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

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СКАЧАТЬ house mucking about. There was a recreation room, at the top of the building, very cold and uncomfortable. You didn’t go up there because if the seniors needed to get anybody to do anything they’d go straight there. So we preferred the corridor.’

      ‘On the first day,’ Joe Strummer said in an interview with Record Mirror in 1977, ‘I was surrounded and taken to the bathroom where I was confronted by a bath full of used toilet paper. I had to either get in or get beaten up. I got beaten up.’ In a Melody Maker article written in 1979 by Chris Bohn, he continued this theme: ‘I was a dwarf when I was younger, grew to my normal size later on. But before then I had to fight my way through school.’

      During his first year at CLFS, the nine-year-old Johnny Mellor tried to run away from the school with another boy. ‘We got about five miles before a teacher found us. I remember being taken back to school and the vice-headmaster came out and shouted at us for not wearing our caps. I was thinking, “You idiot. Do you really think we’re going to run away with our caps on?” I just couldn’t believe it.’

      Years later Sara Driver, the American film director, told me of how she saw Joe behaving at the end of the 1980s: ‘He was very much wallowing in darkness and talking about growing up and being beaten up at public school when he was a kid and how rough that was.’ As time went by Joe worked out a standard line on his school days: ‘I had to become a bully to survive.’

      Paul Buck dismisses this self-assessment: ‘He wasn’t a bully. He was full of life and very funny.’ Nor, he says, was John Mellor a participant in the fights that are often a feature of coexisting adolescent boys. ‘I might have forgotten or maybe I wasn’t there, but it certainly wasn’t “Oh, Mellor’s in a fight again.” No way. He was boisterous but he wasn’t dominant. He was one of us.’

      As though making a statement to Ron and Anna, Johnny Mellor refused to participate in school-work for much of his time at CLFS; his mystification at having been taken away from his parents seemed to have created a befuddle of stubbornness that simply did not allow him to find any interest in his studies; he had had an exciting and exotic family life which overnight had stopped: why? Like a punishment, he would never post the letter to his parents that he was compelled to write once a week. The self-confident persona seen by Paul Buck at that entrance exam was a front, something that the quietly sensitive and sometimes easily hurt Johnny Mellor had learnt as a social art on the diplomatic cocktail circuit. When Gaby Salter went through Ron Mellor’s papers at 15 Court Farm Road, she found that almost every year until the Sixth Form the headmaster had written to Johnny’s father, apologizing for the school’s failure to make any headway with his academic progress – he flunked his GCE ‘O’ levels, and had to repeat them.

      Although Paul Buck was a year below John Mellor, the boy – who also had an older brother at the school – was to become one of his closest friends, a relationship that continued into the early days of the Clash. ‘He was his best friend,’ the writer Peter Silverton, friends with both of them, confirms of Buck’s relationship to Joe. ‘I saw him and thought, “Oh, I remember you at that entrance exam,”’ said Paul Buck, who formed a double-act with John Mellor, bound together by an absurdist view of life and a common love of music. ‘I remember getting on with him all through school. We were as thick as thieves.’ At first, John would be referred to – as were all junior boys in the school – by his surname, Mellor, frequently contorted into the jokey Mee-lor.

      But how did the other Mee-lor boy, whose personality seemed the diametric opposite of his younger brother, fit into this dog-eat-dog world? ‘My brother and I were sent to school,’ Joe Strummer told Mal Peachey for Don Letts’ Westway To The World documentary, ‘and it was a little strange in my case because my brother was very shy. He was the opposite of me – I mean the complete and utter opposite. The running joke in school was that he hadn’t said a word all term – which was more or less true. He was really shy, and I was the opposite, like a big-mouthed ringleader up to no good.

      ‘I often think about my parents,’ he continued, ‘and how I must have felt about it, because being sent away and seeing them only once a year, it was rather weird. [He misses out the Christmas trips here.] When you’re a child you just deal with what you have to deal with, and it really changed my life because I realized I just had to forget about my parents in order to keep my head above water in this situation. When you’re a kid you go straight to the heart of the matter. There’s no procrastination. I mean, I feel bad now because I was a bad son to them. When they came back to eventually live in England, I’d never go to see them, and I feel bad about that.

      ‘I would say that going to school in a place like that you became independent. You didn’t expect anybody to do anything for you. And that was a big part of punk: do the damn thing yourself and don’t expect anything from anybody.’

      The boy boarders were lodged in four dormitories, according to age. For the younger boys bedtimes were strict: they had to be in bed by 7.30. The seniors did not have an official bedtime. The junior dormitory, where John Mellor first slept, lodged ten boys and two prefects. The dormitory had fifteen-feet-high windows, from which the more adventurous pupils, like Mellor, would climb out onto the building’s flat roof.

      Life for CLFS boarders was regimented: day-pupils had to arrive at 8.45 a.m. for assembly, held in the main hall that doubled as diningroom; by then the boarders already had gathered for ‘Boarders’ Assembly’, at which they had to account for what they would do at the end of that day’s lessons, which started at 9.00. Games or homework were all that were on offer. ‘We usually put down games, as this would get us out of the school buildings,’ said Adrian Greaves, who had joined the school the year after Johnny Mellor, also as a boarder. While a ‘Grub’, as Juniors were known, John Mellor wore short trousers for two years and was so diminutive in stature that he was known as ‘little Johnny Mellor’. At first he remained in the fantasy world of small boys in which role-playing games are a norm; in the grounds of the school Adrian Greaves remembered Johnny and himself making ‘tiny villages of mud huts with twig people. He was very normal – bright, enthusiastic and mixed well.’ As a member of the school’s Boy Scout troop, Johnny Mellor learnt to put up a tent and sleep the night outdoors, a skill he would later harness to enhance his love of the festival outdoor life; his woodwork classes had given him the facility to knock up lean-tos and small sheds. Adrian Greaves recalled how even as a ‘Grub’ Johnny would immerse himself in the world of art that had led to the cowboy painting that hung on the wall at Carnmhor: ‘Johnny was very good at drawing. I can remember as early as 1962 him drawing cartoon-strips on long rolls of paper. They were good stories, cowboy and Indian stuff. Certainly I didn’t expect him to be a musician. He would often be in the art-room. I think the art teacher had a lot of time for him.’

      In 1962 Ron Mellor had been given another overseas posting, to Tehran, the capital of Persia, a Moslem state ruled in a feudal manner by the king-like Shah, whose family had been installed by American oil interests. Ron and Anna drove down to CLFS and spent a Saturday afternoon with their two sons, explaining where they would be living for the next two years. In the interview he gave to Caroline Coon in November 1976, Joe vented anger at the notion of boarding school: ‘It’s easier, isn’t it? I mean, it gets kids out of the way. And I’m really glad I went, because my dad’s a bastard. I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn’t gone to boarding school. I only saw him once a year. If I’d seen him all the time, I’d probably have murdered him by now. He was very strict.’

      The ‘old bear’ had plenty of spirit, however. He decided that he and Anna would get to Persia by driving, taking the boys with them during the summer holiday. While they were traversing Italy, Anna’s suitcase slipped from where it was strapped to the top of Ron’s Renault: they had to go to a children’s shop to find replacement clothes that would fit her slight stature. In Tehran Ron and Anna lived in an embassy compound. But Anna was not at all taken with the country. ‘She didn’t like Tehran,’ said her sister Jessie. ‘She said she had been СКАЧАТЬ