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. 

You can order the book direct from myself or from the publisher by following the link above.

9
Upper Armley – 26b

 Teatime with the family was always entertaining in those days.
Now regarding ourselves as honorary northerners we decided
that “tea” was to be our main meal of the day, eschewing posh
terms like “dinner” in the true spirit of the Yorkshire working
class thumbing their noses at softie southerners. We didn’t go
in for whippets or ferrets down the trousers but a quarter of a
century on the ecclesiastical merry-go-round that had deposited
us seemingly randomly in different parts of the country had left
us feeling like cultural nomads. By birth Brummies, we now felt
no affinity to Britain’s second city, and Yorkshire was as good a
place as any (and indeed better than most) to say we belonged.
It was a rare day when I returned with no “story of the day”
with which to regale the family. This was usually heavily edited
for the ears of my youngest two children, for whom bizarrely
having a father who drove a taxi was far more of a status symbol
than having a clergyman, and certainly less embarrassing in
the school playground. Without doubt most of these seedy
narratives were drawn from the first couple of hours of my shift.
Sometimes it would be merely a narrative relating to the surreal
conversations generated by the anomaly of this being the start
of my day but the end of the customer’s. Their long-delayed and
frequently guilt-laden journey home would be coincidental
with the start of another shift; they would be planning for
“tomorrow” and I was already there. Moral lapses and excesseswere often made glaringly obvious by the circumstances of the
pick-up location, but whether or not this was so I seemed to be
regarded rather bizarrely as a kind of Father Confessor. Souls
were unburdened of almost every carnal sin imaginable, and
some almost beyond the imagination.

 More often than not the
breadth of my family’s social education would be extended
by an alluring mixture of the sordid and the comical. Perhaps
this is mainly because I started work at what was generally
closing time for the sex industry, be it the commercial sort or
the homespun “husband pretending to be on night shift but
really bonking his mistress since the small hours” variety. There
was probably nothing in all these experiences that the tabloid
press would pay serious money for; as far as I know I never
once transported a member of the nobility, the judiciary, the
Church or the government to or from houses of ill repute, and
in any case to compromise the anonymity of the cab would have
been the equivalent of a priest breaking the confidentiality of
the confessional. But these experiences were certainly highly
entertaining, and given a little moderate embellishment and
judicious censorship kept all six of us entertained certainly until
pudding was dished up.

 Everyone knew that the pick-up point that came to be known simply as “26b” was a brothel, or more colloquially a
“knocking shop”. Almost as a matter of principle every driver
I met pretended to find it rather distasteful when “26b” jobs
materialised on the datahead, but I only ever met one driver
who refused a fare, a rather bizarre individual who was
concerned that some unpleasant substance might be secreted
onto his carefully valeted upholstery.....

 There were three wonderful things about 26b; firstly it was
very close to Base where I picked up my car for a day’s work,
secondly closing time was 5.00 a.m., the time I generally started
work, and thirdly there were some cracking jobs to be had
that could really provide a great start to the day. Even the less
lucrative fares provided good waking-up entertainment, a bit
like the effect of one of those 70s sitcom repeats shown before
breakfast that put you in the mood for coffee and cornflakes
even if you can’t believe that you once used to find it funny.
So it was that most mornings, but particularly at weekends,
four or five drivers would be found in the car park tucked away
out of sight of the few surviving prudish eyes still clinging
tenaciously to residency in the area like eccentric limpets to the
hull of a beached dinghy. Glancing round at their fellow cabbies
each driver would raise eyes skywards in a pretence of claiming
the moral high ground and offer tuts of disapproval at the rate
of a light machine gun mowing down a line of infantry in order to convey an impression of being compelled to perform an
unpleasant task out of a keen sense of public duty. This was pure
hypocrisy; in truth we were all hoping for a lucrative hour or so
before the early morning trade and heavy traffic kicked in.