As soon as I got a chance I made contact with Barney. ‘You from Middlesbrough?’ he said. I recognised him from Teesside and nodded. ‘Any trouble you come and see me,’ he said.
The rule of a Borstal like Portland was simple: kill or be killed. You had to play the part. It meant never letting your guard slip, night or day. Having Barney on my side was more valuable than anything else in that place. Status among the inmates usually depended on the seriousness of the crime that had put you in Borstal. Barney was inside for beating up a rent man and stealing his bag. It wasn’t on a par with murder or armed robbery, but Barney was so rough it didn’t matter. Everybody was frightened of him and he saved me from all sorts of trouble that I might not have survived without him as my guardian angel. I know he still lives in Middlesbrough because a friend saw him recently. ‘Tell Spud he still owes me,’ was all Barney said.
But Barney had a rival, a lad called Godson who was just as much a hard case. He was always winding me up, trying to bait me into fighting him. One day we were on parade in the yard and Godson was having a go, pushing and digging me in the back. He bent down to fasten his shoelaces, so I booted him in the mouth. He fell to the ground, clutching at his throat. The screws came running. We all stood to attention while we watched the screws trying to help Godson breathe. My kick had made him swallow his tongue.
‘Step forward the lad who kicked him, or punched him,’ the Governor said.
Nobody moved. I’d done it so quick that nobody knew it was me. And anyway, you didn’t grass in Borstal.
‘Well, one of you must have done it,’ the Governor said. ‘Come on.’
Again, nobody stepped forward. And no one looked around. Every pair of eyes on that exercise ground was pointed forwards. So they took Godson inside. I knew they’d try and get him to tell, but he didn’t give in.
Godson never came near me again. The screws made us run around the yard fifty times. And I realised that if I didn’t get my temper under control I would soon get myself into serious trouble. Not much later, I did.
Morgan, a screw who ruled my landing in Nelson House, had taken an instant dislike to me. He had a down on me and that was all there was to it. ‘You’re too big for your boots, Vasey,’ he’d say. ‘Nobody comes to Borstal and acts the way you do. Who do you think you are?’
Morgan never missed an opportunity to make my life a misery. ‘Vasey, get yourself a bucket of cold water now!’ he shouted at me one day. ‘And bring your toothbrush!’ It was coming up to recreation time and I was looking forward to watching television or playing snooker. I’d done nothing to provoke Morgan. He just fancied having a go. I wanted to tell him to get lost, but I did as I was told and turned up in front of him, bucket and toothbrush in hand.
‘This landing is a fucking disgrace,’ Morgan said. ‘Now get down on your hands and knees.’ He made me scrub chewing gum, mud and straw out of the cracks in the floor with my toothbrush in my hand. ‘Vasey! Change that filthy water,’ he shouted every ten yards or so. And I would trot off to the washroom to get a bucket of clean water before continuing my task.
The buzzer went, signalling the beginning of recreation time. I stood up.
‘Where are you fucking going?’ Morgan growled.
‘It’s recreation time, Mr Morgan.’
‘Not for you it isn’t,’ he snapped. ‘I want you to start again.’
I went to the washroom, cleaned out and refilled the bucket, and walked back to the beginning of the landing. I got down on my knees, dipped my toothbrush in the water and started scrubbing all over again. Morgan came over. Bending down until he was inches above my head, he shouted directly into my ear. ‘And this time, I mean clean!’ he screamed. ‘Clean, boy!’
I continued scrubbing. Just keep your head down, Roy, I told myself. Don’t lose it. Don’t do anything stupid. Keep your cool.
I’d scrubbed about ten yards of the landing when Morgan approached again. Expecting him to tell me to change the water, I was getting ready to stand up when Morgan kicked the bucket over, spilling water and muck all over the landing I’d just scrubbed clean for the second time. I completely lost it. My temper burst and my Grangetown instincts took over. Screaming at the top of my voice, I picked up the bucket and smacked Morgan over the head with it. There was a small amount of water left in the bucket. I threw it in his face, then flung the bucket with all my might at his open mouth. Morgan fell over, so I kicked him several times as he tried to crawl away from me along the landing. Seeing him reach for his whistle to call for reinforcements, I stopped kicking him in the kidneys and booted him as hard as I could in the face. Eventually more screws arrived and laid into me with their batons. By the time they’d finished with me I was in a straitjacket in solitary confinement.
For days I lay in my cell, trying to come to terms with my life. I’d had enough of fighting almost every day, but I couldn’t see an alternative. When I wasn’t contemplating the mess I’d created, I would spend hours screaming and shouting at the screws until my lungs ached and my throat was raw. I felt I’d lost everything. This is it, I thought: why don’t I just kill myself? I’d always thought I was above suicide. Grangetown had taught me that I could always fight my way out of trouble and that if theft didn’t work, violence would get me what I wanted. But now I was beginning to doubt it. And I didn’t have an alternative. I simply didn’t have the skills or the wisdom to find a different way to lead my life. I was ruled by my quick temper. I could take as much shit as anybody could dish out, but I had a button. And if someone pressed that button at the wrong time, then everything changed. I’d stop saying ‘Hey, cut it out’ and they’d have to take the consequences. It would be me or them. One of us had to win and one of us had to lose. The time for compromise and conciliation would be over.
Trapped in that cell, on my own for days on end, I realised for the first time that resorting to violence wasn’t getting me anywhere. Trouble was, I didn’t know what to do instead.
The fights continued after I was released from solitary confinement until the Governor sent for me. ‘Vasey, you’ve been nothing but trouble since you came here,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to stop this. I’m going to make you my monitor. Every morning, as soon as you wake, you’ll come to this office. The warden will bring you down. You’ll eat alone here. Then you’ll clean this office. You’ll make the tea. You’ll polish all the wood and the floor. You’ll be working for me all day, every day. At four p.m., you’ll go back to your cell and you’ll stay there. That’s what you’ll do every day until you’re released from this Borstal. You won’t mix with the other boys. I am sick to death of you.’
I couldn’t have cared less. I thought if you’re going to stick pins in me, then stick pins in me. I’d given up thinking about myself as a person. I felt like a caged animal and I was happy to act like one, all my decisions made for me.
The other lads thought I was a lucky bastard, but they had no idea what it was like to be on my own all the time. My only human contact came from the screws or the letters that my sister had recently started to write to me. She’d moved back to Redcar, discovered I was in Borstal and hunted me down. Mam, her letters told me, had married Norman Trevethick and moved back to Teesside, so I wrote to Mam, asking her to visit me at Portland.
Mam came down to Dorset on the train. ‘Can you tell me where Portland Borstal is?’ she asked the ticket collector at Weymouth station.
‘That’s it on the hill,’ he said, pointing at the prison and the Borstal. Mam passed out. She couldn’t believe that her son was locked up in a building on a remote peninsula lashed by the sea.
‘How did you end up in here?’ she asked me when we met. It was the first time I’d seen her for more than ten years.
‘Well …’ I said, ‘when nobody wants you …’ I was trying to make Mam feel bad, but it didn’t work. A few weeks later the Governor called me in to tell me that I was eligible for early release provided that someone would take responsibility for me during my parole. I wrote to my
auld fella and to my mam, asking them to sanction my release and to take me in. Both wrote back to say they didn’t want me and that I didn’t have a home to go to. The Governor read my father’s letter out to me.
‘It says here,’ he said, ‘that your father thinks you’re no good and that you’re better off inside Portland than back at home. So we’re stuck with you for another six months.’ I’d never felt so rejected.
At the end of my two-year sentence I was released with about ten other boys. They gave us itchy tweed suits, put us in a van, drove us to Weymouth railway station, and gave each of us a train ticket and three shillings and sixpence. It had been two years since I had last held some money. I’ll never forget the feeling of getting on that train, the money clutched in my hand as we made for the buffet car. We bought cups of tea and sat back to savour them in freedom. We’d passed Bournemouth before we spotted him sitting at the other end of the buffet car. It was Bruce Forsyth. ‘Ask him for his autograph, go on, ask him for his autograph,’ one of the lads said. So I did.
‘I’m sorry to bother you, Mr Forsyth,’ I said. ‘Could I have your autograph, please?’
‘Oh yes, of course,’ he said, taking a pile of photographs out of his bag. While he signed some pictures of himself, he asked us what we’d been doing. I said we’d just been released from Borstal.
‘Ooh,’ he said. ‘You are naughty boys!’ We chatted for a while. He was on his way to the Palladium in London to rehearse for a show.
‘Do us a favour, boys,’ he said as we drew into Waterloo station in London, ‘and behave yourselves in future. Behave yourselves.’
CHAPTER SIX
BEAT SURRENDER
TEN DAYS AFTER the cancer diagnosis, I was driving home after seeing Dr Martin for another consultation. Nothing had actually changed, but now that I knew I was ill, I felt as sick as a show-jumper with piles. As usual, Dr Martin was full of encouragement, but I was still convinced I was going to die. Why should I be any different from Roy Castle or Marti Caine, I reasoned. They couldn’t beat cancer. So why should I get the break that they didn’t? Why should a lad like me, from Grangetown and with a criminal record, deserve to live when other clean-living law-abiding folk hadn’t? Surely, by escaping my past and making a name for myself, I’d already had more luck in a lifetime than anyone deserved. It didn’t make sense, I thought. I was bound to die.
The car phone rang. ‘Hello, is that Chubby?’ said a very familiar voice that for a moment I just couldn’t place.
‘Yes, it’s Chubby,’ I said. ‘Who’s speaking?’
‘It’s Bob Monkhouse.’ Fucking hell! I’d admired Bob all my life and now he was on the phone.
‘Hello, Bob,’ I said, feeling tongue-tied. Well, it’s always difficult knowing what to say when you first speak to one of your heroes. ‘You don’t mind me saying this, but this is not a piss-take, is it? Because I know a few impressionists and you could be one of them.’
‘No, it’s me, Chubby,’ Bob said. ‘I’m sat here with Russ Abbott, on my veranda outside my house in Barbados, sipping a glass of wine, and I heard about what’s happened to you and I just wondered how you got on today because I know you’ve been to see the doctor.’
I wasn’t really taking in Bob’s words. I couldn’t. There was no space for them in my head. It was filled with just one thought. That’s Bob Monkhouse – Bob fucking Monkhouse – and he’s talking to me! I pulled the car into a lay-by. My eyes started to well up with tears. I couldn’t believe it. Bob Monkhouse was talking to me from his home in Barbados.
‘Bob,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry I’ve gone quiet. I am just gobsmacked that you rang me up.’
‘And why not?’ Bob said. ‘We’re fellow professionals, aren’t we?’
‘Well, we are, but I admire you that much, that I never thought …’
‘Now listen,’ Bob said, ‘don’t try and talk, son. Let me do the talking. I’m used to it.’ And Bob went off on a routine, cracking joke after joke. Then he paused. ‘You know I’ve just been through what you’re going through,’ he said. ‘It’s never easy, but you hold in there. It will get better. We’ll fight this disease together.’
‘Yes, I’d heard about you, Bob,’ I said. ‘I wish you the best of luck.’
‘Well, don’t worry. And don’t believe everything you read in the papers,’ Bob said. ‘I never admitted on television I had cancer. I never said I was taking shark food to get rid of it. It’s all baloney and I’m all right. Don’t worry about me – I’m very well, sipping a lovely glass of wine, and the weather’s gorgeous.’
‘Well, it’s blowing a gale here. It’s awful,’ I said. ‘Rain’s coming down in sheets.’
We chatted a bit longer and I thanked Bob for calling out of the blue. ‘Well, all the best to you,’ he said. ‘Let me know how you get on and I’ll write to you.’
I arrived home and Johnny Hammond, a Middlesbrough comedian, came over. Johnny’s a great mate. ‘You’ll never guess who rang me,’ I said. ‘Bob Monkhouse.’
‘Oh,’ said Johnny, ‘I’ve had quite a few calls asking for your number. Norman Wisdom was asking.’
‘Oh, Johnny, fuck off!’ I said. ‘Pull the other one. You know it’s got bells …’ The phone rang. I got up and answered it. ‘Hello … Hello?’
‘It’s Norman here.’ I turned around to where Johnny was sitting on my sofa, a grin the width of a fat lass’s knickers cracking his face.
‘I know …’ Johnny mouthed. ‘He’s ringing from the Isle of Man.’
We talked for about ten minutes. ‘Norman …’ I said, ‘I’ll never forget this phone call. Thank you.’
‘Oh, right,’ Norman said. ‘Yes.’ Norman hung up abruptly and I put the phone down. Twenty minutes later it rang again.
‘Hello, is that Chubby?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Norman here, Norman Wisdom.’
‘You rang me a short while ago, Norman.’
‘Oh, what a berk!’ Norman said. And he put the phone down, leaving me shaking my head in disbelief. Bob Monkhouse and Norman Wisdom in one day.
I was soon back on Teesside, back with my mates and back in the King’s Head, a claggy mat on a particularly run-down council estate. There was always fighting in the King’s Head. Every night. It was that rough the Alsatian had sandals on and all the barmaid’s tattoos were spelt wrong.
‘Hey, I saw Sandra today,’ Robbie shouted over the noise of the bar one night. I hadn’t seen her for two and a half years.
‘Did ya?’ I said.
‘Oh yeah, she looked gorgeous. She was with a blond-haired lad.’
‘Oh, right. What’s she doing here?’
‘She’s at her mother’s,’ Robbie said. ‘Y’know, 17 Ann’s Street.’
‘Is that where she is?’ Bolstered by seven pints of beer, I went up to Ann’s Street. Approaching number 17, I noticed a van parked outside Sandra’s mum’s house. Inside the van, a bloke with blond hair was kissing a woman. Bloody hell, I thought. That’s Sandra.
Buoyed by Dutch courage, I walked up to the van and banged on the window. Sandra jumped, turned around and stared at me. Her face went white when she realised exactly who was standing in the darkness. ‘Go away!’ she screamed. ‘Go away!’
‘I just want to talk to you,’ I yelled.
‘I don’t want to talk to you. Go away.’
So I shook the van, rolling it back and forth, trying to turn it over. Sandra screamed and the man with her yelled at me. He was frightened, but he managed to start the engine. As the van lurched forward, I grabbed the side and jumped up onto it. With a crashing of gears, the van moved off, and accelerated. I fell off it. Sandra’s mother was standing in the door to her house as the bluebottles turned up and I was dragged off to the police station. Sandra had moved out of my life again.
I spent a few months doing odd jobs in and around Middlesbrough until someone suggested there were better jobs to be had in Blackpool. With fond memories of the town from the summer that my father h
ad taken me there for a holiday, I needed little encouragement to get out of Middlesbrough.
Walking along the seafront the day I arrived in Blackpool, I noticed some workmen loitering in a big blue shed and got talking to them. It turned out they were red-leading Blackpool tower. Fifteen minutes later, I had a job. Dressed in overalls, I got into a lift to the fourth floor, where we climbed onto some scaffolding. Three hundred feet above the Golden Mile wasn’t a place for someone frightened of heights. ‘You didn’t last long,’ the foreman said.
‘I’ll go on the pancrack,’ I told the foreman, but when I got to the dole office they told me I wouldn’t need to sign on. The Queen’s Hotel needed a porter.
Every morning I would line up with the rest of the Queen’s Hotel staff and hold my hands out so that the manager could inspect my nails. I had to wear a full uniform with a bow tie even though I was only carrying bags up to rooms. This wasn’t for me, so I found work handing out mats for the slides at the Funhouse on the Pleasure Beach, the next in a succession of dead-end jobs, few of which lasted longer than a couple of weeks. I painted the Big Dipper; I worked for the council letting out deckchairs on the seafront; I grafted in chippies and hotels.
None of the jobs paid much, so most of the time I slept rough. In Queen’s Square, opposite the North Pier, where I’d later play summer-theatre seasons, there was a gents’ toilet with a green railing around it. I’d go down there when the pubs chucked me out, climb over the rail and break in. It was warmer than outside and I could sleep sitting on the loo. When the weather turned colder, I found rooms in run-down boarding houses or the YMCA.
One evening I met a fair-haired Scottish lad and an English lad, both drifters like me. ‘Where are you stopping tonight?’ the Scottish lad said.
Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown Page 9