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

bar. I lifted it out and found just what I hoped for inside it. She won’t miss a few squares, I thought, stuffing them into my mouth. And then I ate a few more. And some more.
    Half an hour or so later, I was out in the street, playing cricket. I’d just bowled out someone and I was taking my turn with the bat in front of the lamp-post that we used as a wicket when I felt the need to blow off. What I thought would just be a silent, surreptitious fart turned into something much more unpleasant. All my mates looked shocked at the sight of a streak of shit running down my leg.
    I ran home, straight past my mother in the kitchen, to the toilet at the back. I couldn’t stop shitting. ‘What’s happened?’ my mam asked.
    ‘There’s sommat wrong with my stomach,’ I groaned.
    ‘Have you eaten anything?’
    ‘No … just a bit of chocolate.’
    ‘Where did you get the chocolate from?’
    ‘Er, your handbag.’
    ‘You little swine,’ my mam said. ‘It’s laxative.’
    My family dined out on that story for years, laughing at how my thieving fingers had landed me in trouble yet again.
    My mother used to say that I got my light-fingeredness from my father. It certainly seemed that, like him, I lived by my wits rather than my brains. If I liked the look of something, I just took it, and, like him, I had itchy feet – I couldn’t wait to get out of the house every day. Because of our similarities, my mother was convinced that my auld gadgie spoiled me. She never let me forget the day when Dad won some money at the York races and returned home with a red wooden train under his arm. I was thrilled, but my mother went mad.
    ‘You haven’t brought Barbara anything back,’ she screamed at my auld fella. Dad just shrugged, but I never lived it down.Forty years later, my mother would still throw it in my face. ‘A train set for you! And nothing for Barbara! What was your dad thinking of?’
    It was a fair criticism. Dad always had time and a few spare bob for me, but little for my mother or sister. And I couldn’t see any wrong in him at all. He seemed kind and generous. He always had time for people, especially down at the club, where I’d often wind up of an evening.
    ‘Is Colin in?’ I’d ask the doorman.
    ‘Yes, son,’ the doorman would say. ‘Your father’s in, all right.’
    ‘Can I see him?’ And Dad would come out. ‘Dad, can I have some money for a bag of chips?’
    His hand was in his pocket straight away. ‘Here, that’s all you’re getting,’ he’d say. ‘Now, bugger off.’
    When I was eight years old, the Queen came to open a new part of the ICI chemical plant in Grangetown. The smells from ICI used to take the wallpaper off our walls. ‘What are they making in there?’ we’d say. ‘Dead rats?’
    The Queen made her way from Middlesbrough to the Grangetown ICI plant along the main road that linked South Bank – or Slaggy Island, as we called our neighbouring suburb on account of the many piles of coal, coke and iron slag that surrounded it – to Grangetown. My mates and I climbed up to the main road, which ran along a viaduct in front of the house, and waved at the Queen as she drove past. Having come up from London, the Queen seemed so glamorous to us urchins and ragamuffins. We’d never been beyond Middlesbrough. Anyone who’d visited Redcar, five miles away on the coast, was thought of as exotic, so the day when the Queen passed through our little community was one I thought I’d always remember.
    After the Queen’s Daimler had passed by, I clambered down the bank to our house in Essex Avenue and walked into thekitchen. There, lying on the kitchen table, was another reason I’ll never forget that day.
    My mother had left home. The only explanation was a note saying she’d had enough. She couldn’t live under the same roof as my father any more, it said. She had to go.

CHAPTER TWO
    MOTHER LOVE
    ‘I’VE GOT CANCER?’ I said slowly. ‘ Cancer? … Are you sure? Because