Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (15 page)

But as Mr White went on, I realised he was making the operation sound like an everyday thing, like he was talking me through a holiday brochure or the plans for some building work on my house. And then I realised that’s
exactly
what it was to him. Booking a holiday or having an extension built or having a cancer operation can all seem complicated, momentous things. But for the people who do it every day – travel agents or builders or surgeons – it’s just another day at the office. And when I realised that, I felt strangely calm and the nervousness seeped away.

‘When you came to see me about your throat,’ Mr White said, ‘what were you about to do?’

‘I was going to Australia for a six-week tour,’ I said.

‘If you’d done that, we might have been talking about a completely different operation. You came to me at just the right time. Any later and it would have been a lot more difficult.’

‘Right …’ I could see what Mr White was getting at. I just hoped it didn’t mean I’d used up all my luck.

‘Now you’ve already had two investigatory operations,’ Mr White said, ‘and we’re going to have to stop putting you to sleep for routine investigations because if we continue to do it, it will affect your brain.’

That put the shits right up me. Would it mean I wouldn’t be able to remember my own name when I woke up?

‘It means we’ll have to try something else the next time we put a camera down your throat,’ Mr White said. ‘And it might be a bit uncomfortable.’

I got used to investigations without sedatives, but when it came to the operation to remove the cancer I was allowed a general anaesthetic. The nurses in the hospital were like angels. While I lay on my bed on the morning of the operation, my mind wandering all over the place, they gave me hope. Their actions and comforting words made me feel a million dollars. The problem was that I’d walked around the hospital and seen what could happen to me. There were cancer patients in the Royal Infirmary who’d had their throats removed. With big blue steam boxes beside their beds and tubes leading to their mouths, they were fighting to keep the germs at bay. I could see the fear in their eyes. They knew they’d have to learn to speak all over again. And I knew they were wondering if they could do it.

Judith Ann Armstrong first caught my eye in – where else? – a Redcar pub. It was shortly after I started drumming with the Four Man Band and I’d gone into the Clarendon. As was so often the case, a gang of lasses was sat near the jukebox. I recognised a couple of them – one was called Diana – but my
attention was totally focused on Judith. Wearing a miniskirt and with short boyish hair, Judith looked a bit like Lulu. I heard her dirty laugh, saw the cheeky glint in her eye and immediately thought, ‘Eh up, that’s a pretty bewer!’

Supping my pint, I was keeping half an eye on Judith when a lad I knew only as China walked in. China was half-Italian and was said to be a bit of a bully, a reputation to which he immediately lived up by walking over to the group of lasses and giving Judith a clip across the top of her head.

‘Eh, eh, fucking pack it in,’ I interjected.

‘Shut ya fuckin’ mouth or I’ll tear off ya face,’ China replied. Thinking it best not to provoke any trouble, I turned my attention back to my pint and waited for China to go to the toilet. Then I followed him into the gents’.

‘You’ll rip my face off, will you?’ I snarled as China stood at the urinal. ‘Well, get on with it.’

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 afternoon 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.