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

here indefinitely.’
    I got a job working for Calor Gas at Port Clarence on the Tees estuary. I’d been there for a few months when a gas tank blew up, killing a few men, so I moved on to a job at Pearson’s driving a dumper truck. I didn’t have a licence, but that didn’t seem to bother Arthur Stairs, the foreman, as long as I drove it only on company property. My job was to transport concrete from large mixers to wherever it was needed on the site. It was good work, the pay wasn’t bad and Arthur was a decent gadgie. ‘Bring your bait, don’t tell your mate,’ he’d say when there was a chance of getting an extra shift. Or it was ‘job and knock’ when you’d finished your work early and could go home before the factory siren sounded. One day, I was delivering concrete to a deep hole in which some men were working. I tipped the front of the dumper to drop the concrete into the hole. The men then spread it with their shovels, but this time I got too close to the edge of the hole. As I pulled the lever to lift up the scoop of the dumper, I felt the dumper move beneath me. It teetered on the edge, then toppled into the hole, swiftly followed by me.
    ‘Get out the way …’ I shouted as I came crashing into the hole and the men below me dived for cover.
    Just after I’d come to my senses at the bottom of the hole, Arthur turned up. ‘Are you all right?’ he shouted.
    ‘Yeah,’ I said.
    ‘Well, you’re fucking sacked!’
    My P45 was in and out of my trousers more than my dick. The next week, I had three jobs in a day. At 8 a.m. I started with a sub-contractor cleaning out blast furnaces at Dorman, Long. Choking on the fumes after an hour, I collected my cards from the gaffer at 9.30 a.m. and walked over to the ICI plant next door, where I took a job with a firm doing the stone work on achimney. By lunchtime I’d quit as I couldn’t stand heights. After lunch I walked back to Dorman, Long and immediately got hired by Pearson’s, a sub-contractor, as a labourer.
    After that, I got a job at Shepherd’s, a building company. For eight hours a day I toiled as a hod-carrier on the Lakes housing estate in Redcar. People say there’s a dignity in the working life, but that was a load of rubbish. For six and a half days’ work I got twelve pounds and each morning I had to get there an hour earlier than the bricklayers because I had to get the cement mixer started and carry the cement up onto the platforms before the brickies turned up. The bricklayers were on piecework. The more bricks they laid the more money they got, but it didn’t ever occur to them that it meant I had to carry more hods. None of them ever turned round to me, the hapless labourer, to say here’s an extra fiver.
    At the end of my shift I’d go back to the home in Westbourne Grove and write short poems. The garden’s full of flowers, the hive is full of bees , one of my early monologues began. The room is full of sound because the piano is full of keys. My head is full of emptiness, my throat is full of cough, this house is full of strangers, I wish they would all fuck off .
    I was fed up. Fed up with hod-carrying. Fed up with living in the hostel. Fed up with having no one that cared for me. And fed up with having no prospect of a better life. If I was going to get myself out of this mess, I needed to earn more money, so I got a job at Devonport’s as a red-lead painter and then at Kellogg’s, an American technical engineering firm, where I was taken on as an engineer’s labourer. It was a grand title for a job that only entailed being a gofer – ‘Go and get me this; go and get me that’ – so when one of the foremen asked if anybody wanted to drive a van to take labourers from the works gate to the various locations on the site where work was being done, I volunteered.

    No one asked if I had a licence and when you’re fifteen years old you don’t worry about it yourself. Every day I drove labourers around the site in a