The Collar and the Cab

In an act of pure opportunist self-promotion and in the hope of selling some I am publishing some extracts from my new book The Collar and the Cab on this blog. There are 35 chapters so it will take a couple of months to offer a little from each. 

 

 29
West Park – Scarborough Fare, Baked
Beans and the Just Plain Bizarre

 It was in my first few weeks as a cabbie that what would be
seen by most of the profession as the dream job came through
the datahead. These were the days already referred to when I
enjoyed a certain level of preferential treatment (known in the
trade as feeding) to try to persuade me that the life of a private
hire driver in West Yorkshire was second in significance and
pecuniary reward only to CEOs of FTSE 100 companies, and
pretty much up there with David Beckham and Tom Cruise in
terms of glamour.
The first thing most private hire drivers do when a job
comes through the datahead is to note the pick-up address and
then scroll down to see where they are taking the customer; this
probably reflects the fact that in spite of the universal deprecation
of the mundanity of the work the optimist in the majority of
drivers has never quite been extinguished. Nine times out of ten
the immediate consequence of this exercise is the emission of an
audible sigh of disappointment followed by an expletive or two
expressing the sentiment that all they get these days is “shite.”
I had little sympathy with this kind of perennial paranoid
depressiveness. It was a simple fact that the great majority of
our work was of the short-distance, low-fare variety; you made
your money by working hard and completing as many of these
jobs as possible and when the odd one came along that paid £10
or more it was really little more than a pleasant change from
the humdrum, and not necessarily as lucrative as it seemed. The
ideal fare in my opinion is one that is a distance of several miles
along roads that are fast and easily navigable and which ends in
an area from which more work is likely to be forthcoming. By
no means did all of the relatively well-paying fares fall into this
category, and some were to be avoided if at all possible. Work from
football matches at Elland Road or test matches at Headingley
are good illustrations; the grounds would frequently disgorge
customers who wanted to travel quite significant distances, but
on match days most drivers with any experience avoided these
plots like the plague, because it could take half an hour or more
to pick your way through the traffic, locate the customers and
extract yourself from the general melee of people and vehicles
that proliferate on such occasions. Music festivals were another
bad idea – The Who had reformed for a nostalgia tour during
my time in the business and were performing at Harewood
House, a stately home near Harrogate. Late one evening I was
offered a pick-up once the concert had finished. The drive there
took seemingly forever, not only negotiating traffic, but on
arrival finding a hundred or more people all wanting me to take
them home but none of them being the people who had actually
booked. Eventually locating the customer and emerging from
the vehicular and pedestrian scrum I managed to deliver the
intrepid concert-goers to their home in something a little over
an hour after setting off. Since we were paid on mileage – and
only when people were in the car – the amount I took at the end
of the job was about what I could otherwise have made in a little
over half an hour had I stayed in the city. Many drivers on this
sort of run just picked up the first person they came across who
wanted a cab and pretended it was the customer whose name
appeared on their screen – and charged mileage both ways. This
was a hazardous thing to do, firstly because it is against the law
and secondly because the time would come when the original
customer would ring the office and ask “where’s my bloody car?”
This would in turn result in a radio call from Base and an earful
from a frustrated operator or manager.

After a while I dropped the habit of looking at the destination
until I arrived at the pick-up address – especially once I could say
I really knew my way around the areas we worked; most likely it
was a bread and butter job, and so long as I refrained from looking
I could entertain the remote hope of something more lucrative,
and it was quite good fun not knowing where I would be going.
But this “dream job” came in the early days when it was of the
utmost importance to see the destination as early as possible in
order to try mentally to plan a suitable route – assuming I had
the first idea where we were supposed to be going.
So when the datahead gave me a nearby pick-up late one
weekday morning and I scrolled down to see the destination
as “Scarborough” I could barely credit the possibility of a job
that would take me the rest of my shift to complete, assuming
the customer wanted a return ride later that day.
 I decided to radio the office
and ask firstly if it was genuine and secondly how much I should
charge for such a job. ‘It’s for real, love; you have to work out the
fare between you and the customer and come to an agreement.’
So I set about working out what was reasonable to charge. I knew
it was about 70 miles from Leeds to Scarborough, and charged
at full rate this would mean a single fare of about £80, and if I
waited to do the return journey something more than double
that. But this was more than I would normally take in a day, so
what was reasonable? I decided to ask initially for £75 and then
to talk about coming back should the customer wish me to wait
for him.
I started wondering what kind of customer might call for
a cab to Scarborough, and visualised a suave millionaire and a
young attractive companion dressed in designer clothes with
accessories by Gucci. Then the thought crossed my mind – did I
really want to spend that long in someone else’s company when
relative solitude was one of the principal attractions of the job?
I was still pondering this question when an elderly man came
shuffling out of the side door and down the garden path towards
me. Shabbily dressed and unshaven I wondered whether he was
rich, eccentric, insane or a combination of all three. Perhaps
nearing the point of shuffling off this mortal coil had he decided
to blow a large wad of cash on a nostalgic trip to a favourite old
haunt? Perhaps a reclusive millionaire acting on a whim who just
fancied being driven to the seaside. Perhaps he had someone to
see about something urgent – a family crisis? I was never to find
out, but I was already having qualms about him simply because
everything about his demeanour exuded resentful grumpiness,
and I was not at all sure I wanted his company for the rest of the
day for anything under four figures.