China responded with a single word: ‘Outside!’
As we passed through the front door, I smacked China on the back of his head. He went flying. He picked himself up and came at me, his fists a blurred whirr in front of him. I hit him once. On the chest with my fist. It lifted him a foot or two in the air. The punch wasn’t hard enough to cause real damage, but it was hard enough to make him reconsider his next move. By the time he was back on his feet, China had changed his mind. ‘Aye, we can talk about this,’ he said.
‘What’s there to talk about?’ I sneered. China paused for a second. He wasn’t the brightest bulb in the room. I could almost hear the rusty cogs inside his head struggling to turn thoughts into action. Then he ran off.
I returned to the Clarry’s lounge and sat down. Sitting on the far side of the jukebox from the group of lasses, I’d just got my breath back when Diana sat down at my table. ‘Judith sent this over,’ she said, holding out a pint of beer.
‘Is she knocking about with China?’
‘Yeah,’ Diana said.
‘He’s an arsehole, isn’t he?’
‘Oh yeah.’
I went over to the lasses’ table and got chatting. When they got up to leave, I asked Judith for a date. The next evening I took her to see a cowboy flick at the cinema. It was the beginning of a regular thing. I soon discovered that Judith was not only very easy on the eye but also easy to get along with. Having grown up in Bellingham, a small mining village near Hexham, she was like a character in a Catherine Cookson novel – a good honest worker, who kept herself spotlessly clean and could make curtains or clothes from potato sacks. Judith was a wonderful woman and within three months I’d decided she was the one for me. Standing in the bookie’s one afternoon – there was none of that getting-down-on-one-knee rubbish in Redcar in those days – I popped the question: ‘Do you want to get married?’
‘Aye, all right then,’ Judith said. ‘We’ll get married on Saturday in two weeks.’
Shortly before eleven o’clock on the morning of 12 August 1967, Judith and I rolled up outside the registry office at Guisborough, up in the Cleveland Hills. Having moved on from being a Teddy boy, I was dressed in a mod suit. Judith wore a light blue silk suit and hat. There was a short ceremony, then we headed back to Redcar to sit with twenty mates in the Clarendon, the scene of our first meeting, and to tuck in to sandwiches and beer. Most of the afternoon was spent running back and forth between the Clarry and Garveys, the local bookmakers. Not that I had any luck. My middle name that afternoon should have been Second. By late afternoon, we were all paralytic from the drink and getting radgy because none of us had won anything on the horses. Petty disagreements were turning into arguments and it wasn’t long before I caught sight of a lad swinging a fist in my direction. By grabbing George, a youngster with a gammy arm who collected glasses in the Clarendon, I avoided the lad’s fist. Instead it hit George, who was carrying a tray of drinks, full on in the mouth. The drinks flew everywhere and I was barred from the Clarendon for three months. Not what I wanted on my wedding day.
We moved onto the Berkeley, a bar with a late licence in Redcar’s bowling alley. We had a few more drinks, then the music struck up on the jukebox. It was an old Chuck Berry number. ‘It was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well…’ Everyone got up to dance with Judith and me. Towards the end of the song, I jumped up from the dance floor onto the stage, ran across it and leaped the gap to the grand piano. Landing on my knees, I slid across the piano’s lid, straight through a plate glass window and into the car park, a drop of about ten feet. I landed on the tarmac with a crunch, ripping my mod suit and scraping the skin off my knees. Up at the window, the entire wedding party was watching in fits of laughter. Beside me, a copper was standing with a dog and van.
‘What the fucking hell do you think you are doing?’ the blue-bottle said. I couldn’t think of an answer. I was arrested and carted off to the cop shop, where I was charged with being drunk and disorderly.
Judith turned up. With tears rolling down her face, she pleaded with the duty sergeant to let me go. ‘I know he’s had a lot to drink, but it’s our wedding night,’ she said.
‘Just get rid of him,’ the sergeant said, and I was allowed to go home to our flat at Newcomer Terrace on the seafront.
Within a few days of us getting married, Judith announced that she was four weeks pregnant. I was delighted, but I didn’t feel ready to be a father. We were given a council house at 36 Cedar Grove in Redcar and on 17 April 1968 Richard was born at Teesborough Maternity Hospital.
Judith was a fantastic mother and immediately adapted to looking after a child, but I didn’t handle it at all well. I was too immature to be a father. And having found a woman to love me and stand by me fifteen years after my mother deserted me, I struggled to accept a competitor for my wife’s attentions.
Richard was a bonny little baby and I did all the fatherly things, although I drew the line at changing nappies. I took him for walks in the pram and played with him on the beach. I loved little Richard and I loved looking after him, but I’d come to a point in my life at which I had to decide who I wanted to be. Richard’s birth had coincided with my first steps in show business, behind the drums with the Four Man Band, and it had presented me with a difficult choice. Did I want to try to improve my life? Or did I want to see how it panned out if I didn’t make any changes? For too long I’d allowed myself to be shaped by events.
When I looked back at my early life, I realised I’d often blamed circumstances for getting me into trouble. The truth is that I courted trouble. Not because I was a born troublemaker, but maybe because I’d lost my mother and because I had a father whose only reaction to any mischief was to tan my arse. I’d grown up with no real idea of what was right or wrong. I rarely considered the consequences of my actions and I had no notion of what was sensible and what was stupid. In short, I’d become an ignorant, clueless arsehole – stealing, fighting, drinking and fucking whatever and with whomever I could get my hands on – and I’d already paid a price for it.
But now, with a young son and a newly-wed wife, I had the opportunity to change my life. I could play the dutiful husband and the devoted father, but that would mean being trapped forever in the destiny I had so far carved out for myself – a future of no-hope jobs that in the past had always led me to boredom, frustration and petty crime. Or I could grab hold of the one thing that had given me a glimpse of a better future – show business.
From that first gig with the Four Man Band at the Magnet Hotel, I’d known that I’d found something at which I was good and which offered me an alternative to a life of crime. Was I going to be a loving, hands-on father? Or did I want to be an entertainer? I’d already discovered that the adoration I got from the audience was far greater than anything I could get from my wife and a little baby. It sounds callous, but that’s just the way it was. Any entertainer would say the same. You can’t wait to get back on that stage. That’s why I still do it today. It’s a drug – just like heroin, only more addictive. And, like a drug, being on stage was to become the biggest thing in my life, something for which I would neglect everything in my path. So, faced with deciding between the stage and my new family, the choice wasn’t difficult.
It didn’t occur to me then, but with hindsight I now realise that I was following in my father’s footsteps. I did exactly what my father did to my mother. I neglected Judith and devoted myself to the clubs instead. Judy and I had our ups and downs but, like my father, I made sure I still provided for the family. Shortly after Richard was born, I realised I needed to earn more money than playing with the band could provide. I’d given up working on the market stall with Marty, so I went back to hod-carrying. Lugging bricks or cement five and a half days a week, I worked from Monday morning until Saturday lunchtime for twelve pounds and ten shillings. Out of that, I gave Judy ten pounds, leaving me two pounds and ten shillings to go out on a Friday with the lads, have a bet on the horses on Saturday afte
rnoon and then take Judy out on the Saturday evening.
It was barely enough to scrape by, but we managed. Judy’s mam and dad would give us bits of furniture that I’d repair and polish or paint white. And I resorted to my old tricks to get my hands on things we needed.
I’d moved on from hod-carrying on building sites to mixing up vermiculite fireproof plaster for the pipe-laggers at ICI when I decided I needed a shed. Knowing I couldn’t afford a new one, I took a mate called Billy down to ICI where I’d spotted a garden shed being used to store cement sacks. We dismantled it, put it on the back of a truck and headed for the main gate.
‘What you doing?’ the gateman asked.
‘We’re working for Pearson’s,’ I bluffed. ‘We’ve got to deliver this shed.’
When the gateman went into his little office to check, I jumped out of our pick-up truck, pulled the gate open, let Billy drive through the gate, jumped back in the van and raced off. We’d got halfway round the first roundabout outside ICI when a security van caught up with us. A guard forced us to pull over. ‘You’re nicking this shed,’ he said.
‘I’m not,’ I replied.
‘Yes, you are. You’re nicking it,’ he said. ‘Now, go and put it back and we’ll forget about it. If you don’t, I’ll prosecute you.’ So we drove back and re-erected the shed, but I wasn’t going to abandon my quest for a shed that easily.
I found an old fifteen-hundredweight furniture van at a scrapyard and bought it for ten pounds. The scrapyard owner took the back of the van off the chassis and delivered it to our home where, with inches to spare, I squeezed it through the space between our house and the neighbouring house into our garden. It was enormous – so long and so high that it blocked out the light from our neighbour’s garden. Our neighbours complained to the council, who came around one day while I was at work, dismantled it and took it away.
Life at Cedar Grove was a litany of attempts to save money or get owt for nowt. We lived for Friday and Saturday nights. Friday night was the lads’ night out – strictly no wives or girlfriends. If I wasn’t working with the band, I’d join my mates and we’d all go into town together, spend the evening in the pub, move on to a nightclub and usually end the night with a fight or a fuck or both.
Walking into a nightclub as a young man, the music blaring, the birds wearing skirts halfway up their arses, you were always going to attract trouble. It was just the hustle and bustle of youth. Some jealous bloke would inevitably come over. ‘You staring at my missus?’ he’d shout over the music. ‘I’ll punch you in the fucking mouth, mate.’ And even if I survived the nightclub and went back to a lass’s house, her boyfriend would often knock on the door and I’d have to scarper. It always happened.
Saturday nights were different. This time wives and girlfriends were permitted, which could make things complicated if the lads had seen some action on Friday night. My best mate at the time was Dave Hewitt, with whom I’d come off the motorcycle given to me by Norman Trevethick. The first thing Dave and I would do when we met at the Clarendon was get our stories straight. ‘Now don’t forget, Dave, you held me down last night, and you give me that love bite, didn’t you, Dave?’ I’d say.
‘Yeah, sure,’ Dave would say. ‘I’ll say I give you the love bite to make Judy jealous and you tell my girlfriend I stayed at your house last night because I was too blathered to get home.’
Some evenings, I’d work on the door of a pub or nightclub – usually the Red Lion – to earn a few extra bob if the band wasn’t playing. We’d all meet at half past seven in the Clarendon lounge, have a couple of pints, then at ten o’clock I’d go and work on the door until two o’clock, the best place and time to pick up a lass at the end of the evening. The girls would have had a drink and as they were leaving I’d say, ‘What you doing, pet? Do you want to go and have a coffee?’
A lot of my mates lived on their own in flats, so I’d borrow the key and take the lass there. I took a fat girl called Grace home one night. She was hugely overweight, but it was the end of the night and I wanted to get my leg over. At times like that, nothing would stop me. Grace had sunk a few drinks too many and couldn’t get her legs up. Now I don’t have the biggest penis in the world and I couldn’t get it in. In those days, there was nothing in the way of foreplay – I hadn’t even heard of a blow job – and we were struggling to get going. Then I hit on a brain-wave.
‘Fart and give us a clue,’ I suggested.
That was it. We collapsed onto the bed in fits of giggles. The moment was lost, but it paid dividends years later when I remembered it and used it on stage. It got the biggest laugh of the evening and for a while became a regular part of my act.
Given the way in which I was carrying on, it was unsurprising that Judy and I had arguments and fights. They were about women, drink and money. Mostly money, actually – ‘you don’t give me enough’ or ‘I don’t get enough to give you enough’ or ‘you get five pound when you’re on the door at the club, why don’t I get any of it?’ – but it was also about jealousy. I’d see Judy going out in a short skirt that barely covered her crotch and I’d see blokes staring at her. I couldn’t help myself. ‘You’re fucking doing that on purpose,’ I’d say. And then the argument would start.
‘You never took your eyes off that girl last night,’ Judy would snap back.
‘What do you mean? I don’t even know her …’ But women aren’t daft. And Judy sussed me out straight away. I had a straying eye and that caused a lot of grief.
And as with a lot of couples from Middlesbrough council estates, it often turned violent. When I look back at that time, I’m filled with regrets. I know I have it in me to be cool, calm and collected, but I wasn’t like that then and neither was anyone I knew. And it was always just everyday things that triggered the rows. Us lads didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. We didn’t realise that we were big blokes and they were little women. I don’t agree with slapping a woman but, having done it, I know why it happens. When violence is all you know, it’s difficult not to resort to your fists when you’ve got nothing and you’re living on top of each other and you’re getting at each other all the time. Suddenly the only way to bring a stop to the bickering and the arguing is to pick something up and just throw it. Or to lash out. I’ve done it and I’ve had it done to me. I came from a background where that was the way we lived. And as a result, we never had an ornament in my parent’s house that wasn’t chipped or broken. It was getting to be the same where Judy and I lived.
The most trivial things would trigger arguments. I was watching football on television one day when Judy got up and switched channels. ‘What y’doing?’ I said.
‘Watching Peyton Place,’ Judy said.
Or, as I called it, Paint and Place. I got up. ‘I’m watching the football,’ I said, changing channels back.
‘No, I’m watching the soap,’ she said.
I saw red. ‘Fucking nobody’s watching it,’ I shouted. And I smashed the television, which was on rent from Burbecks in Station Road. The next day, I went round to Burbecks and said we’d been burgled. ‘You won’t believe this, but our house was broken into. They tried to steal the TV and dropped it climbing through the window,’ I said. Burbecks didn’t fall for that one. I still had to pay for it. Three shillings and sixpence a week for about three years.
One night, at the end of a gig with the Four Man Band, Dave Hewitt came up to me as I was packing up my drums. He’d been living with a girl, but they’d had an argument and the girl had thrown him out. He’d moved on to his mother’s house, but his mother was fed up with him and had told him to pack his bags. ‘Any chance of stopping at your house?’ Dave said. So I put him up in the back bedroom.
Dave didn’t become a permanent fixture. He stayed maybe two or three nights a week. The other nights he’d stay with a woman or his brother or another friend. We were drinking mates and I liked having him around. Judy was pregnant with our second child and she also enjoyed Dave’s company when I was out g
igging with the band, working the door at the Red Lion or out with my mates.
On 12 June 1969 Robert was born in his grandma’s front room at 8 Cleveland Street in Redcar, opposite the post office. I was delighted to be a father again and proud to have two bonny sons.
One Sunday, a couple of months after Robert was born, Judy and I took the kids to visit Judy’s mother. Richard, who was only a year old, picked up one of his toys and smashed it down onto his grandmother’s coffee table, her pride and joy.
‘You little sod,’ I said, wagging my finger at Richard.
‘Don’t you call him a little sod in front of me,’ Judy snapped.
‘He’s got to be disciplined,’ I said. ‘I know he’s only a baby, but look at your face.’ And I slapped Richard on the back of the leg. ‘Naughty, naughty, naughty,’ I said, thinking I was doing the right thing.
You would have thought I’d stabbed Richard. Judy and her mother went berserk, screaming and shouting at me. ‘You’re nowt but a bully,’ Judy shouted. ‘You’re an arsehole.’
‘Aye, and this carry-on is for your fucking benefit,’ I said, pointing at Judy’s mother, ‘not for my benefit.’ Slamming the door, I walked out. I got home at about half past four. At six o’clock, the Four Man Band was picking me up for a gig.
‘Where’s Judy?’ Dec asked when he’d come inside the door.
‘Eh … she’s at her mother’s, we’ve just had a barney. Nowt to worry. It’ll be all right when I get back.’
But Judy wasn’t there when I got home that night and it wasn’t all right. I went upstairs. All her clothes were gone. She’d packed up everything and vanished. I’d always thought that kind of thing only happened in trashy novels. I never thought it would happen to me. And, like something out of a Barbara Cartland plot, there was a note on the table. ‘It’s obvious you don’t love me,’ Judy had written at the top of two pages that detailed all my failings and which ended with the words ‘… and I have found love with somebody else. Don’t try and find us.’
Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown Page 12