Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (37 page)

As the girl walked in, my heart stopped. Fucking hell, I thought. With perfect eyes and teeth and a cute nose, she was absolutely beautiful. ‘I’ve got to say you are one of the—’ I started.

But the girl interrupted me before I made a fool of myself. ‘Hi, Roy,’ she said. ‘You used to be engaged to me mother.’

I stared at her. Surely it was some mistake? ‘What’s your name?’ I said.

‘Greenwood.’

‘Greenwood? I’ve never been engaged to a Greenwood.’

‘My mam married Geoff Greenwood. Her name was Sandra Pallent.’

Sandra Pallent?
The penny suddenly dropped. Big-breasted Sandra from school in Grangetown. Sandra who I was in love with when I was seventeen. It was a good job I hadn’t said owt. ‘You’re Sandra’s daughter?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘How is she?’

‘She’s just split from my dad. He’s an accountant here in Leeds and he’s just left Mum.’

‘Where’s she working?’

‘At the hospital. She nearly came to this show tonight.’

The next day, I spoke to Sandra. She filled me in on her news. ‘What is this about you and your husband?’ I said.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said.

‘That’s all right – I was only being polite. If you’re ever lonely and you want a night out, give us a ring.’

A few days later Sandra rang me and came to see the show. Afterwards she joined me in my dressing room. ‘What do you think of the show, pet?’ I said.

‘Roy …’ she said. ‘It’s absolutely filthy.’

I took her out for a meal. She had aged well, but she wasn’t quite the same Sandra I’d known when I was a kid. She was tougher and sharper. Life had knocked some of the softness out of her.

Slowly Sandra and I drifted together over the next few months. I was still seeing Shirley the super-slapper, but I was
starting to think that Sandra might be a better long-term bet. After about a year together, I took Sandra to visit my mother, with whom my frosty relationship had recently thawed slightly after she split from Norman Trevethick. I would visit Mam more regularly than previously, taking her cakes and scones, paying her phone bill and television licence. I’d recently moved her to sheltered housing in a bungalow. ‘Mother, this is Sandra,’ I said. I made them a cup of tea while they chatted. The next day I visited my mother again, this time on my own.

‘Is that the same girl that you went to school with?’ Mam said.

‘Yeah.’

‘I thought I didn’t like her.’

‘Why?’

‘As soon as she walked in the room, I took an instant dislike to her.’

‘What’s she done to you?’

‘Not my type. Watch her. She’s evil, her. She’s got devil eyes. And she’s full of herself.’

I ignored my mother’s warnings. What with Shirley on the side and Sandra back on the scene, I didn’t care what my mother had to say. And I was preoccupied with something else: a third woman. After the Beryl–Maureen–Pat farce, I’d vowed never again to get involved with three women simultaneously. But my success in the theatres had gone to my head, I thought I was invincible and for the second time I’d got myself into a three-sided mess.

The first I heard of Linda was shortly after I arrived at the Royal Theatre at St Helens with Ronnie, my driver at the time. ‘Have you seen the manageress here?’ he said. ‘She is stunning.’ A few minutes later, there was a knock at my dressing-room door and I clapped my eyes on Linda for the first time. Ronnie wasn’t wrong. With long dark hair, olive skin and a beautiful face, Linda was dazzling. She told me that her real name was
Loretta but everyone called her Linda, and that she did a bit of singing in a duo.

‘Are you married?’ I said. There seemed little point in beating about the bush.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I was living with a bloke, but we recently parted. I’d had enough of him.’

She told me she was Miss St Helens. Looking at her, I could well believe it. She kept talking and from what she said there was very little that she hadn’t done.

She could have been a big star, she told me, but she’d turned it down. She’d been lead singer with a band, she said, but they’d dumped her in the middle of nowhere when she’d refused to sleep with any of them. Then, apparently, a West Indian fella had picked her up, so she’d started living with him. I wondered if everything she told me was true, but she was so gorgeous that I didn’t care. Thinking she was way out of my league, I told her I thought she was beautiful. She smiled and kept talking.

A couple of evenings later, I was playing at the Pleasuredome in Birkenhead. Ronnie stuck his head around the dressing-room door. ‘You know that bird you were talking to on Tuesday night?’ he said. ‘She’s here with two friends.’

‘Really? Is she?’

‘Wait till you see her.’

I’ll never forget the moment Linda walked into the dressing room. Wrapped in a low-cut black dress that flaunted a top pair of cheps and which was slit up the side to show off her fishnet-stockinged legs, she was totally fuckable. ‘Hi, I hope you don’t mind I came over to see you,’ she said.

‘No, no, no,’ I said, lost for words and hoping I wouldn’t blush. ‘No, no, no. You’re all right. No, no, no.’

Ronnie and I went back to her mate’s flat in Liverpool. Linda cracked open a bottle of whisky and one of her friends
made herself scarce, leaving the four of us drinking and laughing until the early hours, when Linda and I went to bed.

After about four weeks of meeting up whenever we could – mainly when I didn’t have an appointment with Sandra or Shirley – Linda and I became a regular thing. Once or twice a week I’d drive from Redcar to St Helens to see Linda, sometimes stopping off in Leeds to see Sandra and often making a detour to Aintree to drop in on Shirley. It was exhausting. I was shagging myself to death. Desperately in need of a holiday, I suggested to Sandra that we took a week off.

The day before Sandra and I jetted off to Tenerife, I acted on the qualms I had about Shirley and rang her up. ‘I’m sorry, Shirley,’ I said. ‘It’s over.’

‘It isn’t.’

‘It is.’

‘You’re not dropping me like that.’

‘Shirley, we are just fun. It’s just friends having a good time, but there’s nothing serious.’ But Shirley wouldn’t accept being jilted, so I told her about Sandra, thinking it would convince her that our affair was over. ‘I’ve got somebody else,’ I said.

‘You haven’t.’

‘I have.’

‘You haven’t.’

‘Shirley … I don’t want to see you any more. You’re a lovely girl, but you deserve better.’ Everyone always say things like that, don’t they? And everyone who hears it knows it’s bullshit. ‘Get somebody who will really appreciate you,’ I said.

Sandra and I had a great holiday in Tenerife. Tanned and relaxed, we returned. We pulled up outside my house in Redcar to find Shirley sitting on my step with three suitcases beside her. Fortunately she had left her kids with her sister in Liverpool. That really would have been the trump card.

‘Who’s that?’ Sandra said.

‘Er … that’s the woman next door,’ I said. ‘She must be looking for someone.’ Talk about thinking on your feet.

‘What’re you going to do?’

‘Erm … we’ll drop these presents off at me mother’s,’ I said, pointing at a stack of souvenirs on the back seat. ‘Then we’ll come back.’

My mam lived about a mile away. As soon as we got round there and Sandra had put the kettle on, I made my move. ‘Me mam wants something from the shop,’ I said. ‘She’d like some scones.’

I jumped in the car and flew back round to my house. Shirley was still sitting there.

‘What the fuck do you want?’ I said.

‘I am coming to live with you.’

‘No, you’re not. You can fuck off now. My wife’s here.’

‘You’re not married.’

‘I
am
married,’ I said. ‘We got married on holiday.’ Quick thinking again. ‘Shirley, you’d better go. I can’t do owt about it now.’

‘You fucking bastard’ she said, starting to cry.

‘Come on, I’ll pick the cases up. I’ll take you to the railway station.’

Shirley stood up. Swinging round, she kicked her foot through my glass front door. ‘You can fuck off,’ she snarled straight into my face.

I grabbed the cases and threw them on the pavement. ‘I am going to pick up my wife now,’ I said. ‘I’ll be coming back then and if you are here … woe betide you.’

It was all too much. I’d had enough of Shirley and her drinking and the photographs that John had shown me and her lies and her kids who she pretended didn’t exist and everything else. I had Sandra and Linda. That was enough for any man. It was
certainly plenty for me and I knew I had to get rid of Shirley once and for all.

By the time I returned home with Sandra, Shirley had gone. ‘Eh, that Marion next door, she’s a one,’ I said to Sandra. ‘She couldn’t get in, but it’s all sorted now.’

But it wasn’t sorted. Shirley started sending me poison-pen letters, full of bile and hate and bitterness. I’d made the mistake of introducing Shirley to my mam, so she asked my mam if I’d got married. And my mam told her the truth: Sandra was an old flame from school and we weren’t married.

A few weeks later, Sandra opened an envelope over breakfast. ‘What the hell’s this?’ she said, her face turning white. She held out a letter and a sheaf of photographs. There in all her glory was Shirley, legs apart for the lads, sitting in a jacuzzi.

Look what you’re missing
, Shirley had written on the photos. I was in the deepest shit.

‘Why’s this girl sending you pictures of herself naked?’ Sandra demanded.

‘This was long before I met you,’ I said, fearing my luck was about to run out.

‘According to this girl, you’ve been going out with the pair of us at the same time.’

‘She’s saying that because she wants me back.’ I needed to pull out all the stops to rescue the situation. ‘Sandra, you know I take you everywhere and buy you jewellery and clothes. When I went out with Shirley, I did the same thing. Shirley is a bit rough. She’s got nothing and she comes from the worst part of Liverpool. She dumped me before we met, but now she wants me back because nobody is spoiling her any more. She misses her sugar daddy.’

‘Oh … right.’

‘Be honest, Sandra, I didn’t know you still existed until your daughter walked in that dressing room. Shirley was before you, so …’ I was running out of words and excuses.

‘I’ll have to think about this,’ Sandra said before leaving. A couple of weeks later, we met up for dinner. We talked about our holiday and I eventually persuaded her that Shirley belonged to the distant past. But I could sense that it would take one final grand gesture to convince Sandra that I hadn’t two-timed her with Shirley.

‘Get in the car,’ I said. ‘We’ll go to Liverpool now and I will prove to you that I am telling the truth. We’ll go to Shirley’s house and she can tell you herself.’

‘You’re a liar.’

‘I’m not,’ I pleaded. ‘Get in that car, we’ll go to Liverpool,’ I said, knowing that if she said yes, I was up the creek.

‘All right – I believe you,’ Sandra said. Phew!

My love life returned to relative normality – Sandra as the main dish with Linda on the side – and the comedy went from strength to strength. Shortly after appearing on
TV-am
, George suggested that I should stop playing clubs. ‘There’s no money in it,’ he said. George was right, but what he really meant was there was no money in clubs for
him
. He took twenty per cent of my earnings in a club, but thirty per cent when I played a theatre.

I didn’t really care how much George was taking from me. I had more than enough in the bank and in 1987 bought Sunnycross House, a large detached property in Nunthorpe with a couple of acres of garden. Very well-to-do, Nunthorpe was where anyone from Middlesbrough moved if they’d made a decent bit of money. I put down a deposit, and employed joiners and decorators to renovate it before I moved in. I also applied for membership of the local golf club, which was about a mile down Brass Castle Lane from Sunnycross House. Walking into the bar, I was stopped by a bloke in a blazer. ‘You’ll need a tie if you want to come in here,’ he said. ‘And would you mind removing your hat?’

It wasn’t what he’d said that riled me. It was the pompous manner in which he’d said it. I was sure he wouldn’t have spoken to anyone else in the same way. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘It’s a hat, not a hand grenade.’

‘If you don’t remove your hat, I won’t ask you again, you’ll be asked to leave.’

‘If I remove my hat, mate, I will stick it so far up your arse the peak will stick out of your mouth,’ I said and left the club. Two weeks later, I got a letter. They’d refused my application for membership. Once again, I’d been judged by the reputation of my Chubby stage persona rather than as plain old Royston Vasey, something that was becoming increasingly the case as I became well known.

A short while later, I was in a fish shop in Hemlington. ‘Oi, Chubby, you fat cunt,’ one of the customers said.

‘Eh, do you mind? This is the fish shop,’ I said.

‘Ah … you fucking fat cunt.’

‘Hey! I told you once, there’s women in here. Do you mind?’

‘Chubby Brown’s just told me to stop fucking swearing!’ the lad shouted to everyone in the shop.

‘If you want to swear at me, go outside and swear,’ I said. The lad mouthed off a bit more, but I ignored him as I waited for my fish supper. As I left, he muttered something. ‘What did you say?’ I said.

He muttered another obnoxious insult. Putting down my wrap of fish and chips, I grabbed him by the throat and pushed him towards the door. The lad tried to swing at me, so I raised a plastic lemonade bottle I was holding. Hitting the lemonade bottle, he looked at me slightly shocked that he’d not made contact with my face, then ran off. As I drove off, I spotted him loitering in the street with two other lads. ‘You fucking cunts,’ I shouted from the car window. It wasn’t like me, but he had me riled.

I’d just finished my fish supper when there was a knock at the door. The police were outside. ‘I have reason to believe you caused a disturbance in the fish shop,’ the constable said.

‘Who’s told you that?’

‘The woman said you were effing and blinding.’

‘Who?’