Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (25 page)

‘I wish I was sat here in my swimming trunks,’ I joked – but there wasn’t time to laugh as the car was suddenly jolted upwards. The car moved sideways, then it rocked from side to side and started floating down the street.

A reservoir above Rabat had burst and millions of gallons of water were coming down the side of the mountain. Built on solid rock and with little vegetation, Malta had few fields or flood plains to soak up the water, which came roaring down the hillside. Sweeping up everything in its path, a wall of water lifted our car twenty feet on the swell. We all panicked. With water coming through the dashboard and the air vents, under the doors and around the windows, we had seconds to make a decision. Pressing my feet against the passenger door, I shouted to the others in the car as the car hit the side of a bank and flipped over.

‘If we don’t get out of the car, we’re going to drown inside it!’ I yelled as I pushed the door open and the water surged into the car. Grabbing Louvane by her anorak and Margaret by her arm, I pushed us all out of the door. We were floating in deep water gushing down the road in a gully between the mountainside and a high wall. The girls were screaming and other cars were swirling past us. A school bus and a van with some kids screeching inside it floated past, but there was nothing we could do. It was like something from a horror movie.

As the water swept down the road I kept hold of Margaret and Lou, my fingers digging into their arms. The water hit us again and again, like a wave crashing against rocks on a beach,
as I pushed the girls towards some trees along the side of a boulevard.

‘Get hold of a tree,’ I yelled. ‘
Get hold of a tree!
’

I grabbed a palm tree at the side of the road and held on for my life. I looked round. George had grasped a tree and was climbing up a bank, pulling Margaret and Norman behind him. They were out of the water and were safe. Next to them Louvane was clinging to another tree, screaming as the water washed around her.

‘My handbag!’ she bawled. ‘My purse! My passport!’

‘Fuck your purse and your handbag!’ I yelled. ‘Keep hold of the tree!’

Lou let go of the tree, but I managed to grab her. ‘Keep hold of me!’ I screamed as I dragged the two of us towards another tree that had fallen over and lodged against the bank, its branches splayed all around it. ‘Grab hold of the branches!’ I yelled.

I looked at Lou. She had lost her glasses.

‘Are you all right?’ I shouted.

‘I’m frightened, Roy. I can’t see anything.’

‘Just hold on to the tree! Hold on to the tree!’

I let go of the tree to push around it so that I could pull Lou up the bank. But when I got round to the far side of the tree, Lou was gone.

‘Where’s Lou?’ Norman shouted from the bank.

I didn’t know what to say. ‘She’s on the other side, Norman,’ I lied. I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t know where she was. As I said it, I looked down the road and saw a massive wave hit the bank, sweeping everything in its path over the mountainside. I knew then that none of us would ever see Lou again.

I climbed up on to a wall. A cornfield waist-deep in water was on the other side, but at least the water there was still. I waded through it to a farmhouse where a farmer was stranded at an
upstairs window, waving and shouting in Maltese. Turning back towards the bank, I saw Norman running along the top searching for Lou as a helicopter plucked Margaret and George off the bank. I got to the farmhouse and the farmer pulled me up to his first-floor window.

‘English! English!’ I said.

‘Very, very bad storm,’ the farmer said. ‘You safe now.’

‘My friend’s car has gone.’

‘Is OK. They take them Mosta. You go Mosta. We wait here and they take you Mosta.’

We sat on the windowsill of the farmhouse, waiting to be rescued, me half naked. The force of the water had washed off my shoes, socks, trousers and top. All I had on was my underpants. The farmer wrapped a potato sack around me, which immediately brought me out in spots, but at least I was warm and dry.

A large army truck pulled up and took us to the police station at Mosta, where I was left standing in a waiting room for hours. Then a policeman walked in with Norman.

‘Where is she?’ Norman said immediately.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I am sorry, Norman.’

Norman said nothing. He just stared blankly at me.

‘I tell you where she’ll be now,’ I said. ‘She’ll be in a farmhouse or somebody will have taken her in and she’ll be sat there wondering about you.’ But as I said it, I was convinced that Lou was not with us any more.

‘What if she has drowned, what if …’ Norman started. And then he broke down in tears.

I wanted to say the right things, but it was difficult in front of a man as distraught as Norman. I put my arms around him. ‘You are looking at the black side, Norman,’ I said. ‘Let’s not think the worst until we know for sure what has happened to Lou.’

We gave the police all our details, then they dropped us back at the hotel. When I walked in, Beryl burst into tears. She had been told that we were probably all dead. (A premature report even made the local paper in Middlesbrough. ‘Chubby Brown missing on holiday’, the headline said.) Beryl and the others had made it back to the hotel without mishap. They’d spent the storm in the hotel’s lounge, watching the water wash half the hotel’s grounds and its swimming pool down the hill. There were uprooted trees and plants everywhere.

At least twenty people died that day. A Land Rover with four people in it had been swept off a viaduct. A woman had drowned in her wine cellar. But in those days most of Malta looked like it had just been through a disaster. The next day, much of the island looked as if nothing had happened. It was hard to tell the difference.

We all took taxis out to the bottom of the viaduct where Lou had disappeared. Word had got around the resorts that we were looking for an Englishwoman and more than two hundred English tourists turned up to help search for her. One of them came over to me.

‘Hiya,’ he said. ‘Chubby, isn’t it?’ He was a small guy. With dark curly hair, a moustache and a suntan he looked a bit Greek.

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘George Forster. Fairworld Promotions,’ he said, offering his hand.

I knew who George was through reputation, but otherwise he was a stranger to me.

‘Bit of a sad day,’ he said.

‘Did you know Lou and her husband?’

‘Well, I knew Norman,’ George said. ‘What with buying and selling acts, I speak to Norman all the time on the phone, but I didn’t know his wife. It’s a very sad affair.’

We got on with searching for Lou. It was a beautiful day, the sky blue, the air warm and soft, but no birds were singing. It was eerily quiet. The police gave us long sticks to poke through the thick mud left on the road. And as we probed with our sticks, I didn’t know what to say to Norman. I was sure that Lou was dead, but I didn’t want to find a body.

Two days later, Lou still not found, we were due to fly home. Norman decided to stay on until he’d located Lou. The rest of us flew back in silence, all shocked by the tragic events.

Norman called the next day. Lou had been found two and a half miles out to sea. Two fishermen had netted her body in the bay. The police said she’d been pulled under the surface of the water, gone under a bridge and into the drains. She was unrecognisable. Norman had identified Lou by her wedding ring.

Norman flew back and was met at the airport by his two sons. I went round to the house. As I walked up the path to the door, I heard one of the boys howling. ‘My mother! My mother!’ he screamed. Lou had died on exactly the same date as her mother, and they’d both been thirty-nine when they went.

‘They want seven hundred pounds for us to bring my mam’s body back,’ one of the sons said to me. I knew Norman didn’t have it. He was a junior insurance agent who lived hand to mouth and who put in extra hours with Brian Findlay to earn enough money to put tobacco in his pipe. Other than that, he didn’t have a penny to scratch his arse.

I made a call to Brian. ‘Why don’t you put on a special Chubby Brown show at one of the biggest clubs and we’ll give all the money to Norman?’ I said. ‘That should be enough to bring Lou’s body back and pay for a funeral.’

I called the show Chubby’s Fresh Brown Eggs – I don’t know why – and pulled together the best North-East musicians I knew. Paul Smith on drums, Tubby Ian on bass and Paul Flush on
piano. I also roped in Les Desouza and Art McArthur, two great singers for a show that ran from eight o’clock until midnight with an hour’s comedy from me. We sold out and, with the tickets at two pounds each, we raised enough money for Norman to bring Lou’s body back.

When Lou was buried and everything had settled down, I sat at my piano and wrote a little ragtime two-step called ‘Louvane’. I thought a ragtime suited Lou because she was always jokey and giddy and full of fun. It was mainly instrumental. At shows I’d introduce it as a song dedicated to a girl who lost her life on holiday in Malta and at the end of every sixteen bars I’d just say ‘Louvane.’ Norman was dead chuffed with it and the audiences loved it, so I put it on my first album,
Fat Bastard
.

I paid for a plaque to be put on the wall near where we’d last seen Lou. Ten years later, I went back to Malta on holiday. Norman died five years after he lost Lou – he’d started drinking heavily after her death and had a heart attack. I went to have a look at Lou’s plaque. It was corroded and filthy. The lettering was impossible to make out. The next day, leaving the rest of the holiday party sitting by the pool, I went to an ironmonger’s in Valletta. I bought some steel wool, a wire brush and some black paint. I cleaned the plaque up, repainted the lettering and planted a flowering bush in front of it. It was the least that Lou deserved.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SOLO STEPS

THE FIRST CALL
after I arrived home from hospital came from Bernard Manning. Many people in the northern comedy world believe there’s a great rivalry between Bernard and me. But there’s not and there never has been. I’ve always admired Bernard and he opened a lot of doors for people like me. We’ve been friends for years and I recently did the entertainment at Bernard’s seventy-fifth birthday party.

Plenty of other comedians had written to me after news got out that I had cancer. Ken Dodd, who has always been my hero, wrote to wish me good luck after I sent him my most recent video. ‘It’s so good to hear that you are doing well with your treatment,’ Ken wrote. ‘I’ll try not to do too much of your material on my next show!’

Bob Monkhouse, as well as phoning as soon as he heard of my diagnosis, wrote several times, on one occasion just after returning home to find more than a thousand letters from readers of two Sunday tabloids that had him at death’s door. ‘We hope with all our hearts that you are recovering strongly from
your op,’ Bob wrote. ‘Let’s fight on, you and I! We’ve both faced some tough battles on the stage and this is another one we can win. Keep polishing your helmet.’

More letters came from other comedians and club owners with whom I’d worked over the years. And then the phone calls started. Joe Pasquale, Duncan Norvelle, Dave Lee, Micky Miller and many others called. The message was always the same: we’re thinking of you at this time. I’d gone through life thinking that few people knew who I was; now all these celebrities were phoning and writing to me.

I appreciated them all but Bernard was different. He has been like a comedy godfather to me, so when he called it was something special.

‘Eeeeh, is this Chubby?’ Bernard said.

I did my best to croak, ‘Yeah.’

‘It’s Bernard.’

‘Hello, Bernard.’

‘I’m sat here worried about you, son. I have been told some hurtful things.’

‘Yeah,’ I rasped.

‘Well, I don’t know what to say. Keep your pecker up, won’t you?’

‘Yeah. How are you, Bernard?’

‘I’m on eighteen tablets a day for me kidneys, for me angina, for me arthritis and me gout.’

‘I bet you rattle when you trip up,’ I rasped.

‘If I trip up, no fucker’s strong enough to pick me up, are they?’ he said. Then he told me a gag about Michael Jackson. ‘What’s Arthur Scargill got in common with Michael Jackson?’ he said. ‘Hasn’t seen a helmet for fifteen years.’

Bernard laughed. ‘You can have that,’ he said, like it was one of his own. ‘If you want anything, give me a ring.
Please
give me a ring. And please keep in touch with me.’

‘Right.’ I wanted to tell Bernard how much I appreciated his concern, but my voice wasn’t up to it.

‘Thank you very much,’ I said. It was all I could manage.

I’d been playing solo gigs for about two years, getting my name about as a solo comic while still playing with George and Mick in Alcock & Brown, when Brian got me a job at Jollys, a premier-division club at Stoke-on-Trent. ‘There’s strippers on the top of the bill,’ he said. ‘Then you.’

Jollys was a venue with a big reputation. Along with Batley Variety Club and the Double Diamond at Caerphilly, it dominated the club circuit. I knew what would be expected of me. There’d be 1,800 men on pie-and-pea suppers washed down with jugs of ale before the strippers, of which there’d be about half a dozen, came on. My job would be to do a twenty-minute warm-up before the strippers and to step in during the show with a few gags if there were any delays. For a novice stand-up it was a daunting proposition, but I took on the gig and set off in my van from Middlesbrough with my cousin Dec, arriving at Jollys four hours later.