Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (3 page)

‘Aye,’ the chairman said, looking at me with all the suspicion of Quasimodo. ‘Were you at Madame Tussaud’s, then?’

‘Madame Tussaud’s?’ I said. ‘That’s the real fucker, you daft old bastard. That’s Tom Jones, one of the biggest stars in the fucking country.’

‘Oh, right,’ the club chairman said. ‘Well, you didn’t do very well when you last played our club.’ And then he walked off.

Aye, I thought. Welcome to the big time.

Sitting in Dr Martin’s surgery that afternoon, trying to come to terms with having cancer, it felt as if I’d come a long way since the days when I was at the total mercy of club chairmen. A lot of it had been fun, but just as much had been a hard and unpleasant struggle. Now, thanks to Helen, for the first time in my life I had true happiness. I was financially secure and the work was going well. The gags were flowing, the material was
good and I was working on my music in my studio. I felt on top of my game and the future looked rosy. But right then it looked like everything for which I’d worked so hard and for so long was going to be taken away from me. I’d come a long way and suddenly it seemed all in vain.

On a Saturday afternoon, three months before the end of the Second World War in Europe, not far from a bomb crater that marked the site of what two years earlier had been a factory warehouse, a scream pierced the air and I took my first gasp of Grangetown’s filthy air. Born on 3 February 1945, I first saw the light of day in the main bedroom of 78 Broadway, a two-up, two-down council house at the end of a terrace in the shadow of a steelworks that belched stinking fumes and dark smoke all day, every day, over the poorest and roughest of Middlesbrough’s run-down suburbs. The milk bottles on our doorsteps were always covered in dust and you couldn’t hang out your washing on the lines. The fumes from the coke ovens choked us and turned brass doorknobs blue. The air seemed to be permanently cold and damp. Even on a summer’s day the sun would be blocked out by smoke and clouds of dust. And at night it would never really be dark because of the eternal glow of Dorman, Long & Co’s steel furnaces and coke ovens at the end of the street. In fact, it was impossible to escape the steelworks. The streets were named after the pioneers of the steel industry, men such as Bessemer, Vickers and Laing. And if you looked beyond the streets to Middlesbrough in the west or Redcar on the coast in the east, steelworks, petrochemical plants and slag heaps stretched right across our horizon for twenty-eight miles along the south bank of the Tees.

Of all Middlesbrough’s industrial suburbs, Grangetown was the most isolated. Boxed in by the massive ICI chemical works and the North Sea to the east, the steelworks to the north (and beyond the steelworks, by the foul Tees river) and the Cleveland Hills to the south, the only way out was through a tiny subway that cut under the railway tracks running all along Grangetown’s western edge. More than 12,000 people lived in those enclosed few square miles, all of them working class, all living hand to mouth, and all white. I didn’t see a black or Asian person until I was in my early twenties. And neither did anyone I knew. That was just the way things were back then.

Recently I went back to Grangetown and it’s even more desolate now than when I was a kid. Back then, Grangetown was known as Cardboard City on account of the many rickety buildings and prefab constructions that dotted our neighbourhood, but Cardboard City is no longer. Most of the terraces have been demolished, leaving a grid of deserted streets running through derelict wasteland. Where once nearly 10,000 men worked in steel mills and coke factories, now the most prosperous industries are prostitution and drug dealing. Many streets have roadblocks to prevent joyriding and the street corners are dotted with tall poles with wire shrouds housing CCTV cameras that spy on the residents.

Grangetown has become an empty, soulless place in which to grow up, but it wasn’t like that when I was a child. Maybe it was the brutal industrial environment, maybe it was the fact that most of us were descended from the thousands of Scottish, Irish and Welsh immigrants who came in search of work at the steelworks after Grangetown was established in 1881, or maybe it was the grinding hardship of a life with little chance of escape, but we were a tight bunch. Everyone knew everyone’s business and we all led a common life. All the kids went to school together, all the dads worked at the steelworks and the
mothers washed, cleaned and went to the bingo. The families were large – twelve kids in the McElroy family and the Harlems had nineteen – probably because nobody had owt and there was little for adults to do after work but go to the pub and get pissed or stay at home and fuck each other.
Everyone
had loads of kids – I used to think it was about survival – which made the Vaseys’ small brood very strange by Grangetown standards. Just my mam, my auld fella, my sister Barbara, and me. Mam was one of the Grangetown Taylors, a well-known family with four girls – Ivy, Alice, Mabel and my mother, Amy – and three brothers: George, Bill and Herbert. George played the squeeze-box and Aunt Alice was such a good pianist that we used to say she could play fly shit. If a fly landed on a plate, we would joke, then my auntie Alice could pick a tune out of the black dots it left behind.

My mam was a real Hylda Baker, always getting things arse about face. ‘Splash some Durex on them walls,’ she’d say, meaning Dulux paint. She once announced that our neighbour Margaret had gone into hospital ‘to get the contradictive pill’. Fortunately, Mam had a quick wit and could laugh at all her malapropisms. She also always needed to have the last word. When I was older and when my mam’s legs started giving her trouble, I remember the doctor coming to the house.

‘You’ve got arthritis, Amy,’ he said. ‘I think what we’ll have to do is get you to do some exercise with your arthritis.’

‘Well, what else can we do with arthritis?’ Mam said.

By all accounts, my mother was a very attractive woman when she was younger. All I can remember from that time is that she wore a pinny and had a perm. I could see that I’d inherited her eyes, button nose and good teeth. However, when the photographs were brought out and shown, other people would make remarks. ‘She stands very well, your mam,’ they’d say and I’d wonder what they were getting at.

But my mam’s beauty, wit and common sense had little effect on my father. A tall man with a thick lick of dark curly hair, parted down the middle and slashed back, Colin Vasey had only one true passion in his life. He was a good cricketer, he loved his tennis and snooker, and he liked to breed Alsatian dogs, which he sold to the police force, but all that paled in comparison to his devotion to the club. It was his life. He was a drinker and liked his booze, but even more than that he just loved being at the club. He went to work at half past seven in the morning, the clack of his nailed boots joining the echoing clatter of thousands of workmen making their way towards the belching chimney stacks of Dorman, Long, the steelworks at the end of our street. For eight hours a day, Dad toiled as a chart changer in the dark mill sheds. Each of the sheds was several miles long with a furnace at one end, out of which huge molten steel sheets would come tumbling. Dad would run along the steel every hour, changing the charts that recorded the temperature of the steel as it cooled, until the wail of the factory siren heralded his return at home at four-thirty p.m. He’d eat his tea silently in the kitchen, beside the fire grate where his underpants and socks would be hanging next to Mam’s pies and cakes, then fall asleep in his chair. An hour later, he’d wake up and head upstairs to his domain: the bathroom. Dad was the only family member who got to soak in a proper bathtub. He’d use most of the hot water in the boiler tank, so Mam would fill pots and kettles to heat enough water for my sister and me to wash in the tin tub in the kitchen, with a brick underneath one end to make the water deeper where Barbara sat. After his bath we’d hear Dad upstairs, getting changed. Then there would be a rumble of footsteps as he thundered down the stairs and a bang as the front door slammed. Dad was off to the club in his suit and flat cap, his hair parted in the middle and slicked back with Brylcreem, a Woodbine wedged between his lips like a proper
Andy Capp. Come seven o’clock, that was his routine. Every day, including Christmas, New Year, our birthdays and holidays. He’d organise trips for pensioners and kids to the seaside. He’d book acts for the concert room and be a pillar of our local community, while my mam sat neglected at home. At half past eleven, Dad would reappear, always in a good mood, often singing and usually with a wrap of fish and chips, or a packet of crisps and some lemonade, or some other scran under his arm. We’d tuck into it before bed, so it’s no wonder I’m a fat bastard. It’s the way I was brought up.

And there was no shortage of places in Grangetown for my auld gadgie to go out drinking. Cardboard City had been a godless community for many of its early years. Without churches, the locals got used to congregating in the dozens of shebeens, pubs, clubs and dives that sprung up and became the heart of our neighbourhood. But by the time I was a kid there were four churches in a row in Bolckow Road, including the Methodist chapel, where Dad’s twin sister Connie was a lay preacher and where I started in the choir as a young boy, loving Sunday school because, like many of the kids, it gave me an opportunity to take more money out of the collection tin than I put in it.

Dad had another sister, Ruby, but nobody talked owt about her. She was a schoolteacher who’d moved to Stokesley at the posh end of Middlesbrough and didn’t want anything to do with us. It left just Connie, a spinster in love with a married policeman, to look after my grandparents. My grandfather, Thomas Vasey, was chalk to my father’s cheese, a miserable old bastard who never said two words to me in all the time I knew him. He was such a grump that other people used to take bets on when they’d see him smile. He’d been a crane driver at Dorman, Long and seemed to me to spend most of his long retirement, until he died at ninety, sat in an old stiff-backed
leather armchair, a spittoon beside him, placing bets on the horses and glowering at anyone who entered the room. In those days there were no legal bookmakers in Grangetown. Instead my grandad would use bookies’ runners who stood on street corners, taking bets and paying out winnings. They always used to be short fellas in flat caps, with one eye permanently on the road in case a copper appeared. There were hundreds of them in them days, all over Middlesbrough and its surroundings. It was part and parcel of life.

And if you won something on the horses, you spent it straight away. There was no saving for a rainy day. No one in Grangetown saw a future beyond the steelworks, which meant you lived every day as if it was your last. You grabbed your pleasures when you could, so a win might mean a night getting blathered in the local dive or pub, which we called the claggy mat because your feet would stick to the floor. Or if you were that way inclined, you might head up to the black path that ran parallel to the steelworks, which was where all the prostitutes used to ply their trade. At times, particularly on a Friday night, there would be dozens of women up there, looking to pick up steelworkers walking home with their pay packets in their back pockets. As kids we used to point at them in the street. ‘Eh, she’s on the scut,’ or ‘She’s on the batter,’ we’d say. And we’d shout a few insults or throw a stone, and then run away.

Other than illegal bookmaking, prostitution and drunkenness, there was very little crime in Grangetown. Everyone in Middlesbrough knew that if you lived in Grangetown you had nowt. You could see it from the houses. No one had carpets down or curtains up – instead, we put cardboard on the windows – and at Christmas the most you hoped for in your stocking was an apple, an orange, some nuts, a colouring book and, if it was a good year, a little toy. That was it.

I’d like to be able to say I can remember happy times when
my auld fella, my mam, Barbara and I all did something together, such as going to the park or the seaside as a family, but I can’t remember it ever happening. My parents couldn’t even agree on what to call me. Dad had called me Royston, but Mam didn’t like it. She said it was a snobbish, poncey name. Telling my auld fella that she was ‘sick of people shortening it – either he’s Royston or he’s Roy’, she went down to the registry office and had my name changed in the official register from Royston to Roy.

Given their many differences, it was perhaps unsurprising that few people ever saw my parents together outside the house. Funerals, maybe, but even that was unlikely as my father was one of the first people in Grangetown to turn his back on the church. It made him the black sheep of the family and maybe it played a part in the warfare between my parents. Theirs wasn’t a passionate relationship; they just didn’t get on. As soon as a row broke out between my mam and my dad, my sister and I would have to scat upstairs as fast as we could. Something would go flying and they’d start bawling at each other. Frying pans, ornaments, you name it, it became a missile. There was nothing in our house that wasn’t chipped or broken.

My father once said something wrong as he was eating his tea at the kitchen table. Mam walked over, picked up his plate, opened the dustbin and threw it all out. The plate, the food she’d taken an hour to cook, everything. She had a wicked temper.

My mam’s other affliction was that she was an epileptic at a time when there was no real treatment for it. Her fits were frequent. She once fell off the platform of the bus during a seizure and ended up in hospital. Another time she had a fit while cooking the tea and fell in the fire, burning the side of her face and her arm. And when I was a baby she had a fit while bathing me, trapping me in the bath. Fortunately, Aunt Alice was after a
cup of sugar and found us. She pulled me out from underneath my mam, held me upside down and emptied me of water. If it hadn’t been for Aunt Alice, I was frequently reminded, I wouldn’t have lived to see my first birthday.

I’ve always suspected that my mother’s epilepsy was triggered by the frequent beatings my father dealt out. In that, our home was no different to any other in Grangetown at that time. It was the way things were in those days: married couples settled their arguments with their fists and their feet. I’m not making any excuses for it, but on rough council estates where times are hard and there’s not a lot of money about, people hit out when they don’t get what they want and need. It’s nowt to be proud of, but it goes on. Walking home along our street you’d often hear, ‘Aaah! Fuck off!’ and then a door would slam and you’d hear heavy footsteps pounding into the distance. Or a window would smash as something went flying.