Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown

by Roy Chubby Brown

  ‘What yer mean?’

  ‘The goods train hit it and pushed it two miles along the breakwater. It’s a wreck.’

  Fortunately, we’d not registered the car after buying it from the old man, so the only way they could trace it to us was if the auld fella could remember us. We knew he couldn’t.

  On one of the few days I was at school, a new girl was introduced to the class. ‘Boys and girls, we have a new pupil today,’ the teacher said as she walked in. ‘Her name is Sandra Pallent.’

  All the lads in the class immediately thought the same thing: Fucking hell, look at the tits on that. None of the girls in our class had breasts. Sandra most definitely did. I was soon besotted with her and fortunately Sandra took to me straight away. Within weeks, we were boyfriend and girlfriend.

  Sandra was beautiful, easily the most attractive girl in our school. She looked like Olivia Newton-John, but with dark hair. She wore tight sweaters, which showed off her slim figure and large breasts perfectly. To start with, I was quite content with a little kiss and a feel of her tits through her jumper, but the pressure was on from my mates to go further. ‘Have you felt her tits properly yet?’ the lads would ask.

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ I’d say. ‘No, no.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ they’d say. ‘You want to feel her tits. They’re huge.’

  But I wanted to take it slowly. We’d go for walks or to the cinema or we’d go round to someone’s house to babysit. We were always kissing, but that was as far as we went, partly because I had a lot of respect for Sandra and partly because I didn’t have a clue about proper sex.

  We’d been going out for a few months when Sandra looked me straight in the eye. ‘My mam goes to the bingo on Friday night at the Lyric,’ she said, ‘so we’ll have sex then.’

  I was petrified. I didn’t have a clue what to do, so I swallowed my pride and asked the lads. ‘How do you start?’ I said. ‘Where you do start?’

  ‘Oh, you put your tongue in her mouth and that’ll get her going,’ one of the lads told me.

  Armed with this valuable information, I turned up at Sandra’s terraced house on Friday night, a bag of nerves. As soon as her mother opened the door, I was convinced that I was being regarded with suspicion. Sandra’s mum appeared to be watching my every move. Shortly before seven-thirty, when the bingo started, Sandra’s mum disappeared out of the door and we were left alone at last.

  ‘Would you like a sherry?’ Sandra asked, opening her parents’ drinks cabinet.

  ‘Er … yeah,’ I said, figuring I needed some Dutch courage.

  ‘Shall we go upstairs?’ Sandra said before I’d finished my sherry.

  ‘Er, yeah,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

  We had hardly set foot in the bedroom when there was a clicking sound as the door opened. I whipped round to find Sandra’s mother, her auntie Pat and a policeman standing at the end of the bed.

  ‘I think somebody’s been caught red-handed, you mucky little get,’ the policeman said. I was right. Sandra’s mam had been suspicious of me. She’d gone straight to the police station, then picked up Auntie Pat on the way over. The policeman took me home and told my auld fella.

  ‘Aaarrrggh, you dirty … what have I brought you up to do? Why …’ Dad shouted what was becoming a familiar refrain.

  ‘I didn’t do anything!’ I complained.

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  Sandra’s mam was just as unbelieving and we were told to keep apart. They needn’t have said it. Sandra and I were so shocked and embarrassed that we couldn’t look at each other for a month.

  The Sandra scandal had one welcome benefit. It took my mind off what was going on at home. Dad had met a woman and invited her to move in to our little house. I should have been happy for him, but after half a lifetime of just the two of us I felt invaded. We’d been a team for eight years. Now Dad was upsetting it all by bringing a woman into our home. And it got worse. Betty Allander, as my auld fella’s woman was called, had five children – two of them twins – when we had only two bedrooms. I moved into the boxroom and the five kids, aged from fourteen to seven, took over my bedroom, pulling my toys out of my drawers, crayoning in my colouring books, snapping the heads off my tin soldiers, drawing moustaches on my Cliff Richard posters, ripping my other posters off the walls and damaging my carefully painted murals. I was livid and I’ve still not got over it.

  My dad and Betty might have been lovebirds, but her kids and I were forever arguing and fighting. Jimmy, one of the twins, was such a little bastard that I tried to kill him. The cheeky recklin mouthed off to me so I pushed him into the washing machine and shut the door. That’ll serve you right, you little twat, I thought as I tried to turn it on, but it wouldn’t go. Jimmy’s sister, Brenda, ran down to the pub and told me auld fella, who came home, dragged Jimmy out of the machine, shouted ‘You nearly broke his neck!’ at me and gave me the biggest hiding I’d ever known.

  From the moment Betty and her kids moved in, I hated being at home. Even now, more than forty years later, I have no time for them. I once heard that Jimmy was bragging to somebody down the steelworks where he works: ‘Oh, I’m Chubby Brown’s stepbrother.’ When I heard it, I had a simple reply: ‘You tell him from me if he keeps saying that I’ll come down and throw him off the fucking scaffolding. He’s no stepbrother of mine.’ The reason behind it was that I was possessive about my father – after all, my mum had buggered off and my sister had gone with her; I had no intention of losing my dad as well – and I expected him to be possessive of me.

  It did, however, teach me that Dad had a bigger heart than I did. He couldn’t have been that lonely he’d bring five kids into the house just to get at their mother’s pussy. That took some doing. Nevertheless, it was something with which I could never get to grips, and from that moment on I was looking for a way to get out of that house.

  *

  I can’t remember my last day at school. I was at school so infrequently – the school bobbies were rarely away from our house – that I probably wasn’t there when school broke up. I left with no qualifications. I didn’t even pass my eleven-plus. The lowest class at my school was B2 and I was bottom of that. Thick as two short planks, I had no prospects and no real future.

  A few months before I left school, I’d started as a van boy, assisting the driver of the Wilfred’s bakery van every morning, working from half past five in the morning until two in the afternoon six days a week. It was easy work, the only exception being the delivery to the nylon-stockings factory in Cargo Fleet Lane, where the workforce of young girls delighted in embarrassing the driver and me as we dropped off their sandwiches and buns. ‘Show us your cock, boy,’ they’d shout as I carried the trays through the factory. I once went into the factory toilets. I’d never seen anything like it. The walls were covered with graffiti of crude boasts and erect penises being pushed into any orifice you could imagine. The writing on the walls of men’s toilets was tame by comparison.

  The bakery round paid decent pocket money, but I needed to start earning a proper wage if I was going to get away from my dad’s overstuffed house and my irritating step-siblings. Scratting around for odd jobs, I applied to be an engine driver at my father’s steel mill. They turned me down. I applied for jobs at various factories, but they all rejected me, so I thought I’d join the army. I had my mind set on being one of the guards dressed in a red tunic and a busby outside Buckingham Palace. That appealed. I went to the Royal Engineers and filled in some forms. The sergeant handed them back to me. ‘Your dad has to sign them to say that you’re old enough,’ he said.

  I was only fifteen, but my dad wasn’t bothered. ‘If you want to join the army … you know …’ he said. I could tell he just wanted me out of the house. With my forms signed, I turned up at the barracks a few days later. At eight o’clock that morning, there was a dozen of us sat on benches in an army careers office when a soldier with a clipboard marched into the room.

  ‘Miller. Parfitt
. Snowdon. Vasey …’ the soldier read from a list on his clipboard. We trooped out of the office into a room where we were given a medical.

  ‘Why do you want to join the army?’ an officer asked me while I was being examined.

  ‘Because I want to be a soldier,’ I said. The officer didn’t look very impressed with my answer. We were then ushered into a hall with two columns of desks and told to sit down.

  ‘We want you to write an essay,’ a soldier with a posh voice said. I didn’t know what essay meant. Until then I’d never even heard the word.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘Well, a composition about your life. A story, give us a story.’

  I still didn’t know what he meant, so I didn’t do it. I left that part of the paper blank and filled in the other parts, which asked again why I wanted to join the army as well as some personal details, such as my height and where I’d gone to school. The last question was ‘Have you ever been in trouble with the police?’ I wrote ‘No.’ It was an outright lie, but that was the least of my crimes.

  The test finished at half past eleven. At ten to twelve, a soldier walked into the room. ‘Vasey!’ he shouted.

  Fucking hell, I thought, I’m the only one who’s passed. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said, getting to my feet.

  ‘Come this way, please,’ he said, leaving all the other lads in the room.

  ‘I’m sorry …’ he started, explaining that I had failed and that all the others had passed through to the next round.

  ‘Oh, I really wanted to be a soldier,’ I said.

  ‘Why don’t you come back in about a year’s time and join the Green Howards?’ he said. All I could think was that if the Green Howards would have me after I’d failed, they must be right thick idiots.

  A few days after failing the army recruitment test, I decided I’d had enough living under the same small roof as my father, his mistress and her five kids. Fifteen years old, fed up and unable to handle life at home any longer, I packed my belongings into two plastic carrier bags and hitch-hiked to Redcar, about five miles away on the North Sea coast. Apart from an occasional visit many years ago for a splodge in the sea with my dad, Redcar was as foreign and exotic to me as another country. Not knowing where to go or how to find somewhere to stay, that first night I climbed up on to a fishing boat that was dry-docked for the winter, laid up on bricks on the seafront. It was freezing. I hardly slept. The days weren’t much better. I spent them walking through the town centre, pinching apples off fruit stalls and wondering if I would be picked up by the police. But nobody paid any attention to me. It was obvious my father hadn’t even reported me missing. I’d caused that much trouble with his Betty and her children that he was clearly pleased to see me gone.

  Several weeks into sleeping rough, I was trying to get warm enough to fall asleep one night when I heard a tapping sound outside the fishing boat. I lifted the canvas to find a copper staring straight at me. I was just as much a shock to him as he was to me. He nearly crapped himself. ‘Hey! What are you … what do you think you’re doing?’ he said. ‘Get out of there!’

  The bluebottle dragged me to the local nick, where I gave him a sob story. ‘How old are you?’ the policeman asked. I told him I was fifteen. The next thing I knew, I was being pushed through the door of a home for wayward children at Westbourne Grove in Redcar. The couple who ran the home found me some clean clothes, gave me something to eat and a warm bed. I was one of four waifs they’d taken in who’d run away from home. ‘As long as you get yourself a job and you behave properly,’ the policeman said, ‘you can stay here indefinitely.’

  I got a job working for Calor Gas at Port Clarence on the Tees estuary. I’d been there for a few months when a gas tank blew up, killing a few men, so I moved on to a job at Pearson’s driving a dumper truck. I didn’t have a licence, but that didn’t seem to bother Arthur Stairs, the foreman, as long as I drove it only on company property. My job was to transport concrete from large mixers to wherever it was needed on the site. It was good work, the pay wasn’t bad and Arthur was a decent gadgie. ‘Bring your bait, don’t tell your mate,’ he’d say when there was a chance of getting an extra shift. Or it was ‘job and knock’ when you’d finished your work early and could go home before the factory siren sounded. One day, I was delivering concrete to a deep hole in which some men were working. I tipped the front of the dumper to drop the concrete into the hole. The men then spread it with their shovels, but this time I got too close to the edge of the hole. As I pulled the lever to lift up the scoop of the dumper, I felt the dumper move beneath me. It teetered on the edge, then toppled into the hole, swiftly followed by me.

  ‘Get out the way …’ I shouted as I came crashing into the hole and the men below me dived for cover.

  Just after I’d come to my senses at the bottom of the hole, Arthur turned up. ‘Are you all right?’ he shouted.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you’re fucking sacked!’

  My P45 was in and out of my trousers more than my dick. The next week, I had three jobs in a day. At 8 a.m. I started with a sub-contractor cleaning out blast furnaces at Dorman, Long. Choking on the fumes after an hour, I collected my cards from the gaffer at 9.30 a.m. and walked over to the ICI plant next door, where I took a job with a firm doing the stone work on a chimney. By lunchtime I’d quit as I couldn’t stand heights. After lunch I walked back to Dorman, Long and immediately got hired by Pearson’s, a sub-contractor, as a labourer.

  After that, I got a job at Shepherd’s, a building company. For eight hours a day I toiled as a hod-carrier on the Lakes housing estate in Redcar. People say there’s a dignity in the working life, but that was a load of rubbish. For six and a half days’ work I got twelve pounds and each morning I had to get there an hour earlier than the bricklayers because I had to get the cement mixer started and carry the cement up onto the platforms before the brickies turned up. The bricklayers were on piecework. The more bricks they laid the more money they got, but it didn’t ever occur to them that it meant I had to carry more hods. None of them ever turned round to me, the hapless labourer, to say here’s an extra fiver.

  At the end of my shift I’d go back to the home in Westbourne Grove and write short poems. The garden’s full of flowers, the hive is full of bees, one of my early monologues began. The room is full of sound because the piano is full of keys. My head is full of emptiness, my throat is full of cough, this house is full of strangers, I wish they would all fuck off.

  I was fed up. Fed up with hod-carrying. Fed up with living in the hostel. Fed up with having no one that cared for me. And fed up with having no prospect of a better life. If I was going to get myself out of this mess, I needed to earn more money, so I got a job at Devonport’s as a red-lead painter and then at Kellogg’s, an American technical engineering firm, where I was taken on as an engineer’s labourer. It was a grand title for a job that only entailed being a gofer – ‘Go and get me this; go and get me that’ – so when one of the foremen asked if anybody wanted to drive a van to take labourers from the works gate to the various locations on the site where work was being done, I volunteered.

  No one asked if I had a licence and when you’re fifteen years old you don’t worry about it yourself. Every day I drove labourers around the site in a wrecked ambulance that was missing two doors. It was totally unroadworthy, but it didn’t matter as long as the ambulance didn’t leave Kellogg’s property. One Thursday, about a month into the job, the lads asked me to drive them into Redcar. It was the Easter holiday weekend and they had double wages in their pockets. They were a rough lot, many of them Scottish, Welsh or Irish labourers who were looking forward to four days off work, but first they wanted a bellyful of beer to carry them through the long, hot afternoon. It was five miles from the site to the Clarendon, one of the roughest claggy mats in Redcar. I dropped off the lads. ‘Roy, will you pick us up?’ they shouted.

  ‘Sure. I’ll pick you up,’ I said, not thinking for a moment about the
consequences of driving on public roads without a licence or insurance. Three hours later, I returned. Turning the last corner before the Clarendon, I heard some voices yelling and some dogs barking. Then I saw where it was coming from. About a dozen of the lads I’d dropped off were involved in a massive street fight. The police were using dogs to try to control it, but they were getting nowhere. I pulled up. ‘Get in the ambulance, you fucking arseholes!’ I shouted. ‘Just get in the ambulance.’

  But the lads were too drunk to do anything but fight. A copper came over. ‘What do you want?’ he said.

  ‘Er … I’ve come for the lads who work at …’ I said.

  ‘You’re the driver of this vehicle?’ the copper said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’ve got bald tyres,’ the copper said. ‘There’s no lights. And the doors are missing. What’s it doing in the town?’

  ‘Well, the lads asked me to come and get them as a favour.’

  ‘A favour?’

  ‘I’ve come from the Kellogg’s site.’

  ‘Is that why this van hasn’t got a tax disc?’

  ‘It’s a site van,’ I said. I still hadn’t realised that I was in deep trouble.

  ‘Where’s your licence?’ the copper said.

  ‘I haven’t got one,’ I said.

  ‘What are you doing, driving with no licence?’

  ‘I just came to pick them up,’ I said. I couldn’t see any wrong in it. It seemed perfectly natural for me to do the lads a good turn by collecting them from the pub.

  The policeman took me to Redcar police station. Downstairs the lads who’d been fighting were locked in the cells. Upstairs I was being questioned by the duty sergeant. ‘Who started the fight?’ he said.

  ‘I haven’t a clue. I’m just the driver.’

  ‘Driver?’ the sergeant said. I could see I’d have to go through the questions all over again. ‘Of that vehicle? The one with bald tyres, a door hanging off and no tax?’