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.

 13
Chapel Allerton – A Little
Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

 I have mentioned the ambivalence and mutual distrust that
exists between drivers and management in the private hire
business, but perhaps I should also say that I found the company
I worked for to be entirely fair. To some extent the relationship
varied with the seasons. In winter, when work was plentiful and
money easy to make, there seemed to be a harsher edge to the
management directives, whereas in summer, when fewer drivers
were working and rents were consequently down, there was a
markedly softer tone. Nevertheless my experience was that I
was always treated with courtesy, albeit a courtesy that featured
some pretty colourful language, and generally honesty too. On
one or two odd occasions I inadvertently overpaid my rent, and
immediately received a ‘phone call telling me there was £10
waiting for me in the office. On the other side of the coin I was
asked to pay for damage I had caused; this totalled £800 in my
two years, £500 of which was for the accident I was involved in
that was entirely my fault.

 

 But on to the adage at the head of this chapter – a little
knowledge is a dangerous thing. The notion behind it, one
imagines, is that whilst ignorance can be bliss, to be only
partially informed runs the risk of basing important decisions
on limited data, and finding to one’s cost that it would have been
better to know nothing.
I had spent most of my life acknowledging the truth of the
saying on the one hand and blatantly defying it to do its worst
on the other. Tiny snippets of professed expertise would be
paraded on suitable occasions when there was an opportunity
to appear cleverer than I am. On several occasions I have come
unstuck, usually with consequences ranging anywhere from
embarrassment to humiliation. Only once have I felt under
threat out of trying to be an intellectual Walter Mitty.

Whilst most of my customers were people who spoke the
same language as myself, albeit with a strange accent and an
extended regional vocabulary, occasionally I would find myself
driving round those of other nationalities. I’m really not very
good at languages – my French is not a complete disaster as I did
it at school and have been taking holidays in France ever since –
but other than that I know very few words of anything else.

 

 I also know a handful of Russian words thanks to the
questionable benefit of attending a grammar school where the
Headmaster was a dedicated Russophile who tried to make
as many children as possible take Russian as a second foreign
language in addition to French or German. Always one for
trying to impress authority figures I had embarked on two years’
worth of learning Russian, the result some 35 years later being
a familiarity with about seven or eight words. But the language
group is quite distinctive, so when a couple of rather burly men climbed into the back of the minicab for a pretty decent fare and
started to speak to each other in Russian or a similar tongue
with some earnestness, I only listened as much as one does to
the back end of a late-night chat-show, hearing words but not
really taking anything in. In spite of not understanding a word,
though, I realised pretty quickly that they were not the sort of
people I would like to get on the wrong side of.
The conversation they were having became increasingly
intense until it was abundantly clear they had become oblivious
to their surroundings and to my presence, though they obviously
gauged, correctly, that I couldn’t understand a thing they were
saying. They were still going hard at it when we pulled up at the
address they had given me at the start of the journey. Having
paid and stepped out of the car I then decided to be clever and
called out “Dos vedanya”, the Russian for “see you again”, thus
exhausting about 25 per cent of the Russian vocabulary stored
safely in my long-term memory.
In a fraction of a second the larger – and more sinisterlooking
– of the two was back at my window demanding to
know how much of their conversation I had understood.