become sardonic and sneering, an attitude in which he shared companionship with Paul Buck. ‘That explains how they fitted in with our circle. In our circle they were warm, generous people. There was a sense of superiority amongst all of us of being the coolest people around.’
In a class below Johnny at CLFS was Anne, or Annie, Day, from an army family based in Germany. By the time Annie got to know John in the school choir, he was in the Sixth Form, known as either ‘Woody’ or – another nickname – ‘Johnny Red’. Annie Day became a ‘sort of girlfriend’ of Johnny Mellor: ‘We snogged a bit, but we weren’t full on.’ Perhaps the state of his teeth held him back: ‘When he kissed you he didn’t quite open his mouth. He was always really embarrassed about his teeth.’ There was a considerable age gap between Annie Day and Johnny Mellor; as he matured into the character of Joe Strummer, this became a pattern.
‘We clicked. We just got on well. I think what really cemented our friendship was that every Wednesday afternoon at school, every single class did games. I was excused from games pretty much the whole of the summer. Instead of Joe doing games, he was given free range to use the art department whenever he liked: he was in the Upper Sixth, doing his art A-level, so he used to spend all his time in the art room. At the time he was doing a 27-foot-long painting, and I became his artist’s assistant. I thought he was a really talented artist. I had a conversation with him where I said: “You are going to be really famous and I think you will be famous for your art.”’
For the Christmas celebrations in his final year at CLFS, Johnny Mellor did a series of pop-art-style, comic-strip-like paintings which were put up on display in the school dining-hall. In the manner of Roy Lichtenstein, whose examples of the genre were widely popular, he adorned them with speech bubbles bearing such Marvel-type utterances as ‘BIFF!’ and ‘POW!’ These did not meet with the approval of Mr Michael Kemp, the headmaster. The paintings were only passed for public consumption after each one of them had been altered to the more seasonal ‘Happy Christmas!’
In the Lent edition of The Ashteadian (‘The Journal of City of London Freemen’s School’), in his last year at the school, ‘J.G. Mellor’ is listed as one of the nine boys and eight girls who are school prefects. On page 10, beneath the heading of ‘Dramatic Society’, there is a brief appeal: ‘Again I would like to make a strong plea for material, in the form of songs, sketches or jokes which should be handed into the prefects’ room,’ signed, ‘JOHN MELLOR (Chairman)’. Elsewhere, John Mellor is listed as ‘School cross-country running champion’; surprisingly, as he was hardly the tallest of competitors, on Sports’ Day he also won the high jump. But his approach to school games was flexible; he picked the volleyball teams on the basis of whoever he felt like hanging out and talking with, perfunctorily playing the game whenever teachers turned up.
On Saturday nights he would put on entertainments, ‘off-the-wall things’, said Ken Powell. One such evening was clearly influenced by a parody of The Sound of Music as regularly performed by the then highly popular Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. It proved inspirational for Andy Secombe: ‘I’d never seen anything like it: it was really fantastic, hysterically funny.’ Adrian Greaves recalls Johnny Mellor appearing alongside him in a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘He also had a small role in Sandy Wilson’s Free As Air, with one line, “Dinner is served,” delivered in a French accent.’
In Reaction: The School Poetry Magazine, Number 1 (‘A selection of the poems from Reaction will be printed weekly in the Leatherhead Advertiser,’ the reader is advised.), published early in his final year at CLFS, John Mellor has written a poem entitled ‘Drunken Dreams’ – aptly enough, one might think with the benefit of hindsight. It is short, only four lines long, and telling: ‘And the pebbles fight each other as rocks / And my father bends among them / Two hands out-stretching shouting up to me / Not that I can hear.’
In his obituary of Joe in the Washington Post, Desson Thomson, a writer on the paper, recalled his years spent at CLFS. John Mellor, Thomson recalled, was very unlike the other prefects at the school. He had, he said, ‘a fantastic, surrealistic and absurd sense of humour’. ‘Prefects never gave us the time of day, except to beat us or force us to polish their shoes. John Mellor was the one with the implied twinkle. Always playing pranks, mind games. Not as cruel as the others. Always funny. I suddenly remember that he once wore a T-shirt with a heart on it. It said: “In case of emergency, tear out.” … “Thomson, you’re in for the high jump,” he thundered one night, after catching me talking in the dormitory after lights out. I was shaking. Even Mellor could be like the rest of them, at times. This was going to hurt. Solemnly, he made me stand in front of my bed. Withdrew a leather slipper from his foot and told me … to jump over my bed. End of punishment.’ And every single night John Mellor would make the eleven-year-old Desson Thomson sing the Rolling Stones’ Off the Hook. ‘He made me recite the names of the band members. Who plays bass? Bill Wyman, I told him. What about the drummer? Charlie Watts. Right, he said. Who’s your favourite band? The Rolling Stones! Not the poxy Beatles.’
7
THE MAGIC VEST
1970–1971
Towards the end of the 1960s the ever withdrawn David Mellor began to assert his identity in an unexpected way. An extreme inner change in his personality was externally expressed in the visual world he erected around him. When Richard Evans went round to 15 Court Farm Road not long after David’s eighteenth birthday, he was very surprised: ‘I went into his bedroom and David had completely changed it. It had been just a normal boy’s room and now it had Nazi pictures all around it, swastikas and images of Hitler: he had become extremely extreme. Very strange. It seemed to happen in about a day. He’d gone off on this extreme tangent.’ Perhaps as a rebellion against the fervour of left-wing revolutionary thought, and Ron Mellor’s socialism, David Mellor had joined the National Front, the extreme right-wing British political party. ‘That was the point at which both Joe and I were aware something was going on we didn’t understand. At that point I felt closer to Joe than to David. But what was going on with David, I just didn’t understand.’
David Mellor left CLFS in July 1969; to the consternation of his family and Richard Evans, he had decided to become a chiropodist, treating foot ailments such as corns and bunions. ‘It made no sense. But he insisted. And off he went to college in London.’ ‘David was studying chiropody, Johnny was going to be a cartoonist,’ Iain Gillies was told. In September, David Mellor moved up to London into a hostel on Tottenham Court Road in the West End.
Towards the end of his first year at chiropody college he severed contact with his parents and brother, not telephoning or staying in touch. His mother believed him to be in the grip of depression, which she attributed to anxiety over exams. Johnny Mellor was very concerned for his elder brother. Many an artist is given the dubious blessing of a gift that can be defined simply as intuitive or – more complex and loaded – as ‘psychic’; one theory insists this is the consequence of early trauma and that such predictive insight is an inbuilt defence mechanism. By the early summer of 1970 Johnny Mellor had a presentiment that something about his brother was not right. Then the Mellor family learnt that David had been missing from his hostel for a week. Deeply worried, Johnny Mellor set off with Richard Evans to find his brother. They scoured their old play-haunts, especially a nearby abandoned World War II aerodrome, sprinkled with wartime pill-boxes like the one that sits at the gate to Carnmhor. ‘At that point Joe and I became twins. All I remember is that we knew something had happened to David. At the aerodrome was this pill-box, with a rusty old door, it’s dark and dank. We went in but found nothing.’
On 31 July 1970 David Mellor was found dead on a bench on an island on a lake in Regents’ Park, not far from the hostel in which he was staying. The cause of death was given as aspirin poisoning, following the ingestion of 100 of the tablets. The verdict was suicide.
David’s self-inflicted death cast a pall of depression over the remainder of the lives of Ron and Anna Mellor. They would never recover. Johnny was equally afflicted. He said the worst day of his life was when he had to identify the body of his brother, which had lain undiscovered