Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (7 page)

‘I saw my Dad’s girlfriend’s fanny last night!’ I bragged at school the next day. All the lads were fascinated.

‘Did you? What was it like?’ they said.

‘Oh, it looked like a big black spidery thing!’ I said.

My own interest in women was taking time to develop, but like any adolescent I had a vivid fantasy life that made up for a lack of any real action. Anybody of my age knows about
Spick
and
Span
. They were little black and white magazines with pictures of ladies in their underwear. By today’s standards they were quite harmless; you see more now in a home shopping catalogue. I was in my bedroom one afternoon, looking through
Spick
and
Span
and doing what any teenage boy would do in the circumstances. The next thing I knew, Dad was standing in my bedroom. ‘Roy!’ he shouted.

I jumped up. ‘What?’ I said.

‘Your tea’s ready, you mucky little bastard!’

I’d fallen asleep with my trousers down and my hand in my pants. It was obvious what I’d been up to and my father had caught me red-handed. I didn’t dare go downstairs.

Compared with other lads in my class, I was a late starter. They were always bragging about what they were getting up to with girls. One day, Derek Harland, who was a couple of years younger than me, turned up at my house with two girls. ‘These girls want fucking,’ he said as I opened the door.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Er … our Dad’ll go mad.’

‘I’ll show you,’ Derek said. He took Cynthia, a fat lass I knew from around Grangetown, and he fucked her on our stairs while me and this other girl I’d never met stood watching. I don’t know whether Cynthia’s friend expected me to follow Derek’s lead. She certainly didn’t come on to me and I was just not that way inclined. I was a little bit shy and naive when it came to girls. Although I had no qualms about pinching things, getting drunk or fighting in the street, I had scruples about the right
way to treat women and that stopped me taking advantage. I was from a staunch Methodist family – Sunday school and things like that – and despite being the black sheep of the family I had stronger morals than many of the lads with whom I kicked around. I can’t help thinking that the absence of my mother, and to some extent my sister, played a part in my attitudes towards girls when I was a teenager. Maybe it had made me scared of women; I certainly wasn’t used to their company. Or maybe it made me put girls on a pedestal, as if they were something special and delicate that needed to be handled carefully because they were so rare in my life.

At that time I knocked around in a gang of about five or six lads. We all had nicknames. There was Sweaty, Namda, Baz, Carless, Panda and I was Spud. Spud Vasey. How any of us got those names I don’t know. We were all in the same class and we had the same interests. We’d meet on a corner at five o’clock at night and wander the streets. When we were old enough, we joined the Boys’ Club, where we’d play table tennis and do sports. I was good at basketball and a fast runner over a hundred yards. A hundred and one yards and I was fucked, but over one hundred yards I was good. I also got into painting, winning a local painting competition. I used to draw cartoon characters on the walls at home. Our bathroom had Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. They were that good that my auld fella would say: ‘You’ll be a cartoonist one day.’ But, like most things, I lost interest in it. I didn’t have any idea of what I would do in the future. I just took each day as it came and never thought I’d amount to anything.

On Saturday evenings, the lads and I would go to a dance at Grangetown Boy Scouts hut. Local bands would play rock-and-roll and ballad standards of the day – ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘A White Sports Coat and a Pink Carnation’. The girls wore pleated skirts and the lads stood around trying to look hard. We were all
Teddy boys, taking our lead from the
New Musical Express
, which had pictures of Lonnie Donegan, Alma Cogan, Frankie Vaughan and Mel Tormé. Cliff Richard was just coming through and I used to think I was just like him. I’d spend ages in front of the mirror in my bedroom, which I’d surrounded with pictures of Cliff, combing a DA into the back of my hair and teasing out a curl at the front. Barry Gerrard, who had the best quiff in Grangetown, used to give me tips on how to comb my hair. One evening, down at the Scout Hut, I thought I’d never looked better when Barry turned to me. ‘What’s that smell?’ he said.

‘What smell?’ I said.

‘I can smell something,’ Barry said.

‘What?’

‘It’s your hair,’ Barry said. ‘What’s them bits in your hair?

‘Them little bits?’ I said. ‘What?’

‘It looks like little bits of bacon and egg.’

‘You told me to get some lard and put it on my hair.’

‘Not out of the fucking pan! Fresh stuff!’ Barry said. The smell was overpowering.

When Sweaty, Namda, Baz, Carless, Panda and I weren’t hanging out on street corners or going to dances, we’d pinch motorbikes and cars, dumping them when they ran out of petrol. We were no different from the joyriders that nowadays plague inner cities.

I met a lad called Terry who was particularly good at putting two wires together and starting up a car or bike. Between us, we decided to buy an old black Austin off an auld fella for eight pounds each. It wasn’t taxed or insured, but Terry was what we called a sandscratcher – he lived in Redcar, on the coast – so we decided the best way to avoid the attention of the bluebottles was to fill up the tank and drive the Austin from Redcar to Warrenby, which had one long road that went along a breakwater
to a pier head. There’d be no traffic there, we reasoned, just a few fishermen’s huts.

We spent all day at Warrenby, taking it in turns to drive along the breakwater, until at about five o’clock we ran out of petrol. ‘We’ll leave it and take the can,’ I said to Terry. ‘We’ll get the can filled and bring it back to the car in the morning.’

The next morning we walked to the garage, a good five miles from the breakwater, and filled the can. As we approached the breakwater we could see a group of men in the distance, but nowhere near where we’d left the car. Some of them were wearing peaked caps. ‘What’s happened there?’ I said.

‘I think it’s the police,’ Terry replied.

‘Eh, we’d better just walk the other way. Maybe they’ve found the car and discovered it isn’t taxed or insured.’

We made a detour around the sand dunes, then sat at a distance, watching and waiting. After about an hour the men dispersed. We walked up to a bloke wearing a hard hat.

‘Hiya, mate!’ I said.

‘All right?’ he replied.

‘There’s coppers there,’ I said. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Some fucking idiot’s left a car on the railway track.’

‘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.