Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer. Chris Salewicz
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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 Adolph Mellor, Joe’s grandfather, worked in a senior administrative position for the Indian railway, but died of pleurisy in 1919, when Ronald was still a toddler. Following his death his widow married George Chalk, who became Ronald Mellor’s stepfather, but Chalk disappeared to South Africa. Joe’s grandmother Muriel Mellor was not without her problems. A social whirl was part of the colonial norm in India; excessive drinking was an accepted part of that world, and she was an alcoholic, taking out her drunken rages on her children. Gerry King, a former teacher who lives in Brighton, is the daughter of Phyllis, the eldest of Ron’s siblings: ‘I was told that the mother was alcoholic, and used to beat them up. So my mother protected all four of them, and they used to hide from her.’ In 1927 Muriel Mellor died, largely because of her addiction to drink. (In 1999 Joe Strummer told me that both his grandparents on his father’s side had been killed in an Indian railway accident. When I learned what the truth was, I suspected him of some Bob Dylan or Jim Morrison-like obfuscation of his past. But no, said Gaby, the mother of his two children: ‘Joe really thought that was the truth. All the information that came down to him about his father’s life in India was so befuddled, and he was always trying to find out what the real history was.’) Joe’s father Ronald Mellor and his brother and two sisters were then brought up by Agnes Spiers, although Mary, her daughter, took a keen interest in helping to raise the children. ‘Ronald was the favourite with his half-Aunt Mary,’ said Jonathan Macfarland, another cousin on Joe’s father’s side. Ronald and Fred were educated at La Martinière College in Dilkusha Road in Lucknow, a revered Indian school. After La Martinière Ronald Mellor moved on to the University of Lucknow.
After Mrs Adam Girvan met Lieutenant Ronald Mellor, they fell in love. Ron, who by the end of the war had been promoted to Major, was great company, very funny, sensitive, intelligent and articulate; his Indian upbringing and racial mix made him seem unusual to the woman with a pure Highlands bloodline; and when she was with him her natural beauty was only emphasized by the glow of love that surrounded her like a halo. ‘Ron was very exotic, and I can see why Anna was captivated,’ thought Rona, Alasdair Gillies’s twin sister. Anna’s heart was touched by the subtly lingering sense of sadness that Ron had carried with him ever since the death of his difficult mother; some felt that the fact that he couldn’t even remember his father accounted for his faintly other-worldly air of permanent bewilderment.
They decided to make their lives together. But there was a problem: Anna was still married. Divorce in those days was very rare, and not in the vocabulary of the Bonar Bridge Mackenzies. All the same, Anna communicated her intentions to Adam Girvan. When she returned to the United Kingdom at the end of the war, they divorced: Anna discovered that as soon as Adam had learned of her relationship with Ron Mellor, he had cleaned out their joint bank account.
‘I remember my father wasn’t very chuffed about the divorce,’ said her sister Jessie. ‘But Mum didn’t say much.’ But would you have expected her to? As Jessie pointed out, ‘You didn’t even talk about pregnancy. Granny was very, very strict.’ Anna went up to Bonar Bridge and made peace with her parents. In that Highland way of keeping intimate matters close to your chest, the divorce was kept secret from everyone, including her children. ‘My mum told me Anna had been married before, but she never told my dad,’ Rona described a typical piece of Mackenzie behaviour. ‘I wasn’t surprised about it – things happen,’ said Uncle John, customarily phlegmatic. Joe didn’t learn about it until he was in the Clash. ‘I’ve just found out that my mum was married before,’ he said, tickled. ‘She seems to have been a bit of a goer.’
Ron