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

But naturally Johnny was not showing any indication of such emotion on his first visit to the school. ‘Loudmouth!’ was Paul Buck’s very first impression of John Mellor when he saw him at the entrance examination. Of all the fifty or so boys there, aged between eight and ten, the short-trousered John Mellor – one of the youngest and smallest present – seemed the only candidate unbowed by the exam worries: he didn’t seem to be taking it seriously, laughing and making cracks. ‘I just remember him as being a kid who wasn’t bowed by having to take an exam – which can be daunting for a nine-year-old kid.’

At the beginning of September 1961, dressed in the navy-blue blazers that bore the CLFS coat of arms on the badge pocket, the red-and-blue striped ties of the school neatly knotted at the collars of their white shirts, the regulation blue caps pulled down over their freshly shorn hair, David and Johnny Mellor bade farewell to their parents. Johnny was just nine – because of where his birthday fell he was almost always the youngest in his year – and David ten and a half. Later, in the days of punk, when such a skewed background counted, Joe would claim he had failed the school’s entrance examination and was only accepted because he had a sibling who was already there. This was not true. Because City of London Freemen’s was a public school, however, this led his punk peers to snipe at Joe. Joe never fell back on an easy let-out clause: that his place at the school was a perk of Ron’s job. The Foreign Office paid for David and John Mellor’s school fees, an acknowledgement of the need for some stability in a diplomat’s peripatetic life. (Part of Ron’s employment package was summer-holiday plane tickets to wherever he was stationed; Ron and Anna would add to this themselves with fares paid out for their sons to visit them every Christmas holiday.) There was a number of boys and girls at CLFS whose parents were diplomats or in the military, ten per cent of the school’s 400 pupils. There were many more day-pupils than boarders at CLFS, which added to the boarders’ sense of embattled remoteness; equally unusually for a British boarding school, CLFS was co-educational.

John Mellor in his regulation school uniform. ( Pablo Labritain )

Later Joe Strummer recalled his years at CLFS guardedly and defensively, not even mentioning its name until October 1981, when he revealed it in an interview with Paul Rambali in the NME. To Caroline Coon he lied for a Melody Maker article in 1976 that the school had been ‘in Yorkshire’. ‘I went on my ninth birthday’ – in fact it was a couple of weeks after his birthday – ‘into a weird Dickensian Victorian world with sub-corridors under sub-basements, one light bulb every 100 yards, and people coming down ’em beating wooden coat hangers on our heads,’ he told the NME ’s Lucy O’Brien in 1986. Paul Buck, who was in the same boarding house as John Mellor, confirmed this. ‘Joe spoke of dark corridors, and basements, and he wasn’t exaggerating. When we started we used to spend most of our time in a dark basement corridor in our boarding 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.