Chris Salewicz - Redemption Song - The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer

The social whirl of diplomatic functions meant, as it did for many of the embassy staff, that alcohol became a staple part of Ron and Anna Mellor’s diet. Ron was always partial to a gin and tonic, and was fastidious that it was served with a slice of lemon. Anna had a wardrobe of cocktail dresses, and forced herself to learn bridge, which she secretly detested. ‘But that was what you had to do as an embassy wife,’ pointed out Maeri, another of Joe’s Mackenzie cousins. Anna would laugh scathingly to her sisters about a publication called Diplomatic Wives , the in-house magazine of embassy spouses. ‘Anna wouldn’t complain. She wasn’t the complaining type. But I don’t think she liked Cairo,’ said her sister Jessie. As they grew older her two sons David and John learnt to serve drinks and cutely play the parts of junior waiters. A story that attained the status of legend within the Mackenzie family told of how when the boys were taken by Anna Mellor to get a haircut in Cairo, Johnny wriggled so much that the Arab barber became so angry and upset that he stuck his head under a tap to cool down.

In 1956, two months before the invasion of Suez by British and French troops, Ron Mellor was transferred again, to Mexico City. Of all Ron’s overseas postings this was where Anna was happiest; in a photograph of her with her two sons in Mexico City she wears curved Sophia Loren-like sunglasses that emphasize her film-star beauty: she looks impossibly glamorous, rather like the sort of girls you would find backstage at a Clash gig. As though to underline his wife’s sophistication, Ron bought a boat-sized 1948 Cadillac in which to transport his family.

Not long after they had arrived in Mexico City, the area was struck by a devastating series of earthquake tremors. One night while they were having dinner the lights started swinging back and forth; Ron and Anna ran out of the house carrying David and John and sat in the middle of the lawn away from any swaying structures. At first they didn’t notice John when he slipped away. ‘I remember the ’56 earthquake vividly,’ he told me, ‘running to hide behind a brick wall, which was the worst thing to do.’ When the earthquake tremors seemed to have calmed, Anna attempted to bring some calm and normality back into the boys’ lives by bathing them together. Suddenly the water started to slop from side to side as the tremors returned. That night Ron and Anna moved the boys’ beds into their room, so they could all die together.

It was in Mexico City, however, that Ron Mellor developed an ulcer; and he was troubled by the altitude. In 1957 the Mellor family were shipped back to London, and Ron may have had an operation.

Before 1957 was over, the Mellor family again was on the move overseas: Ron was posted to work with the British embassy in Bonn, the then capital of West Germany. ‘I was eight when I came back to England, after Germany,’ Joe Strummer told me, forty years later. ‘Germany was frightening, man: it was only ten years after the war, and what do you think the young kids were doing? They were still fighting the Germans, obviously. We lived in Bonn on a housing estate filled with foreign legation families. The German youth knew there was a bunch of foreigners there, and it was kind of terrifying. We’d been told by the other kids that if Germans saw us they would beat us up. So be on your toes. And we were dead young.’

Aware of the need for some kind of stability in the lives of his family members, Ron Mellor decided that he must establish a permanent home in England, his adopted country; his sons lost a new circle of friends with every overseas move. One consequence of this seemed to be Johnny’s almost acute sense of self-reliance and self-awareness. But for David, Ron and Anna’s eldest son, the constant break-up of friendships, accompanied by that nagging wonder of whether everyone would always disappear from his life with such sudden ease, seemed to be having a negative effect: increasingly quiet, he often seemed lost in thought. This struck a nerve with Ron: his memories of his own traumatic childhood would rise when confronted by the hushed sense of ‘otherness’ that floated about David. In turn it was hard for sensitive David to be unaffected by the way this unhappy childhood was so deeply etched in his father’s being; it was as though they were cross-infecting each other with indeterminate but undeniable suffering. Yet David showed no evidence of Ron Mellor’s tendency towards volatile mood swings. ‘Ron loved being able to just reminisce,’ said Gerry King, Joe’s paternal cousin, remembering her visits to the Mellors. ‘But he would go into moroseness. I felt it once or twice – some pity. I think he’d had such a sad life, really.’

Ron Mellor’s plan to buy a house in London hit a problem: he had no savings, so where could he raise the money for a deposit on a property? There was a potential solution. In India he had always been the favourite of his half-aunt Mary, who had married a rich Pakistani man by the name of Shujath Rizvi, and had no children of her own. (The somewhat formidable Mary Rizvi lived in a state of pasha-like splendour, with one room in her palatial home reserved simply for her Pekinese dogs.) Ron mustered up his courage and wrote a letter to his half-aunt: could he borrow £600 for the deposit on a house? Aunt Mary immediately gave him the money. Back in London in 1959 for what he knew would be a three-year stint in Whitehall, Ron Mellor made a down-payment on a three-bedroomed single-storey house just outside Croydon in the south-east of London. The property, at 15 Court Farm Road in Upper Warlingham in Surrey, was being sold for £3,500, cheap even by property prices of the day, a reflection of its dolls-house size. A cul-de-sac, Court Farm Road wound round the side of a steep hill that formed one side of a valley that sloped down to the main Godstone Road. Located on a corner of Court Farm Road, No.15 was the last of four identical bungalows, built in the 1930s and – partially due to their hillside perch – having something of the appearance of Swiss mountain chalets, a look that distinguished them all the more from the larger detached and semi-detached houses that made up the rest of the street.

When the Mellor family moved into the bungalow, David and Johnny were sent to the local state primary school in nearby Whyteleafe. Joe Strummer would later seem to dismiss the home bought by his father as ‘a bungalow in south Croydon’. But this is exactly what it was; for once he was not disguising his past. Presumably dictated to by the maxim that location is everything, Ron Mellor had bought what was essentially a miniature version of the adjacent properties in the neighbourhood. In fact, it was typical of English houses built in the 1930s, and – as did much of Britain at the beginning of the 1960s – it still had much flavour from that decade. Through the black-and-white front door was a hallway-like corridor: to the left was Ron and Anna’s bedroom. Opposite, on the right-hand side, was a small kitchen whose window faced the road; further along on the left was David’s bedroom and the bathroom; and on the right was the sitting room and Johnny’s small bedroom. ‘They never spent a lot of time worrying about pretty carpets or furniture. It was just kind of bricks and mortar and that’s where they were,’ said a visitor. On display at 15 Court Farm Road were exotic artefacts gathered at Ron’s various international ports of call: bongo drums, a wooden framed camel’s saddle, pouffes made of Persian leather. Although a television did not appear at first, there was a large radiogram of the type later featured on the sleeve of the ‘London Calling’ single. ‘My parents weren’t musical at all,’ Joe later told Mal Peachy. ‘They had sort of Can-Can records, from the Folies Bergère, and that was about it. Maybe a few show tunes like “Oklahoma”, that sort of thing. I remember hearing Children’s Favourites [a request show broadcast at nine o’clock every Saturday morning] on the BBC, things like “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford.’