‘I’m thinking of the youth hostel near the bowling alley by the North Pier,’ I said. It was two and six a night and they had hot water.
‘If you fancy a change, do what we do,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Past the Savoy there’s a big roundabout and on the other side is Pontins. Round the back, near the airport, there’s a hole in the fence. You can get in there. Some of the chalets aren’t taken. Look through the window and if there’s no bags in it, you know nobody’s staying there. Give the door a good push and it’ll come away from the latch.’
‘Eh, great,’ I said.
It was worth the effort just to save two and six. The scam ran so well that we got to know some of the holidaymakers and would go back to their chalets for a party. Then I got caught by security. I told them I’d come about a job. They put me in charge of teaching kids to swim. But teaching swimming also involved tearing arse – a load of tiresome tasks such as sweeping up at the end of the day, collecting sunbeds and stacking towels. I’d had enough and was looking for a way out when the Scottish lad made a suggestion.
‘Let’s hot-wire a car,’ he said.
We broke into an old Austin and set off, taking turns to drive along country roads with no particular destination in mind. We thought of ourselves as fugitives from society, but really we were just a trio of shitheads. Ending up near Oxford, penniless, tired and filthy after sleeping in the car for two nights, we came upon an old house in a country lane. We knocked at the door. There was no answer. We looked in the garage. No car there. So we smashed a back window and climbed into the kitchen, where an army uniform was hanging behind the door. Finding some food in the fridge, we cooked ourselves bacon and eggs, then ransacked the house looking for money. We found nothing of any value, but I loved every minute of it. I thought I was one of the Kray Twins, a proper gangster, when all we were attempting was petty burglary.
We left the house, needing to refuel the car. As we approached Oxford I noticed a middle-aged woman standing at a bus stop. ‘Slow down and I’ll open the window,’ I said to the blond Scot, who was driving. ‘I’ll grab her handbag.’ It worked a treat. We found a couple of pounds in the bottom of the bag, dumped the evidence, filled up the car with petrol and drove home.
Back in Blackpool, we spent what remained of our booty on three beds in a boarding house in Grassmere Road. The next morning, we drove the car to a nearby café for breakfast. After all our escapades, we were starving and the breakfast tasted great. We’d been in the café for about twenty minutes and I was just finishing a cup of tea when a copper walked in. ‘Whose is that red car outside parked on the yellow line?’ he said.
And like an idiot I opened my mouth without thinking. ‘Oh, it’s mine, mate,’ I said.
‘You better move it if you don’t want a ticket,’ the copper said, so I ambled outside.
A squad of bluebottles was waiting and the cuffs were on me straight away. The gang of three was soon in a police van bound for Oxford. After two days in the police-station cells we were in court. The woman we’d robbed had the make of the car, its licence-plate number and a full description of the three of us, down to the colour of our eyes and our hair. Served us right for robbing a local magistrate. We were sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and I was sent to Bristol jail.
I’d left Borstal less than three months ago. Now I was in prison, but for some reason it didn’t seem a big deal to me. I wasn’t frightened. I wasn’t even particularly bothered. Thinking that my most likely future was a life of crime, my reaction was simple and unsentimental. This will do for me, I thought. I’m going to be like this. I’ll be an arsehole all my life.
Bristol nick was a comparatively cushy number. There was none of the football, cricket, swimming and rehabilitation of Borstal – prison is just about being locked away and left to rot – but I’d been in Wormwood Scrubs, Leicester and Armley jails. They were shithouses compared with Bristol. Full of lags who’d been there for twenty years or more, Bristol jail was like an old people’s home.
My cell was painted green and white with two black heating pipes running along one wall. If I stood on them I could see out of the window. In the distance I could see the gate of a matchbox factory. Beside it was a park with trees and people taking their dogs for walks. I used to watch them for hours, but I never wanted to join them. I had nothing on the outside, whereas my little cell felt like a safe haven from a world where nobody cared about me. And because nobody wanted me, it was very easy to be an arsehole. It was up to me to snap out of my destructive behaviour, but there was little chance of that if it made no difference to anyone else.
After three months with good behaviour I was released. I returned to Redcar where I rented a room in Westbourne Grove, a few doors along from the home for wayward kids. There were few jobs for someone with no qualifications and even fewer for someone with a Borstal and prison record. So I fell back on the occupation of hundreds of former convicts: a nightclub bouncer. Working the door at the Red Lion was an easy number. There was a disco at the back and a bar at the front. Most of the time it was quiet, but when the Redcar races were on a fight was a dead cert. Busloads of Geordies and Mackems would converge on Redcar from Newcastle, Gateshead and Sunderland, and they all hated each other.
One particular night after the races, I’d ejected some Geordies who had been throwing glasses and fighting with some Mackems in the disco. The Geordies stood outside waiting for the Mackems. ‘Come out, come out …’ they chanted to the Sunderland lads. ‘We’ll fuckin’ have you …’
Inside the club, the rest of the bouncers and I decided we’d had enough. It was time to get the Geordies to move on. We steamed outside to find that the Mackems had followed behind us. Stuck between the two gangs, there was nothing to do but fight our way out. Six bouncers against thirty or forty pissed-up lads. It might not sound like a fair fight, but a couple of the bouncers were karate experts and weren’t frightened of anyone. The rest of us knew how to take care of ourselves.
It was like a fight in a cowboy movie. Everyone piled in. Then the coppers turned up with dogs. I was swinging punches and dodging blows when a young copper came wading in and punched me.
‘What the fucking hell are you doing?’ I shouted at him.
He hit me again, so I loafed him, the worst thing I could have done. I was handcuffed and dragged to the police station two hundred yards down the street, where I was lined up in front of the duty sergeant. I could hear the drunken Geordies locked in the cells downstairs, screaming and shouting revenge on us. Upstairs, us doormen were waiting at the desk in the front office while the coppers tried to sort out what had happened. The copper who I’d head-butted was standing to one side, a big bruise on his brow. He came over to where I was standing with my hands behind my back.
‘You!’ he shouted inches from my face. ‘You think you’re fucking hard, don’t you?’
‘No, sir,’ I said.
‘Yes, you do. You stuck the head on me,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you what head’s all about.’ The copper went to head-butt me, so I ducked. His forehead collided with the crown of my head. I heard a crack as he broke his nose, but hardly felt a thing myself. ‘I’m gonna fuckin …’ the young bluebottle shouted, blood pouring down his face as the sergeant stepped over.
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, cut it out before you lose it,’ the sergeant said. Instead of getting a beating, I was charged with assaulting a police officer and sent down for three months to Durham jail.
Durham was as rough as prisons come. It was where they sent you when they thought you were scum. From the moment I stepped inside its walls, I was terrified. With a bunch of other new arrivals, I filed into a reception area. ‘Left turn,’ barked one of the screws. ‘Stop! Now strip off. Everything.’
We put all our clothes and belongings in a cardboard box and stood naked in a windowed room like a conservatory but with a counter running down the middle. A screw wrote my name on my box of belongings and put it on a s
helf. ‘Right, through that door,’ he bellowed.
‘Name … address … distinguishing marks … tattoos … height …’ one of the screws shouted. Then, hair clipped and dressed in prison uniforms, we were led to our cells. Like most of the prisoners at Durham, I was on my own.
I immediately realised that the only way to survive was not to cause any trouble. Durham prison was not a pretty place and the rules were simple: keep your nose clean; do as you’re told; don’t look at anybody; keep your eyes on the ground. All the inmates wore overalls, but some had big red and green patches sewn onto them. It meant that they were escapees or that they were inside for murder, violent conduct or killing children. Most of the time, these high-security prisoners were cordoned off from the rest of us and we’d see them only through the nettings. But every now and then, one of them would mix with the rest of us and send a shiver down my spine. They looked the part, just evil, to me. I didn’t need to ask questions about why they were inside. I’d glance at them, then I’d look away in case they clocked me and decided to do something about it.
I spent only twelve weeks in Durham prison, but it was long enough for me to see sense. I realised there was nothing I could do about having a temper. No one plans to have a short fuse. There’s no such thing as a premeditated loss of cool. Everyone’s got a limit and if things aren’t going right, you’ll reach it at some point. It was just that the distance between me saying ‘This is wrong’ and me saying ‘Fuck the consequences, I can’t take this any more’ was less than for other people. What got through to me in Durham prison was the realisation that there had to be a better life than bouncing in and out of jail. I felt I needed to do something, to create something with my life, and that if I didn’t sort it out very soon, I’d miss the chance. As soon as I got home from Durham prison, I went to see my auld fella. ‘Dad,’ I said. ‘I’ve had enough of being an arsehole.’ And I promised him faithfully that I would never get in trouble again.
Determined to avoid employment that would land me in trouble when I got back to Redcar – such as working as a doorman – I took a job at the Dorman, Long steel yard. The social security provided a small flat above a hairdressing salon at 54 Coatham Road, a few hundred yards from the home for wayward boys at Westbourne Grove. With my bait (as we called a packed lunch) in a box beside me, I’d take the bus to work every morning and do my hours. For the first time in a long while it felt like I could have a normal, stable, honest life. My fellow sandscratchers had always regarded me as a hooligan and never taken much of an interest in my welfare. But now they encouraged me to keep my nose clean. ‘You know, Roy, there’s more to life than what you’ve been through,’ they’d say.
Around this time my sister Barbara moved back from Pontefract to Dormanstown, where she was living with her boyfriend. I bumped into her one day in the street in Redcar.
‘Our mam’s back in the area,’ Barbara said. ‘She’s living at 48 Wilton Road.’
‘Oh right,’ I said. It meant nothing to me. I would have been more interested if Barbara had told me chips were half price that day.
‘She wants to see you,’ Barbara said.
‘Hmm … maybe …’ I conceded.
A few days later, I knocked on the door to the house where Mam was living with Norman Trevethick. Maybe I was expecting Mam to put her arms around me, but she didn’t. Instead we sat down quite far apart on separate chairs on opposite sides of her front room.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hello,’ said Mam. ‘How are you?’
I told her a bit about what I was up to, but she felt like a stranger, a feeling I never really shook off for the rest of my life.
I think Mam wanted to wipe out the memory of all the things she’d done, but she’d deserted me so long ago and I’d heard too many relatives and friends badmouth her, saying things like ‘your mother can’t have loved you; anyone who walks out on a family must be hard as nails’, to be able to forgive and forget. It was only when I was much older that I came to understand why a mother or father might walk away from their children if they were trapped in a violent marriage.
I didn’t see much of my mother after that, but a few months later, I knocked on her door. ‘Mam, I’ve been told to get out of my flat,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got any money, but I’m starting a new job at ICI soon.’
‘I’ll ask Norman if you can live in the back bedroom,’ she said.
A few days later I moved in with Mam and Norman, who, in an attempt to befriend me, gave me a motorbike.
Every Thursday I’d pay Mam some rent, but after a couple of months, I returned home on a Thursday with empty pockets.
‘You all right?’ Mam said, as I sat down to a plate of sausage, eggs and chips she’d just cooked. ‘What was it like getting your second month’s wages?’
‘I haven’t got any,’ I said.
‘What?’ Mam snapped. She still had a terrible temper. ‘Where’s your money?’
‘I went to the bookies and put it on a horse.’
‘You haven’t got a penny?’
‘No.’
‘You wasteful little shit!’ Mam shouted. She picked up my dinner and threw it at me. I ducked. The plate hit the wall.
As Norman walked in from work, the sausage, egg and chips were running down the back kitchen wall. Thinking it was my fault, he yelled at me. ‘Out! Get out! We don’t want you here. You’re no good. Get out!’
That was the last occasion I spent more than a couple of hours with my mam for at least another decade. I’d drop by her house once in a while, but a year could pass quite easily without us seeing each other and I never received the love and affection from her that other people take for granted from their mothers.
I moved into a bedsit and continued to do my job at ICI, where I spent most of each working day supplying a gang of welders with materials. Whenever we stopped for a chat or a cup of tea I would tap out a beat on the welding rods. I’d always had a good sense of rhythm and would tap my knees or the table or anything else within suitable range. ‘Are you a drummer?’ one of the welders said one day.
‘No.’
‘Well, you’ve got it,’ he said. ‘You ought to think about drumming.’
I didn’t think any more of it until a few weeks later when, in the works canteen, I was tapping the table with my cutlery. ‘What is it with you?’ one of the lads said. ‘You’re always tapping.’
‘Dunno … I just like it,’ I said.
‘Have you ever tried drumming?’
‘Only when I was school. I played in Thornaby boys’ band for a while.’
‘What happened there, then?’
‘It didn’t last.’ I shrugged. ‘I was only in it for a while. They shut down the band.’
‘You’re a good drummer, you should take it up,’ the lad said.
The welder and the lad were right. I really did enjoy tapping out beats. Maybe I should give drumming a go, I thought. So I visited my auld fella. His first reaction was that drums cost a lot of money, but he dug out the Evening Gazette, spotted an advertisement for a drum kit and took me round to a cottage near the seafront. An old bloke let us in and pointed at a kit in the corner of a back room. The bass drum had a rope around it and a picture of Jesus on the front.
‘Dad, it’s Salvation Army …’ I said. The auld fella just raised his eyebrows.
There was also a snare drum and a foot pedal with a big wooden hammer. It was a bit makeshift, but it would do. I lugged it back to my flat and began to practise.
Just along from the flat was a pub called the Station Hotel where a woman played standards on the piano in the lounge most evenings. Nancy Pinky was from Slaggy Island and she was the ugliest woman I’d ever seen. We used to say she had Wednesday eyes because they looked both ways to the weekend, but her worst problem was that she had terrible wind. Nancy would sit in the lounge, drinking pints of Guinness (which surely didn’t help), and lifting her backside off the stool as she played the piano, farting all the while.
‘When you’re smiling …’ she’d sing. Fart. ‘When you’re smiling …’ Pump. ‘The whole world smiles with you.’ Fart.
The lounge was always packed, everyone laughing at Nancy while I would tap the beat on the bar. Some nights, an auld fella on the drums would accompany Nancy, but quite often he didn’t turn up. At the end of one night I went up to Nancy.
‘Where’s the drummer?’ I said.
‘Oh, he can only make it now and again,’ Nancy said. ‘He’s got a couple of other jobs.’
‘I’ve got a set of drums,’ I said. ‘Can I play along with you?’
‘There’s no money in it,’ she said, ‘but I’ll get you a pint.’
‘That’s all right.’
The next evening I set up my drums. The first song was a disaster. I was far too loud, the boom of my Salvation Army bass drum drowning out Nancy and the piano, but I soon got the hang of it and from then on I’d race home after work to be ready to join Nancy in the Station Hotel at seven o’clock. After a while, I’d saved enough money to trade in the Salvation Army kit for an old second-hand Rogers kit. It was falling to bits, but it was a proper kit with tom-toms and cymbals and it was good enough for me to accompany Nancy singing and farting at the piano. Playing at the Station Hotel several nights a week, I got friendly with some local sand-scratchers. Barry Gardener, Billy Blackburn, Lol Gibbon and Marty Miller, whose family ran market stalls, were all good Redcar lads. ‘Why don’t you come on the market?’ Marty said one day. ‘You’ll make more money than you do at the works.’ Although I didn’t have a licence, I was driving an old van with L-plates around Redcar. Marty assumed it meant I could drive his four-ton truck. ‘Do you want to pick us up in the morning?’ he said.
From then on I’d pull up outside Marty’s house at half past five and knock on the door. Marty was a nightmare to get out of bed. I’d shout through the letter box, thump the door and bang on the windows. ‘Marty! It’s Roy! Get up!’
And from where Marty was slumbering with his girlfriend, I’d hear: ‘I’ll be with ya in a minute.’ I’d sit on the doorstep, reading the paper and drinking tea from my flask, sometimes for half an hour. ‘I don’t know how you can be so fucking bright and cheerful this time of the morning,’ Marty would say when he eventually emerged. ‘I’ll never get used to getting up this early.’
Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown Page 10