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

bastard!’ my father screamed. The back of his hand lifted me clear off the ground. The next few blows took the skin off my arse. Then I was dispatched to bed without a bath.

    As kids, we were left largely to our own devices. It meant we inevitably got up to no good, but it also meant we learned to fend for ourselves. If you had an old pram, pushchair or some worn-out tyres, you didn’t bother taking them to the municipal dump. You just got rid of them on a strip of waste ground behind the King’s Head. It was where the locals used to dump things. One day we found an old car. We played on it for ages, pretending to be cops or robbers in car chases. Over the next few days, the windows got broken and the doors were pulled off, but our games came to a sudden end when Leslie Dobson, a kid from my school, removed the cap from the petrol tank and threw a firework down the pipe. The car went up and Leslie passed me doing about thirty miles an hour. I think he ended up in hospital.
    Next to the wasteland was a hut that sold fish and chips. The smell of fried food that drifted from that shop was a constant source of temptation to me, but I had no money so I’d run around all the houses in Grangetown, collecting old newspapers to exchange for chips. Most nights, there’d be a race between all the kids to be the fastest round the houses and get the most chips.
    When I was about six, we moved from 78 Broadway to a brand new council estate. Our new home was at 30 Essex Avenue, a street in the far corner of Grangetown, next to the main road and the railway tracks, which carried coal to Dorman, Long. When a train was parked in the siding next to our house, my auld fella would hog me over the fence with a bucket to refill our coal bunker from the wagons. I’d be there for ages, passing buckets back to Dad and nicking coal for all our neighbours.
    We’d steal anything we could get our hands on, but like most petty criminals we believed there was honour among thieves. Shops or businesses were fair game, but we wouldn’t steal fromeach other because no fucker had owt. The exception was parents, who by the standards of us kids were loaded. On one occasion, I came home to find no one in the house and a pound note on the mantelpiece. I immediately snatched it and ran up to Baxter’s, the local cake shop. Unsure of what to do with a whole pound, I spent it all on broken biscuits. They handed over a massive sack, enough to feed a cow. ‘What do you want all these for?’ Mr Baxter said.
    ‘Er … we’re having a party,’ I replied. I hadn’t realised I would get so many biscuits for a quid. I invited all my friends round and we sat in the back alley behind the shop, eating our way through the mountain of broken biscuits.
    Meanwhile, my mother must have sent for my father and told him that a pound note was missing. I was lying in the alley, my stomach as full as a butcher’s dog, when my auld gadgie appeared on his bike. As he pedalled down the alleyway, I saw him and jumped up. ‘Come here, you little get!’ he shouted.
    I ran as fast as I could, so my father threw down his bike and chased after me. About fifty yards from the house, he caught up and lifted me right off the ground. ‘Don’t you lads ever come round to our house again,’ he shouted at my mates as he gave me a bloody good hiding in the street. ‘He’ll never come out again!’
    My sister, my mother and our next-door neighbour said that they could hear me screaming all the way home as my father dragged me along the street and into the house. There were twelve steps in our house and I didn’t touch one of them, my father ran me up them to my bedroom that fast. ‘You stay there now. Don’t you move! If I hear one peep out of you, I will lace your arse!’ he threatened and I never took another pound off my mother.
    I did, however, dip into my mam’s handbag when I thought I’d spotted some silver paper, the type that would normally bewrapped around a chocolate