subject matter of which concerned coating the crack of a female bottom with jam. He knew all the words and to my six-year-old mind it was very funny, slightly shocking, but exhilarating.’ Clearly by that age Johnny was indicating the mischievous humour within him that would remain all his life. But he was also revealing a slight tendency to bully, an aspect of himself that also never entirely went away. ‘On another occasion at Carnmhor,’ Iain recalled, ‘he convinced me that it would be a great idea to completely strip my sister Anna, who was about five, of all her clothes and hide them upstairs in our Uncle John’s cupboard – nobody would ever find them in there, he said. Anna came downstairs and made her grand naked entrance.’

      ‘I can remember going down the three steps,’ said Anna, ‘where Aunt Anna was drying clothes, and there was a tremendous hullabaloo. They couldn’t find my clothes, which were hidden in Uncle John’s room.’

      Each Sunday morning the adults would take themselves and any girls about the house to endure the tedious sermonizing of Mr McDonald at church. On one of these occasions Johnny and Iain, who had quickly become partners-in-crime, decided to provide an entertaining homecoming greeting for Anna. Taking her favourite doll, they suspended it upside down with pegs in the lobby. She was most distressed. ‘It was all blamed on Johnny,’ she said. ‘Because I was a girl they wouldn’t let me play.’ ‘I was immediately aware,’ added Iain, ‘that for all my six years of worldly experience, cousin Johnny was unlike anyone I had met so far.’

      It was on one of those trips between 1960 and 1963 that Johnny’s family broke their journey up from London by staying for a couple of days with the Gillies family in Glasgow. David was in a bad mood for the duration of their sojourn because he had to sleep in the same bedroom as Anna. ‘He stood there sawing this piece of string up and down on the door handle, which even at my young age seemed pointless,’ she said. In Bonar Bridge itself, ‘Johnny decided,’ said Iain, ‘that since we were going on a two-mile walk to visit our relatives and the road would take us past a Gypsy encampment, that we would need to be fully armed to repel any attack. Johnny told me to explain the seriousness of the situation to my parents; he would do the same with his, and therefore our parents were bound to provide us with the funds for weapons. There was much adult laughter but they complied, and we bought shiny, one shilling pen-knives at the local newsagent’s. I remember Johnny and I debating whose knife had the most style and panache.’ Johnny and Iain managed to arrive without having to draw their pen-knives.

      Anna Mackenzie was born on 13 January 1916, the second child of David and Jane Mackenzie and their first daughter. After attending local schools, she opted for a career in nursing, one of the few choices open for women from families with limited means and one that accorded well with the Presbyterian need to fulfil one’s societal duty. Anna’s older brother, David, had died of peritonitis as a young man. Anna herself was imbued with characteristic Mackenzie qualities: ‘self-reliant, uncomplaining, serene, stoic, ironic, shrewd, determined, engaging, solicitous, and quietly aware of the vicissitudes of life,’ thought Ian Gillies. She was also beautiful.

      Moving to Aberdeen, 120 miles south of Bonar Bridge, Anna received her training at Forester Hill hospital. Fifteen years older than her sister Jessie, she was nursing before Jessie had even gone to school. After Aberdeen, Anna went to Stob Hill hospital on the north-east edge of Glasgow, moving into accommodation nearby in Crowhill Road; Anna was promoted to Sister, a position with much responsibility for one still in her early twenties, a clear indication of her abilities.

      At Stob Hill she met Adam Girvan, a male nurse from Ayrshire. Twice when she travelled home to Bonar Bridge he was with her. In 1940 they were married.

      But as World War II had begun the previous year, Anna Girvan, as she now was, joined the Queen Alexandra Nursing Service; meanwhile, her husband, went into the Royal Army Medical Corps. Although they had expected to do service together, Adam Girvan was sent to Egypt, whilst Anna went to India: it was three years before she saw her husband again.

      Stationed at a large army hospital in Lucknow in northern India, this woman from the north of Scotland suffered from the climate. ‘The heat disagreed with her severely,’ said her sister Jessie. ‘She had prickly heat.’ Struck down with appendicitis, which must have triggered memories of the death of her older brother David, she was successfully operated on. Then she was sent to recuperate in the cooler weather higher up in the hills. ‘In the hospital where she stayed she had a great view of the Himalayas.’

      There, while lancing a boil for him, she met a lieutenant in an artillery regiment in the Indian army called Ronald Mellor who had been called up into the armed forces in 1942.

      Ronald Mellor had been born in Lucknow on 8 December 1916. He was the youngest of four children; Phyllis, Fred and Ouina came before him. His father was Frederick Adolph Mellor, who had married Muriel St Editha Johannes; half-Armenian and half-English, she was a governess to a wealthy Indian family. There was a large population of Armenians in Lucknow. Frederick Adolph Mellor was one of five sons of Frederick William Mellor and Eugenie Daniels, a German Jewess, who had married during the Boer War when his father lived in East Budleigh in Devon. Shortly afterwards they moved to India. The family home in Lucknow was named Jahangirabad Mansion. Later Frederick William Mellor returned to East Budleigh, where he bought a row of cottages that he rented out. His son Bernhardt came to East Budleigh and married the local postmistress. Phyllis, his daughter still lives there.

      Muriel Johannes was one of three daughters of Agnes Eleanor Greenway and a Mr Johannes: her two sisters were Dorothy and Marian. After the early death of her Armenian father, Muriel’s mother Agnes remarried, to a Mr Spiers, with whom she had two further daughters, Mary and Maggie.

      Frederick СКАЧАТЬ