So I rang Helen, who was in Lincolnshire, where her parents live. ‘Are you sitting down?’ I said. ‘I’ve got some bad news.’ I told her what the doctor had said. The phone went quiet. Then I heard sobbing.
‘This can’t be right’ she said.
‘Well, unfortunately it is,’ I replied.
Helen was crying on one end of the phone; I was crying on the other end. When push came to shove, I was discovering, none of us are as brave as we think we are. After a while, we pulled ourselves together, said goodbye and I drove home to my house in North Yorkshire. Three hours later, Helen arrived. She’d dropped off Reece with her sister. They’d all been in tears. And then Helen had driven over to Teesside, weeping all the way. When she walked in the side door to the kitchen, I crumpled, falling into her arms.
‘I wish it was me and not you,’ Helen said. ‘The kids need you.’
Typical Helen, I thought. Always thinking of others before herself. If only my mother had been made of the same stuff.
No one in my family ever explained to me why my mother left, but I got plenty of excuses. One neighbour’s verdict was that ‘all your mother ever wanted was to be taken out, but your dad would never do it.’ This gossip insisted that if my auld fella had taken Mam to the Boy Scouts hut at the end of the street, where they held old-time dances on a Friday night, then she’d still be at home, cooking my dinners.
Jenny, who lived next door, never got over it. ‘You were everything to her,’ she said. ‘It was such a shock when she walked out because she adored you. She never let you out of her sight.’
While the rest of the family never forgave my mother for leaving, my sister was more lenient, insisting that my father pushed Mam out of the house, even though my mother didn’t want to go. Amidst all this, I tried to piece together my own understanding.
A few months after Mam left, life was starting to settle in down Essex Avenue when a letter landed on our doormat. Mam was in Pontefract, it said, working at the Bassett’s Liquorice All-sorts factory and living with a man called Norman Trevethick. I’d been suspicious of Trevethick – the spelling of which my mother later described as ‘thick on the end, but I’m not’ – ever since he came to our house to repair the washing machine. I thought Trevethick was a slimeball and I was never able to work out what my mother saw in him. With his big round face and greasy hair, I thought he looked like a dirty old man, the kind of dirty old man that fixed the washer, then buggered off with it and me mam.
About a year after Mam left, my parents divorced. It made the front page of the local rag, the Evening Gazette. In those days nobody got stabbed or was left hanging in an alleyway, there was less crime generally and most marriages lasted, so a divorce was big news. But to me, living in a house where doors were slammed and ornaments were thrown, it seemed just a normal thing. My parents probably had their moments when they had a fuck on the carpet in front of the fire when my sister and I were out of the house, but otherwise it wasn’t so much the good old days as just the days. In the end, only my mother and father knew why Mam left and they took it with them to their graves.
As a consequence, I have no childhood memories of my mother. And even today, more than fifty years later, I feel robbed. I used to see other kids coming home from school to their mothers cuddling them, giving them cakes and playing with them out in the garden. And I wanted that.
My father did a good job in Mam’s absence. He looked after me, took me to football matches, held my hand and sat in the garden with me, talking things through, but he couldn’t entirely replace a mother. Aunt Connie used to give us scones and buns, my friend John Clark’s mum used to bake us cakes, and Jenny, who lived next door, kept an eye on my sister and me, but I pined for a mother’s love. Without it, I simply became a nuisance. By the time I was nine, I was a complete pain in the arse who thought that if I wanted something all I had to do was steal it. ‘If you can get owt for nowt, give us a shout,’ I would say to my mates.
Every December, shortly before Christmas, my mates and I would walk through the underpass beneath the railway lines and into Slaggy Island, from where we’d take the trolleybus ‘over the border’ into Middlesbrough for a bit of shoplifting. We’d pinch presents for all our friends and family, who on Christmas Day couldn’t understand how we managed to afford such nice presents and wondered why all of them had neither box nor guarantee.
‘Ooh, that’s lovely. That’s beautiful, that,’ they would say.
‘Yeah, but it was so heavy I threw away the box,’ I’d reply.
One year I got stopped just as I was leaving Hamilton’s Music Store with four vinyl LPs up my jumper. The owner bundled me into the back of his car and took me to South Bank police station, where I was hauled into a room and told to ‘shut up and wait’ until a policeman was ready to see me. Thinking they might search me, I unzipped my anorak, pulled the four LPs out from underneath my jumper and stashed them behind the radiator. A few minutes later, the door swung open and a policeman walked in. ‘We have reason to believe you’ve been shoplifting,’ he said.
‘Me?’ I said. ‘Not me.’
They searched me and, of course, found nothing. I was released and thought nothing more of it until about ten years later when my cousin Lee was going out with a girl called Dorothy. When I heard that Dorothy’s mother was a cleaner at South Bank police station, I told her about my brief detainment when I was twelve.
‘Well!’ Dorothy’s mother said. She looked at me and stood up. ‘Well, I don’t believe it. Do you know, I found them!’
‘You never?’ I said.
‘Yes. You left them in one of the detective’s rooms upstairs, didn’t you? Was it you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, they’d melted,’ Dorothy’s mum said. ‘I found four LPs stuck together in a big lump.’
Most of my thieving was less risky. In those days, there was a threepenny deposit on lemonade and pop bottles. One of our favourite scams was to pinch empty bottles from the yard behind the local shop, take them into the shop and collect the deposit. We’d wait ten minutes for the shop owner to take them out the back and stack them neatly in a wooden crate, then we’d climb over the wall, pinch them all over again and claim the deposit a second time. On a good day, this never-ending con could net us a small fortune.
I even stole from Edmond Saul, my best friend at the time. Edmond was an only child and his dad and mam spoilt him wicked. His bedroom was rammed to the rafters with toys and I would go round to his house to stare at them with envy. More than anything, I coveted his massive army of little lead soldiers and cannons, all carefully painted in regimental colours. So each time I visited Edmond’s house I’d pinch a soldier or two, or maybe a cannon. Over the months, his army got smaller, while my army was forever attracting new recruits. ‘These are all right, aren’t they?’ Edmond said, surveying the troops in my bedroom one day. ‘Where d’you get ’em?’
‘Er … my dad saw yours, so he went out and bought them,’ I said. Edmond never suspected a thing and I had no guilty conscience. When a thieving little bastard wants something, no thought is given to the consequences.
By the time I was ten, Mam had moved to Blackpool and taken my sister Barbara to live with her, leaving just my father and me in the house in Essex Avenue. I’d become a full-blown house-husband to my father and I was struggling to make ends meet. Thieving was the only way I’d get my hands on the things that other kids took for granted. And it was the only way of finding some kind of relief from domestic drudgery. I’d get home from school at a quarter to four and rush around the house, vacuuming and cleaning so it would be neat and tidy for my auld fella coming home. I’d put something on, a pie in the oven or beans on toast or maybe egg and chips. Jenny Robinson, next door, who was the closest thing I had to a mother, would come by with some vegetables, but mainly it was chips. Sausages and chips; egg and chips; bacon and chips; pie and chips; beans and chips – it always had chips on the end of it.
With Dad’s tea in the o
ven, I’d run up to the end of the street and wait for him returning from work at four-thirty, when I’d see him in the distance, wobbling up Evans Road on his bike. When he reached the corner of Essex Avenue, I’d grab his hand and shout: ‘Dad, Dad, Dad. Gizza tan.’
‘Have you been a good lad?’ he’d shout before pulling me on to the back of the bike for a ride.
‘Yeah, I’ve been a good lad,’ I’d say. Usually I hadn’t.
While Dad was eating his tea, I’d go upstairs, make the beds and clean the bathroom. Then Dad would say ‘Jenny’s going down the launderette’ or ‘Jenny’s going to wash the sheets’ and I’d fold up the washing and take it over to Jenny’s house. I also kept the garden tidy, cutting the grass, trimming the edges and weeding the borders. I had my chores to do and I did them without moaning, otherwise I’d have got a backhander. For Dad, life went on as before. He still worked at Dorman, Long, he still went to the club and he still had someone to wash and cook for him. He’d replaced Mam with me.
Just as he had done with Mam, Dad would take me to the Lyric cinema – we called it the bughole because of all the bugs in the seats. Dad was a cowboy fan and we’d cheer whenever James Stewart, Roy Rogers or John Wayne came on the screen and we’d boo when the baddies appeared. In the summer he’d take me to Blackpool, where in those days the beaches were packed and the boarding houses were smart, with beautiful curtains and clean wallpaper.
And like my mam, I’d sit at home alone most evenings while Dad went to the club, waiting for him to come home with some scran. On New Year’s Eve one year I was sat in the house at about half past eleven, shivering because there was two feet of snow outside and we didn’t have any coal, and listening to everybody knocking on everybody else’s door, exchanging bits of fruit cake, putting coal on the fire and singing Happy New Year, when there was a knock on the door. It was Jenny Robinson. ‘I think you’d better come with us, Roy,’ she said. ‘It’s your dad.’
Outside there were snowdrifts everywhere, so I put my wellington boots on and walked with Jenny and Harry Hardy, another neighbour, to the corner of Essex Avenue and Evans Road. There was our auld fella, singing at the top of his voice, lying in a foot of snow. He’d fallen over the fence, landed in a snowdrift and couldn’t stop laughing. What a job we had to pick him up.
My auld fella’s boozing was starting to catch up with him. He never had a day off work for illness, but he was suspended a few times for drinking. Dad would sneak out of the mill at twelve o’clock and run down to the pub for two or three pints. It wasn’t allowed, but the Queen’s Head, the Bottom House and the other pubs near the works gate were always packed at dinner time. They were so close that my dad and his mates could hear the wailing siren sounding the beginning of the afternoon shift and make it back inside before other men had returned to their workplace from the canteen.
Dad spent almost all his money on drink. He’d usually give me enough money to keep us in food, but beyond that I didn’t have a penny to scratch my arse, so I was the scruffiest, most raggedy-arsed kid at my school, with one pair of shoes and trousers that were always ripped. My attendance record at Sir William Worsley, the local school, was poor, but when I did turn up I worked hard at being popular. I was good at geography and my best subject was art. At that time my ambition was to be a cartoonist.
‘Stay back, Vasey,’ my art teacher, Mr Nee, would often say at the end of a lesson.
‘What, sir? I’ve done nowt wrong, sir?’ I’d say.
‘That’s Robbie Hutchinson’s. You drew that,’ he’d say. ‘That’s Raymond Bassett’s. You drew that. That’s Billy Parfitt’s. You drew that.’
I did it simply because I wanted to help out my mates. They couldn’t draw, so they’d pass their papers over to me and I’d happily do it for them. But Mr Nee wasn’t daft and I often got caught out.
It was the same in the playground. I was always the class clown. If someone said ‘Let’s jump through a glass window,’ I would volunteer. I was always the one to whom they’d say: ‘Go and kick that dog up the arse.’ I always did it. I wanted to be popular, but it meant I was always the kid that got into trouble.
Like every school, Sir William Worsley had a pupil who was known as the best fighter in the school. And there were other pupils who were recognised as the second-best and third-best fighters. You knew who to speak to and who to avoid. I plodded along quite merrily, having few fights, until I was about fourteen, when the kid who was apparently the third-best fighter stabbed a white plastic ball given to me by my father and with which I was playing in the playground. So I went over and kicked him. He fell to the floor, so I kicked him again and punched him. Amongst the lads, the buzz immediately went round. ‘Royston, third-best fighter in the school, you know.’
Once I’d gained the reputation as the third-best fighter, every other hard nut in the school wanted to have a go at me. It was ridiculous. A couple of months later, I was in a science lesson. One of my classmates drew a funny face on a steamed-up window and wrote ‘Goosey’, the name of the second-best fighter in the school, below it.
Goosey walked over to me. ‘You did that,’ he said, pointing at the cartoon.
‘I haven’t done it,’ I said.
‘Yes, you did, you fucking cunt …’ Goosey yelled, hitting me over the back of my head with a stick. By the time we got pulled apart, I’d given Goosey a black eye and broken his nose, so it was clear to everyone watching that I was winning the fight. ‘Royston left Goosey keggy-eyed,’ I heard the lads say in the playground. I moved up the rankings. I was now the second-best fighter in the school.
A short while later, as Dad was finishing his tea at home, he asked me a question. ‘Are you a bully?’ he said.
‘I’m not a bully, no,’ I replied
‘They tell me you’re a bully at school.’
‘But Dad, I’m not.’ It didn’t matter. I’d been labelled a bully and in Grangetown the rule was ‘guilty until proven innocent’. My father didn’t believe me and that night gave me a right slapping with his belt. It didn’t half hurt, but it did no good. I’d got used to living by my fists and I wasn’t going to change. I didn’t see myself as a bully. I thought I was the Robin Hood of my school, the lad the others could come to when they were getting bullied. ‘Eh! Fucking leave him alone, all right?’ I’d say. ‘I’m telling you, leave him alone.’ And I’d thump whoever was giving my mates a bashing. I thought I was doing the right thing, but I didn’t realise I was gaining a reputation as a hard case to be avoided by decent kids and befriended by the troublemakers.
And at home I was chancing my arm more than ever. Finally realising just how scruffy I was, Dad gave me ten shillings to get some new shoes from Brown’s, a shop opposite Grangetown police station. At school that day, I told Raymond Bassett, one of my new hard-nut mates, about the money burning a hole in my pocket.
‘Your Dad’s given ya ten bob and you’re gonna spend it, are ya?’ he said.
‘Yeah.’
‘You wanna keep that and we’ll nick ya some shoes,’ Raymond suggested.
‘Eh, that’s a fucking good idea.’
Outside the shop, I devised our plan of attack. ‘You keep her talking,’ I said, referring to an elderly shop assistant, ‘and ’ave a skeg to make sure no bluebottle’s coming and I’ll pinch the shoes.’
We walked in and I chose a nice pair of brown winkle-pickers, really smart with very pointy toes. I tried them on, and when I’d made sure they fitted I bolted out of the shop. The shop assistant’s screams of ‘Stop! Stop! Stop that lad!’ ringing in my ears, I ran straight into the path of a policeman coming out of the police station. I took off, running down the pavement as fast as my legs would carry me. Behind me, the copper took up the chase, so I circled my school, ducked down a side street and turned right. I looked round. The copper was out of sight, so I pulled off my new shoes and threw them in a dustbin on a nearby lamp-post. Thinking I’d got away with it because neither the policeman nor the shop assistant would know who I
was, I ran home, where I put on some sandals. A little later, Raymond and the lads came round and we all had a laugh about it. ‘Eeeeh, fucking hell, you sure shifted on that,’ one of them said.
‘Where did you put them?’ Raymond asked.
‘In a bin on a lamp-post at the end of Cheetham Street,’ I said. ‘C’mon, let’s go back and get ’em.’
We headed back to Cheetham Street, stopping off on the way at the chip shop and the corner shop, where I spent Dad’s ten shillings on some fish and chips, a bottle of lemonade and a packet of fags for my mates.
We found the shoes, covered in ash and rubbish but still OK, in the bin. I took them home, put them under the tap, cleaned them up a bit, gave them a good polish and put them on. They looked fantastic.
At half past four, Dad came in from work. ‘Did you get some shoes?’ he said.
‘Yeah, Dad – look at them.’
‘What the hell is them?’
‘Winkle-pickers.’
‘Well, you’re not wearing them,’ he said. ‘They’s going back in the morning. Bloody stupid shoes. You’re swapping them.’
‘But they’re all the rage, Dad.’
‘I don’t care. You’re taking them back in the morning.’
There was a knock at the door. Dad went to see who it was. ‘Hello, Colin,’ I heard.
Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown Page 4