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

forms signed, I turned upat 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 theGreen 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 runaway from home. ‘As long as you get yourself a job and you behave properly,’ the policeman said, ‘you can stay