Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (38 page)

‘The woman behind the counter.’

I saw red. ‘The bitch. It was for her benefit that I pushed that lad out of the shop,’ I said.

The policeman accepted my explanation and let me off with a warning. But the lesson was clear. My success wouldn’t buy me an escape from my background – in fact, it would make things worse. I’d grown up and started to put my house in order but, like anyone, I still had faults. And my failing was that I could take only so much abuse or aggression or conflict. Inside I’d be boiling, but most of the time I could keep a lid on it. But if it went too far, I’d snap and then whoever was in my way wouldn’t know what was coming.

About a year after I’d dumped Shirley, both Sandra and Linda made it clear that they wanted to marry me. I couldn’t believe my luck, but I also knew it meant facing a difficult choice. Linda was more beautiful and a better shag, but she was wayward, whereas Sandra was relatively calm and relaxed.

I was becoming increasingly well known and I knew it would take an understanding woman to put up with me. I thought of it as a simple contract – I’d spoil rotten any woman who was with me (I bought Linda jewellery, dresses and a car) but in return I expected them to give me a loose rein. Being very busy and living in the public eye, I needed a woman who wouldn’t get jealous or possessive or uptight if I wasn’t in the right place at the right time. Linda certainly wasn’t that type of woman. And it didn’t help that whenever she walked into a room, every pair of male eyes turned to her and every male mouth drooled. I didn’t like that.

Although not as glamorous or as attractive as Linda, Sandra was clean, smart, attractive and good company. She was a typical housewife, which was what I needed. I thought Sandra was the better bet, but put off a final decision until, passing Leeds one day, I thought I’d drop in on her. My car parked, I knocked on the back door and walked in to find a bloke sitting on the sofa. Sandra’s face went bright red and he left as soon as I’d said hello.

‘Who was that?’ I said.

‘Just a fella.’

‘What do you mean, “just a fella”?’

‘I put an advert in the lonely-hearts column for companionship.’

‘You are fucking joking. What about me?’

‘I’m just a bit of fun to you. You’ve got women all over the place.’

‘I haven’t. I packed them all in for you.’

‘I know you. You’re having affairs all the time.’

I was jealous. It surprised me, but it also made up my mind. I now knew which woman I really wanted. ‘Look, to prove my point,’ I said to Sandra, ‘let’s get married.’

Sandra accepted immediately, but first I needed to deal with Linda. I decided to drop her gently by taking her on a week’s holiday to Cyprus. We stayed at the Grecian Bay Hotel in Ayia Napa. We went out every night and Linda always looked stunning. One night, she was asked to dance by two German lads. When she accepted the invitation, I saw my chance. ‘You’re right out of order,’ I said. ‘I brought you to Cyprus, you’re on holiday with me and you get up and dance with another lad. When we get back, you can take your bags and fuck off. I don’t want to see you again because you are nowt but a fucking cow.’

Sandra moved into Sunnycross House when I got back to
Nunthorpe. And straight away Linda’s phone calls started. ‘Who’s that woman ringing up all the time?’ Sandra said.

‘She’s just a friend.’

‘She said you took her on holiday.’

‘She’s lying.’ Once again, I was ducking and diving with a piece of skirt. I knew I might as well come clean because in the end I’d get caught out simply because women are not daft.

Fortunately Sandra knew what I was like, so the wedding still went ahead. Maybe she liked a bit of rough. A lot of women have told me that it makes them feel protected.

As for my wedding day, even now a shudder goes down my back when I think of it. 28 July 1988 – it pissed down all day. How appropriate.

Sandra and I didn’t stand on tradition or ceremony. Sandra spent the night before the wedding with me and I didn’t have a stag night, mainly because I’d played too many stag nights to be able to enjoy my own. I hired a vintage car to take us to the registry office in Middlesbrough. Stopping at Sandra’s mother’s house to drop off some flowers for the buttonholes, I was ushered into the back kitchen by Sandra’s mum, a small silver-haired chain-smoker called Gwen. I’ll never forget what she said to me. ‘Son, you do know what you’re doing, don’t you?’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘It
is
our Sandra.’

‘I know it is. I love her very much.’

‘Well, be it on your head, then, son.’

We got to the wedding. Peter Richardson was my best man and everyone I knew from Teesside clubland was there. We had a lovely day and a party that night at the house. We went on to a club later on and somehow I couldn’t get Gwen’s words out of my head. She had a wise old head of her own on her.

The
Evening Gazette
was doing a cheap offer of a cruise to New
York on the
QE2
and a flight back on Concorde. I’d booked us two tickets for our honeymoon. It cost me seven grand and was worth every penny.

When the ship pulled away from the dock in Southampton, a brass band was playing on the quayside and Sandra burst into tears. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

‘This is one of my dreams,’ she said. ‘Going away on the
QE2
. I never thought this would happen to me.’

Seeing Sandra display her emotions so openly was a rarity. As the matron of a psychiatric unit, she’d been stabbed several times and had glass thrown at her. It had made her hard and self-protective. ‘You do know what you are doing, getting involved with Sandra?’ one of her nurse friends once said to me when we were out having a drink.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Why?’

‘She’s a tough girl, you know.’

‘I know. She comes from Grangetown. The same place as me. She went to school with me. I know she’s a tough girl.’

I asked the nurse if she had any favourite tales about Sandra. ‘The one we all laugh about,’ she said, ‘is the time we rang her at home one night when we were having trouble with a regular patient who came in all the time on drugs. “Sandra, Tommy’s on the windowsill and he won’t come in,” we said. “He’s going to jump.”

‘About twenty minutes later Sandra walked into the ward. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said to Tommy. “I’m going to jump,” he said. “Well, jump, then – and shut the window.”’

‘You can’t treat people like that,’ I said.

‘Sandra did,’ the nurse said. ‘And he soon came back inside.’

The crew on the
QE2
knew we were newly-weds and gave us free chocolates and as much champagne as we could drink. We hadn’t finished unpacking our cases when there was a knock on
our cabin door. It was the boatswain. ‘You’re Chubby Brown, aren’t you?’ he said.

‘Aye.’

‘You wouldn’t do a show for us, would you – in the Boatswain’s Nest? It’s our bar down near the engine room where all the crew drink.’

Sandra agreed to let me go. It was a tiny place and when I arrived it was heaving with sailors and crew. ‘Where am I gonna stand?’ I said.

‘We’ve got a barrel in the corner,’ the boatswain said. ‘Will you stand on a barrel?’

Compared to playing gigs from the tops of crates or standing on sticky clubroom floors, a barrel was the Palladium. ‘Yeah, all right then,’ I said.

I stood on the barrel for forty minutes without a microphone, talking to the crew, cracking gags about the ship, the sea and the Navy. It was absolutely fabulous. One of my best gigs. I was on a high after the wedding, I was thrilled to be on the
QE2
and the crew were my kind of lads.

At half past five on the fifth morning, we passed the Statue of Liberty as we sailed into New York harbour. The whole ship was up to see it, Sandra in her nightie and me in my pyjamas under our overcoats because we’d been told we would arrive at seven o’clock and had to race onto the deck.

We stayed in a hotel near Grand Central Station. I couldn’t get over the size of the jacuzzi and the forty channels on the television. We took in some shows on Broadway, went up the Empire State Building and shopped at Macy’s and the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, where you could pay two hundred dollars for a tie and a flunky asked for five dollars if he carried your coffee to your table. I told him if he wanted a tip, Big Bertha in the 3.30 at Kempton Park was worth a punt.

It was a fantastic holiday. When we got on Concorde, one of
the stewardesses recognised me. ‘The pilots noticed you when you got on,’ she said. ‘Would you like to go up front?’ Sat on a little red jump seat, headphones on, I chatted with the captain through the microphone while Concorde flew twice as fast as sound over the Atlantic. Up above, the sky was inky black. Down below, the water was dark blue, speckled with the white dots of thousands of icebergs. I felt a very long way from Grangetown.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

HOME AND AWAY

SATURDAY NIGHT IN
Blackpool and every seat in the theatre is taken, all of them Chubby fans eager to see my first night back after cancer. Standing in the wings, I run through the material I rehearsed at home and peer at the audience. I know what they’re whispering – ‘Do you think he’ll do it, do you think he’ll …’ – and I think: I can do this. I’m ready.

The music starts, I dance on stage, shuffle over to the microphone stand, open my mouth and …

My voice had still been hoarse a month earlier when I’d gone into my garage, locked both doors, taken a deep breath and started talking. Walking up and down, I ran through all the material I’d written in the seven months since I’d last faced an audience, just to see if I could remember it.

I’d been writing all the time I’d been convalescing. It felt good to have built up all that material, but when you write ‘fuck’ on a piece of paper it’s not as funny as when you say it in front of 1,500 people. And by the time I was ready to go back on the road, the news had changed. Things that had happened to
Madonna, Sting and Elton John were yesterday’s news and I had to start afresh. I looked through my back catalogue of gags for the jokes that had always got a laugh. After all, the first night’s important.

… And it all goes brilliantly until twenty-five minutes into the show my throat switches off, just like a candle being blown out. One moment it’s there; the next moment, nothing. After thirty minutes on stage there’s only one thing for me to say.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I whisper. ‘As you can see, I’ve got a problem.’

Walking off to a standing ovation, I can’t meet anyone’s eyes as I come off stage. I keep my head down and make straight for my dressing room. The door shut and locked behind me, I burst into tears and think the unthinkable: oh fucking hell, I am finished.

Afterwards, everyone says the same thing – don’t worry about it; at least you got through half an hour – but their words sound hollow and false. I thought I could do it. My mind had been willing, it was just that my throat wouldn’t play along. And then I pull myself together. Don’t be a defeatist, you arsehole, I tell myself. Get up and get on with it.

There’s no speaking to me after that. I don’t want to talk to anyone. All week I steam my throat and do my exercises. I phone Jane Deakin. ‘I told you it would be difficult,’ she says. ‘But hey, congratulations. Half an hour is a good start. It will only get stronger.

‘When we started,’ Jane says, ‘I told you there was no guarantee that your voice would come back. But you’ve done much better than I expected and from here on, it’s all up to you.’

George phones, wanting to know if I still want to play the Blackpool gig booked for next Saturday. ‘Are you sure you can do it?’ he says. ‘Because I can’t ask people for seventeen quid a ticket if you’re not gonna get through it.’ He’s right to be
worried – if the press hears of it, they’ll accuse us of conning my audience – but I know that George is more worried about himself than about me. He wants to get in his last couple of bob before he retires.

The next Saturday, I return to Blackpool. I play an hour. A full fucking hour. It’s fantastic and the crowd is great. I still can’t sing, so the audience gets a bumper show of gags, more in an hour than I’ve told in that time for years.

That night I go back to the hotel with the management, the crew and some friends and get completely and utterly legless. The champagne is out and everyone is celebrating, singing ‘Welcome back, welcome back’ until
their
voices are hoarse.

‘Let’s do two nights a week,’ I tell George. Then we increase it to three nights a week and I go to see Jane Deakin and Dr Martin.

‘You’re doing too much,’ Dr Martin says.

‘Two nights is sufficient,’ Jane says.

Feeling I could do more than two, I nevertheless stick to their advice. I tell George not to exceed two bookings a week.

‘No problem,’ he says. ‘But is two enough?’

Six months later, I’m back up to three nights a week.

Of the eight years that Sandra and I were married, seven years and ten months were pure purgatory. I put up with it because I was away working most of the time and because I thought better the devil you know, but to this day I really don’t know how I didn’t lose my mind.