Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (8 page)

I was only fifteen, but my dad wasn’t bothered. ‘If you want to join the army … you know …’ he said. I could tell he just wanted me out of the house. With my forms signed, I turned up
at the barracks a few days later. At eight o’clock that morning, there was a dozen of us sat on benches in an army careers office when a soldier with a clipboard marched into the room.

‘Miller. Parfitt. Snowdon. Vasey …’ the soldier read from a list on his clipboard. We trooped out of the office into a room where we were given a medical.

‘Why do you want to join the army?’ an officer asked me while I was being examined.

‘Because I want to be a soldier,’ I said. The officer didn’t look very impressed with my answer. We were then ushered into a hall with two columns of desks and told to sit down.

‘We want you to write an essay,’ a soldier with a posh voice said. I didn’t know what essay meant. Until then I’d never even heard the word.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘Well, a composition about your life. A story, give us a story.’

I still didn’t know what he meant, so I didn’t do it. I left that part of the paper blank and filled in the other parts, which asked again why I wanted to join the army as well as some personal details, such as my height and where I’d gone to school. The last question was ‘Have you ever been in trouble with the police?’ I wrote ‘No.’ It was an outright lie, but that was the least of my crimes.

The test finished at half past eleven. At ten to twelve, a soldier walked into the room. ‘Vasey!’ he shouted.

Fucking hell, I thought, I’m the only one who’s passed. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said, getting to my feet.

‘Come this way, please,’ he said, leaving all the other lads in the room.

‘I’m sorry …’ he started, explaining that I had failed and that all the others had passed through to the next round.

‘Oh, I really wanted to be a soldier,’ I said.

‘Why don’t you come back in about a year’s time and join the
Green Howards?’ he said. All I could think was that if the Green Howards would have me after I’d failed, they must be right thick idiots.

A few days after failing the army recruitment test, I decided I’d had enough living under the same small roof as my father, his mistress and her five kids. Fifteen years old, fed up and unable to handle life at home any longer, I packed my belongings into two plastic carrier bags and hitch-hiked to Redcar, about five miles away on the North Sea coast. Apart from an occasional visit many years ago for a splodge in the sea with my dad, Redcar was as foreign and exotic to me as another country. Not knowing where to go or how to find somewhere to stay, that first night I climbed up on to a fishing boat that was dry-docked for the winter, laid up on bricks on the seafront. It was freezing. I hardly slept. The days weren’t much better. I spent them walking through the town centre, pinching apples off fruit stalls and wondering if I would be picked up by the police. But nobody paid any attention to me. It was obvious my father hadn’t even reported me missing. I’d caused that much trouble with his Betty and her children that he was clearly pleased to see me gone.

Several weeks into sleeping rough, I was trying to get warm enough to fall asleep one night when I heard a tapping sound outside the fishing boat. I lifted the canvas to find a copper staring straight at me. I was just as much a shock to him as he was to me. He nearly crapped himself. ‘Hey! What are you … what do you think you’re doing?’ he said. ‘Get out of there!’

The bluebottle dragged me to the local nick, where I gave him a sob story. ‘How old are you?’ the policeman asked. I told him I was fifteen. The next thing I knew, I was being pushed through the door of a home for wayward children at Westbourne Grove in Redcar. The couple who ran the home found me some clean clothes, gave me something to eat and a warm bed. I was one of four waifs they’d taken in who’d run
away from home. ‘As long as you get yourself a job and you behave properly,’ the policeman said, ‘you can stay here indefinitely.’

I got a job working for Calor Gas at Port Clarence on the Tees estuary. I’d been there for a few months when a gas tank blew up, killing a few men, so I moved on to a job at Pearson’s driving a dumper truck. I didn’t have a licence, but that didn’t seem to bother Arthur Stairs, the foreman, as long as I drove it only on company property. My job was to transport concrete from large mixers to wherever it was needed on the site. It was good work, the pay wasn’t bad and Arthur was a decent gadgie. ‘Bring your bait, don’t tell your mate,’ he’d say when there was a chance of getting an extra shift. Or it was ‘job and knock’ when you’d finished your work early and could go home before the factory siren sounded. One day, I was delivering concrete to a deep hole in which some men were working. I tipped the front of the dumper to drop the concrete into the hole. The men then spread it with their shovels, but this time I got too close to the edge of the hole. As I pulled the lever to lift up the scoop of the dumper, I felt the dumper move beneath me. It teetered on the edge, then toppled into the hole, swiftly followed by me.

‘Get out the way …’ I shouted as I came crashing into the hole and the men below me dived for cover.

Just after I’d come to my senses at the bottom of the hole, Arthur turned up. ‘Are you all right?’ he shouted.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘Well, you’re fucking sacked!’

My P45 was in and out of my trousers more than my dick. The next week, I had three jobs in a day. At 8 a.m. I started with a sub-contractor cleaning out blast furnaces at Dorman, Long. Choking on the fumes after an hour, I collected my cards from the gaffer at 9.30 a.m. and walked over to the ICI plant next door, where I took a job with a firm doing the stone work on a
chimney. By lunchtime I’d quit as I couldn’t stand heights. After lunch I walked back to Dorman, Long and immediately got hired by Pearson’s, a sub-contractor, as a labourer.

After that, I got a job at Shepherd’s, a building company. For eight hours a day I toiled as a hod-carrier on the Lakes housing estate in Redcar. People say there’s a dignity in the working life, but that was a load of rubbish. For six and a half days’ work I got twelve pounds and each morning I had to get there an hour earlier than the bricklayers because I had to get the cement mixer started and carry the cement up onto the platforms before the brickies turned up. The bricklayers were on piecework. The more bricks they laid the more money they got, but it didn’t ever occur to them that it meant I had to carry more hods. None of them ever turned round to me, the hapless labourer, to say here’s an extra fiver.

At the end of my shift I’d go back to the home in Westbourne Grove and write short poems.
The garden’s full of flowers, the hive is full of bees
, one of my early monologues began.
The room is full of sound because the piano is full of keys. My head is full of emptiness, my throat is full of cough, this house is full of strangers, I wish they would all fuck off
.

I was fed up. Fed up with hod-carrying. Fed up with living in the hostel. Fed up with having no one that cared for me. And fed up with having no prospect of a better life. If I was going to get myself out of this mess, I needed to earn more money, so I got a job at Devonport’s as a red-lead painter and then at Kellogg’s, an American technical engineering firm, where I was taken on as an engineer’s labourer. It was a grand title for a job that only entailed being a gofer – ‘Go and get me this; go and get me that’ – so when one of the foremen asked if anybody wanted to drive a van to take labourers from the works gate to the various locations on the site where work was being done, I volunteered.

No one asked if I had a licence and when you’re fifteen years old you don’t worry about it yourself. Every day I drove labourers around the site in a wrecked ambulance that was missing two doors. It was totally unroadworthy, but it didn’t matter as long as the ambulance didn’t leave Kellogg’s property. One Thursday, about a month into the job, the lads asked me to drive them into Redcar. It was the Easter holiday weekend and they had double wages in their pockets. They were a rough lot, many of them Scottish, Welsh or Irish labourers who were looking forward to four days off work, but first they wanted a bellyful of beer to carry them through the long, hot afternoon. It was five miles from the site to the Clarendon, one of the roughest claggy mats in Redcar. I dropped off the lads. ‘Roy, will you pick us up?’ they shouted.

‘Sure. I’ll pick you up,’ I said, not thinking for a moment about the consequences of driving on public roads without a licence or insurance. Three hours later, I returned. Turning the last corner before the Clarendon, I heard some voices yelling and some dogs barking. Then I saw where it was coming from. About a dozen of the lads I’d dropped off were involved in a massive street fight. The police were using dogs to try to control it, but they were getting nowhere. I pulled up. ‘Get in the ambulance, you fucking arseholes!’ I shouted. ‘Just get in the ambulance.’

But the lads were too drunk to do anything but fight. A copper came over. ‘What do you want?’ he said.

‘Er … I’ve come for the lads who work at …’ I said.

‘You’re the driver of this vehicle?’ the copper said.

‘Yeah.’

‘You’ve got bald tyres,’ the copper said. ‘There’s no lights. And the doors are missing. What’s it doing in the town?’

‘Well, the lads asked me to come and get them as a favour.’

‘A
favour
?’

‘I’ve come from the Kellogg’s site.’

‘Is that why this van hasn’t got a tax disc?’

‘It’s a site van,’ I said. I still hadn’t realised that I was in deep trouble.

‘Where’s your licence?’ the copper said.

‘I haven’t got one,’ I said.

‘What are you doing, driving with no licence?’

‘I just came to pick them up,’ I said. I couldn’t see any wrong in it. It seemed perfectly natural for me to do the lads a good turn by collecting them from the pub.

The policeman took me to Redcar police station. Downstairs the lads who’d been fighting were locked in the cells. Upstairs I was being questioned by the duty sergeant. ‘Who started the fight?’ he said.

‘I haven’t a clue. I’m just the driver.’

‘Driver?’ the sergeant said. I could see I’d have to go through the questions all over again. ‘Of that vehicle? The one with bald tyres, a door hanging off and no tax?’

‘Well, it’s a site vehicle.’

‘So what’s it doing on the road in Redcar?’

‘The lads asked me to pick them up.’

‘And you just did it?’

The sergeant left the room. It was clear that the police didn’t quite know what to do about me. I could see they were scratching their heads. The sergeant returned. ‘You might as well go but don’t touch that vehicle,’ he said. ‘Leave it where it is – you’ll be hearing from us.’

I went back to the site and told one of the gaffers what had happened. ‘Oh, fucking hell,’ he said. ‘No.’

On the Tuesday morning after the Easter weekend I reported at work, expecting to pick the lads up and ferry them around the site as usual. The gadgie called me into his office. ‘There’s your cards and there’s your P45,’ he said. ‘You’re finished.’

I was fired. For doing my workmates a favour. I still couldn’t comprehend what I’d done wrong.

‘You’ve got two weeks’ wages to come,’ the gadgie said. ‘That will be in the post for you, unless you want to come back to collect it.’

I returned the next day for my money. While I was waiting for it, I got talking to a lad who said he was in the merchant navy. He’d been all over the world. ‘Why don’t you apply?’ he said.

‘Aye, I will,’ I said.

I made my mind up that quickly and that easily. It was a simple decision and it was staring me in the face. I had nothing to offer Teesside and it had nothing to offer me. I just wanted to get away, see somewhere else and do something with my life. I’d wanted to join the army for similar reasons, but that hadn’t worked out. As an alternative, the merchant navy appeared to tick all the boxes. My mother, father and sister had deserted me. Sandra had turned her back on me and one job after another had slipped through my fingers. If Teesside didn’t want me, I’d find my luck elsewhere.

CHAPTER FOUR

AWAY FROM IT ALL

‘IN YOUR CASE,’
Mr White said, ‘I think we can beat this.’

I’d got over the initial shock of having cancer and I was now sitting in the office of a small bespectacled man with neat hair, parted precisely to the right. A week or so earlier, Dr Martin had uttered a few words – ‘Mr Vasey. I’ve got some bad news for you. You have throat cancer’ – that had changed my life for ever. Now another few words were again changing my life. I’d assumed that cancer was a death sentence, but Mr White, a specialist cancer surgeon, was telling me otherwise. That one sentence of hope left me feeling like a million dollars.

‘You know my voice is my life,’ I said. ‘Without my voice I can’t earn a living.’

‘I understand that,’ Mr White said. The words seemed to hang in the air. The Royal Infirmary in Middlesbrough was the kind of building in which voices echo along corridors and where everything you say seems more loaded. Fifteen minutes earlier, Helen and I had walked in through the big heavy doors, our footsteps tip-tapping through chambers, along corridors with
big marble pillars and up an old-fashioned staircase with a wooden banister to Mr White’s office. Outside, it was just like any other hospital, with people milling in the car park, killing time and smoking cigarettes, making me want to shout at them that they were all brainless arseholes. ‘Can’t you see what’s happened to me?’ I wanted to say. ‘Don’t you realise what you’re doing to yourself?’ But I didn’t. I just got on with the business of dealing with my cancer.

‘How bad will it be?’ I asked Mr White.

‘That’s something I can’t tell you because we don’t know yet,’ he said. ‘All I know is what I need to do to deal with this cancer immediately. We’ll cut it away and see what remains. After that we will give you therapy. Hopefully, with good physio, you’ll retain your voice. It will never be the same. You will never be able to sing …’