The day before New Year was a quiet one. My parents had many things to do, they said, so they were leaving us to our own devices for a couple of hours. We were ordered not to traipse snow into the house if we went outside, and not to help ourselves to cake. Would it be alright for Conker to come round? we asked. Yes, they said, that would be alright. They would be back at teatime.
The snow had by now lost its charm for us, so instead we opted to stay indoors for the day. Martin suggested a game of snakes-and-ladders, to which my brother and I both agreed, and when Conker arrived he offered to make up a foursome. Before play could begin, however, there was a matter to settle. As Martin reached for the dice, Conker knocked him down and pinned him to the floor. Then my brother and I did our very best to screw his head right off.
8. They Drive by Night
It was a dark and stormy night, with the threat of rain moving rapidly in from the west. I glanced along the road, hoping that at any moment a pair of suitable headlights would appear.
Two minutes passed.
Nothing.
There were very few cars on the road this evening, and I hadn’t set eyes on a van since about half past seven. The occasional vehicles that did go by all seemed to be making local journeys only. They rumbled past in a stately way, their drivers glancing casually at the lone figure standing by the roadside, and then disappeared into the gloom.
“Come on,” I murmured to myself. This was the worst day’s thumbing I’d had for a long while, and it was beginning to get to me. Normally such a trip would take five or six hours at the most, yet on this occasion I’d been on the move since early morning and still had over a hundred miles to go. If I didn’t get a ride very soon I was going to be stuck here for the night. And it was about to start raining.
A gust of wind tore through a clump of nearby trees and rushed across the fields pursuing a flurry of late-autumn leaves. Then, as it faded away, I heard another sound: a faint roar in the distance like a great beast labouring under an enormous burden. My ears pricked up, and a moment later a bloom of artificial light appeared between the converging hedgerows. A lorry was coming!
There were no street lamps here, so I’d positioned myself near to some reflective posts at the beginning of a lay-by. Hopefully this would help the driver spot me in good time, and give him plenty of opportunity to pull over. As the vehicle approached I saw that it was an eight-wheeler, its load hidden beneath a great tarpaulin and roped down on all sides. I stuck out my thumb.
A whistle of air brakes told me he was stopping, so I shouldered my bag and watched as the lorry veered into the lay-by and came to a noisy halt. Then I ran quickly up to the cab door on the passenger side, where a window was being wound down. A man’s head emerged. He was wearing a woolly hat.
“Want a lift?” he yelled. He had to yell because of the racket the lorry was making. The whole cab seemed to be shaking with the motion of the engine, which clamoured incessantly beneath the rattling bonnet.
“Yes please!” I yelled back. “How far are you…?”
“Eh?” interrupted the man, thrusting his head even further out of the window.
“Going south?” I tried.
“South?”
I nodded and his head disappeared. Then the door swung open and I climbed up. To my surprise the man turned out to be not the driver but the driver’s mate, an occupation I thought had disappeared decades before. He leant back and with some difficulty I squeezed past him into the middle seat.
The driver sat behind the wheel grinning across at me. He, too, wore a woolly hat.
“Thanks!” I shouted to him above the din. It was just as noisy inside the cab as outside, or if anything even noisier.
“You in alright?” he bellowed, jamming the lorry into gear. This involved moving my right knee out of the way, since it was pressed up against the gear stick. I complied and we pulled away just as some large drops of rain began to fall on the windscreen. Second gear required another knee movement, as did third, and not until we got into fourth was I able to relax my leg. The catseyes lit up on the road ahead, and I sat back in my seat thankful to be moving once more.
The noise made by the engine had now built up into a steady drone, augmented by the roar from the exhaust stack, which seemed to be mounted somewhere close behind us. Because of all this din I expected conversation within the cab to be kept to a minimum, but after a short while I realised that the driver was speaking to me. I strained to hear him, but only caught the end of his sentence, which sounded something like, “Ease parts then?”
“Just passing through really!” I replied. “I’m on my…”
“You what?” he said, cutting me off. His ears were hidden beneath his woolly hat.
I raised my voice. “I said I’m on my way home for a few weeks!”
“Eh?” said the man on my left, inclining his head towards me. For the last few moments he’d sat quietly gazing through the windscreen, but now his reverie had been disturbed and he peered at me in an enquiring way.
“I was just telling your friend I’m on my way home for a few weeks!”
A look of puzzlement crossed his face as he deciphered the words. Then he nodded vigorously. “Chance would be a fine thing!”
“You what?” said the driver, leaning across.
“He says a chance would be a fine thing!” I explained.
“Oh yes!” he agreed, after giving the remark some thought. “Yes, indeed it would!”
The rain was coming down heavily now. It drummed on the roof and did battle with a pair of very ill-matched windscreen wipers which had been switched on shortly after I came aboard. Each wiper had its own very distinct mode of operation. The one on the passenger side swished from left to right with short, violent flicks, while the other scraped irregularly back and forth in long, languid movements that only served to move the rainwater around, rather than actually get rid of it. In consequence the driver had a broad but rather dim view of the road while his mate could see clearly but only through a very narrow segment. It occurred to me that between them their field of vision was probably quite adequate, and I wondered in an idle way if this was the reason they operated as a pair.
Certainly they had all the makings of a ‘team’. For a start, the two of them were of very similar appearance, both wearing a donkey jacket as well as the woolly hat I mentioned before. They each had curly hair and thick bushy sideboards, and identical accents which placed them from the north-west, though I couldn’t say exactly where. Both driver and mate seemed equally bent on pressing forward with the journey despite such atrocious weather conditions, their shared concentration evident as they stared intently at the road ahead.
When it came to verbal communication, however, there was a problem. The inside of that cab was one of the loudest places I’d ever been, yet my two companions continually tried to discuss our progress, exchanging comments on every bend, puddle or similar hazard that we encountered. This would have been alright if either had been prepared to listen to what his partner was saying. Instead, the pair of them constantly interrupted one another with shouts of “Eh?” or “You what?”
At one point we passed a sign warning of a particularly steep hill approaching, and the driver began the process of selecting low gear, a noisy operation that entailed much revving of the engine and stamping on the clutch pedal. While I deftly adjusted the position of my knee in relation to the gear stick, his mate chose the moment to make a remark about the weather.