Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown by Roy Chubby Brown Read Free Book Online

and clean the bathroom. Then Dad would say ‘Jenny’s going down the launderette’ or ‘Jenny’s going to wash the sheets’ andI’d fold up the washing and take it over to Jenny’s house. I also kept the garden tidy, cutting the grass, trimming the edges and weeding the borders. I had my chores to do and I did them without moaning, otherwise I’d have got a backhander. For Dad, life went on as before. He still worked at Dorman, Long, he still went to the club and he still had someone to wash and cook for him. He’d replaced Mam with me.
    Just as he had done with Mam, Dad would take me to the Lyric cinema – we called it the bughole because of all the bugs in the seats. Dad was a cowboy fan and we’d cheer whenever James Stewart, Roy Rogers or John Wayne came on the screen and we’d boo when the baddies appeared. In the summer he’d take me to Blackpool, where in those days the beaches were packed and the boarding houses were smart, with beautiful curtains and clean wallpaper.
    And like my mam, I’d sit at home alone most evenings while Dad went to the club, waiting for him to come home with some scran. On New Year’s Eve one year I was sat in the house at about half past eleven, shivering because there was two feet of snow outside and we didn’t have any coal, and listening to everybody knocking on everybody else’s door, exchanging bits of fruit cake, putting coal on the fire and singing Happy New Year, when there was a knock on the door. It was Jenny Robinson. ‘I think you’d better come with us, Roy,’ she said. ‘It’s your dad.’
    Outside there were snowdrifts everywhere, so I put my wellington boots on and walked with Jenny and Harry Hardy, another neighbour, to the corner of Essex Avenue and Evans Road. There was our auld fella, singing at the top of his voice, lying in a foot of snow. He’d fallen over the fence, landed in a snowdrift and couldn’t stop laughing. What a job we had to pick him up.
    My auld fella’s boozing was starting to catch up with him. He never had a day off work for illness, but he was suspended a fewtimes for drinking. Dad would sneak out of the mill at twelve o’clock and run down to the pub for two or three pints. It wasn’t allowed, but the Queen’s Head, the Bottom House and the other pubs near the works gate were always packed at dinner time. They were so close that my dad and his mates could hear the wailing siren sounding the beginning of the afternoon shift and make it back inside before other men had returned to their workplace from the canteen.
    Dad spent almost all his money on drink. He’d usually give me enough money to keep us in food, but beyond that I didn’t have a penny to scratch my arse, so I was the scruffiest, most raggedy-arsed kid at my school, with one pair of shoes and trousers that were always ripped. My attendance record at Sir William Worsley, the local school, was poor, but when I did turn up I worked hard at being popular. I was good at geography and my best subject was art. At that time my ambition was to be a cartoonist.
    ‘Stay back, Vasey,’ my art teacher, Mr Nee, would often say at the end of a lesson.
    ‘What, sir? I’ve done nowt wrong, sir?’ I’d say.
    ‘That’s Robbie Hutchinson’s. You drew that,’ he’d say. ‘That’s Raymond Bassett’s. You drew that. That’s Billy Parfitt’s. You drew that.’
    I did it simply because I wanted to help out my mates. They couldn’t draw, so they’d pass their papers over to me and I’d happily do it for them. But Mr Nee wasn’t daft and I often got caught out.
    It was the same in the playground. I was always the class clown. If someone said ‘Let’s jump through a glass window,’ I would volunteer. I was always the one to whom they’d say: ‘Go and kick that dog up the arse.’ I always did it. I wanted to be popular, but it meant I was always the kid that got into trouble.
    Like every school, Sir William Worsley had a pupil who wasknown as the best fighter in