Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (17 page)

I’ve got a young wife now and I’ve discovered that the best thing to do is to give a woman a lot of space and freedom, something I was incapable of giving Judith. I would have been too jealous and possessive. And now that I’ve found happiness with Helen, I can see that love grows if you allow a woman to be herself.

But there’s one thing I’ve also learned. It takes two to make things work and two to make things go wrong, but in the end it’s always the bloke that takes the can. After all, my mother always blamed my father for everything.

CHAPTER EIGHT

HARD KNOCKS

LYING ON MY BACK,
staring at the ceiling after the operation, I was just glad to be alive. I didn’t want to underestimate it – but then, I also didn’t want to
over
estimate it. Thoughts of exactly what had happened – had the surgeon removed a little nodule or had half my throat been taken away? – didn’t matter. I knew I had survived and that I couldn’t talk and that was all I needed to know.

Of course, I tried to talk. If they’d removed my leg, I would still have tried to run. This was no different. I wondered if I could say anything at all. What should I try to say? I settled on a gentle ‘ah’. Nothing came out. Just a muffled hiss.

I looked around the hospital room. Beside my bed was a row of machines keeping tabs on my breathing and heartbeat. There were gas bottles and a steam machine that would soon become a familiar friend. Every few hours a nurse would come in and make me breathe steam to avoid any throat infections. It left my face looking like a ripe tomato, but it killed all the germs.

And sitting halfway along the side of my bed, silently waiting
for me to wake up, was Helen. As usual, just the sight of her filled me with confidence. And once she started talking, telling me how much she loved me and missed me and how important I was to her and how I was the best thing that had ever happened to her, I was filled with a quiet determination to get better soon.

Mr White popped in a few hours after I’d woken up after the operation and told me that he’d removed a vocal chord and some scrapings from my throat.

‘You need to take it slowly, Roy,’ he said. ‘Just think of it as one day at a time and we’ll get you back to where you were before the operation. But first you’ll need six weeks of radio-therapy.’

When Helen wasn’t visiting and when the hospital staff weren’t attending to me, I’d lie on my bed and worry. On top of all those usual everyday worries – like paying the bills on time and getting the car serviced and making sure the garden’s being looked after and the kids are happy and wondering what’s on the telly – there was now a new one: ‘How long have I
really
got?’

It wasn’t an entirely novel question for me. I think everybody wonders when they’re going to die. And once you reach your late fifties or your sixties, you think about it all the more. Anyone who claims that question hasn’t crossed their minds is lying. We’re all the same. The young ’uns want to climb mountains and see a bit of life. The old ’uns want the comfort of a nice house and a nice garden. We all want enough money in the bank not to have to worry about things and to be able to go on holiday once in a while. And the one thing that unites us above all else is that we want to put off our final breath for as long as possible. That’s why so many of the soldiers who went into battle in the Second World War were pissed or on pills. Faced with something they knew could mean certain death, they were
petrified. They wondered if the bullet would strike them or their mate running beside them. They wanted to know which of them would be the lucky one. And so did I.

Four days after the operation, Mr White shone a torch down my throat. ‘We’re letting you go home,’ he said. ‘You know what the rules are. You’ve got to abide by them.’

I knew exactly what Mr White meant. And with little more than a rough growl where my voice had once been, there was a fat chance of me being an arsehole, going out and getting drunk, shouting and bawling all night. So I didn’t bother trying to rasp an answer and just nodded instead.

As soon as I got home, I started to work on my voice. All day, every day, I whispered simple words like ‘hello’ so quietly that only I could hear them. It was a start.

Late one evening, a week after the operation, I whispered loud enough for Helen to be able to hear me for the first time. And what was my first word? Well, it wasn’t ‘fuck’.

‘Is the late shop open?’ I murmured. A whole sentence! And straight from the heart. I’d been off my usual diet of bacon, beans, cornflakes and bread ever since the operation. Instead it had been jelly and lukewarm soup. I was desperate for something crunchy.

‘Packet of crisps?’ I whispered to Helen.

When Helen returned, I opened the packet and popped a crisp in my mouth. It tasted wonderful as it melted on my tongue. The flavours were particularly intense after a week of bland, sloppy hospital meals. Then I slipped the sharp sliver of spud between my teeth, crunched it and pushed it cautiously to the back of my mouth. I swallowed. The instant it entered my throat, I was in agony. The tiny crumbs were like shards of glass. It was like rubbing my bell end on a cheese grater. I’d never felt such pain.

The rest of the packet went straight in the bin and I went
back to square one. This was going to take longer and be much more difficult than I’d anticipated.

A lot happened in the year or so between Judith running away with Richard and Robert and returning to Teesside with the two bairns. I passed my driving test and ended my days of driving stolen cars without a licence when I bought a MkII Jaguar. It was my pride and joy until I discovered that it had been welded together from two Jaguars involved in car crashes. More importantly, the Four Man Band broke up and I formed a duo with Mick Boothby, a long-standing mate who played bass. I knew from my time with the Four Man Band that bands playing cover versions struggled to make a reasonable living. Club audiences wanted a good laugh at the end of a working week more than they wanted to dance, so we decided from the outset that we would be a comedy-music act. All we needed was a good name. We spent a couple of weeks scratching our heads, then it dawned upon us. Mick looked just like Jason King, a popular television detective at the time, and all the characters I played on stage were hard nuts, so we called ourselves Jason & Everard.

Jason & Everard didn’t last long, no more than nine months to a year, but I look back particularly fondly on those days. Mick wore velvet jackets and frilly shirts, like the dandy character of Jason King, and I wore a tartan or checked suit and a flat cap with the peak turned up so that the crowd would notice me behind the drums at the back of the stage. We developed an act based on a couple of well-known hits of the day interspersed with a few comic routines and parodies of advertisements. But with just Mick and me to carry the show – and I did almost all the comedy – I had to hone my audience skills fast. The first
lesson I learned was that a decent comic always has to be two steps ahead of the audience. A quick-witted quip under pressure will not only get you out of trouble but will win over the audience for the rest of the evening.

We were in full flow at a club at Stockton-on-Tees when a woman who could have doubled for Mr Blobby started making her way through the audience towards the stage. I suspected she was a committee member with a message that someone in the audience needed to move their car or come to the telephone. It was exactly the kind of interruption I didn’t need when I was running through my gags. The jokes were a bit close to the bone – ‘I’m taking my Goblin Teasmaid back to the shop,’ I said, ‘because it’s not doing what it promises on the label’ – and needed to be rattled off in quick succession to keep the audience on my side.

With a face like a bulldog’s arse and wearing a shabby white top with a trail of deeply embedded gravy stains, the committee woman arrived at the front of the stage and held out her hand for the microphone. I tried to ignore her, but I could see from the sour expression on her face that I’d be asking for trouble if I didn’t give in.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the woman said. ‘This man is filthy and should not be on this stage.’

‘Yeah, about as filthy as your fuckin’ blouse,’ I snapped back. She looked at me with contempt, but I didn’t care. The audience was roaring and I was thrilled. With just one line, I’d turned a potentially fatal put-down into a devastating riposte at the woman’s expense.

However, dealing with bolshie club committee members or pub landlords wasn’t always as easy and successful as it was on that night. Another evening and we were playing Gresham Working Men’s Club near Seaton Carew. We’d reached the part of our act where Mick would start playing ‘Walk Right Back’ by
the Everly Brothers. After the first verse I would usually run off stage. Mick would then sing ‘Walk Right Back’ over and over again, getting increasingly angry and desperate until I reappeared on stage dressed as Terry Scott doing the Curly-Wurly advert.

But on this occasion, just as we started singing, a committee man stood up. ‘Raffle tickets!’ he shouted, completely ignoring us on stage. ‘Meat prize!’

That was enough. I took the hump and walked straight off the stage, through the dressing room to the side entrance and out of the door. I got into our old post-office van and drove home.

The next day I bumped into Mick. ‘Where the hell were you?’ he said. I told him I’d had enough of the rudeness of club chairmen and had gone home.

‘I sang “Walk Right Back” twenty-six times before I realised you weren’t going to walk right back,’ Mick said. ‘It was funny afterwards, but at that time I called you all the fat bastards under the sun.’

Mick was the best-natured stage partner any musician or comic could have ever wanted. On the way to a gig at Middlesbrough Labour Club, we stopped off at Guitarzan, a shop in Slaggy Island, where Mick bought a brand new Shure microphone. Driving the van to the club, I watched as Mick, sitting beside me, took it out of its case and admired it.

‘That’s a lovely-looking mike you got there,’ I said. ‘Can I use it tonight? It’ll make the gags sound better.’

Mick didn’t hesitate. He immediately said yes. A couple of hours later, we walked on stage to face a rowdy crowd. I grabbed Mick’s mike to start the show, but was immediately heckled.

‘Get off!’ someone shouted. ‘Yer rubbish!’

Then a few of the audience booed. We hadn’t even started.

‘You’re a bunch of fucking wankers,’ I shouted in the direction of the hecklers. Then I threw Mick’s brand new Shure microphone at them and stomped off stage. When we got to the dressing room, I could see Mick was upset.

‘I paid eighty quid for a microphone that I will never speak into and which is now in little bits that I’ll never find,’ he said. Then he shrugged it off with a smile.

Mick and I were a good team, but I missed playing in a larger band, so I started to play a few gigs with a couple of other mates. The core of the band was my cousin Lee Vasey, who played guitar, with Davy Richardson on bass and me on the drums. We called ourselves The Nuts.

Other musicians would join us for a few gigs then drop out when they got a better offer or got fed up earning a pittance for an evening’s work. Davy’s brother, Barry, who was a Bob Dylan fan and a bit of a hard nut, played with us for a while. Towards the end of our time together, Mick Boothby joined us and with his good looks promptly became the ladies’ man of the band. Mick brought along George Proudman, who always had something funny to say.

The Nuts were happy but poor – we had some good laughs, but we never made much money. And we were hopelessly inept at times. We were playing a small mining club one night, going down like a nun’s knickers. Trying to get a laugh by singing ‘King Of The Jungle’, I was dressed as a gorilla, throwing bananas into the audience. One of the bananas knocked over a bloke’s pint. He must have spent his last penny on that pint because he was straight up on to his feet and wading through the audience before I realised what had happened. The sight of this big miner approaching the stage was so frightening that it would have sent an egg back up a chicken’s arse.

‘Hang on there,’ I shouted from the stage. ‘The drink’s on us.’

Those were some of the most stupid words I’ve ever uttered
on stage. The audience stood up as one and made for the bar. Every single one of them bought a drink at our expense and at the end of the evening we didn’t get paid a penny.

Another night and we were playing the Ranch House Social Club at Hutton Rudby. I’d devised a sketch where I’d leave the stage, put on a vicar’s costume, slip out of the stage door, leg it around the club and re-enter the concert room at the back, from where I’d make my way through the audience, taking a collection. Davy on stage would then pick an argument with me and the banter would flow from there. On this particular evening, I was stopped at the front door of the club by a doorman.

‘You can’t go in there, vicar,’ he said. ‘The Nuts are on. You won’t like them.’

‘I’m the drummer,’ I said.

‘But you won’t like it, vicar. They are very blue.’