Extracts from my first solo book which I have recently published about the two years I spent driving a private hire car rather than being a clergyman. It began life as a piece of auto-catharsis and turned into a project. If I can sell some I can start recouping my costs!


The Collar and the Cab
Follow this link to buy from publisher, or you can order direct from me. Amazon also have it as well as a number of independent retailers.

23
Lower Bramley – God Bless

 Like respectable Edwardian families, who were inclined to
have them institutionalised, most of us have a relative who is
embarrassing in company. The draconian options open to our
ancestors are no longer available, so we have to find other means
of marginalising their potential effect on respectable company.
Those who plan and govern major cities are faced with a
similar predicament; there are whole tracts of land that are an
embarrassment, usually featuring a fairly wide, but entirely
predictable array of local authority housing. These are the estates
that survived the great sell-off of council housing during the
Thatcher era, or failed to benefit from them, depending on one’s
perspective. The generally preferred means of coping with these
substantial bunions is a combination of denial and disguise, the
latter largely being a means of facilitating the former.
My own head was removed from the concrete desert
when my neck was yanked effortlessly by the force of sheer
necessity. It was simply not an option as a cab driver to avoid
this reality since so much of my work took me into the kinds
of urban landscape I thought had become extinct during
the slum clearance programmes of the post-war era. Most of
these dwellings were erected long after the Orwellian “flying
aspidistra” semi in the plush suburban districts that had been
the domestic staple diet of almost my entire life. My maiden
foray into one of the labyrinthine, arthritic byways that wound its way through a bewildering and depressing topography was a
jaw-dropping experience; how did people go about constructing
anything like a decent life in these surroundings? Row upon row
of once-identical buildings containing any number of dwellings,
sometimes configured together like one of those wooden puzzles
given as a gift on Christmas Day, dissembled, and laid aside
after an hour’s futile manipulation. The original uniformity of
appearance was distorted only by the largely, but by no means
universally, cosmetic scars, some inflicted by time and weather,
others by frustrated or malevolent residents, visitors or the
local criminal fraternity. The parts of the landscape set aside for
what was comically called recreational use were adorned with
the discarded detritus of broken-down domestic appliances
and redundant technology – fridges, washing machines, video
recorders, cassette players and the like that had once lured
underemployed credit cards from reluctant wallets. Whilst
on one level this provided plenty of hardware to function as
makeshift goalposts or cricket stumps, any sporting activity
would be the equivalent of a game of hopscotch in a minefield.
Were there any youngsters with the inclination or courage to
venture onto the putative recreational areas they would often
have had to brave not only the dangers of abandoned appliances
but the likelihood of coming to grief on a used hypodermic
syringe.
Some of the damage suffered by homes designed to give
ordinary people a decent and wholesome habitat almost
beggared belief. A tiled roof once the accomplished product of
a skilled artisan that had somehow been crushed from above;
craters in gardens that would not have done injustice to the
reputation of a decent Luftwaffe bombardier, and holes in walls
that might have been inflicted by a medium-sized wrecking ball.

It was these bloated blotches on the landscape that I, like so
many others, had previously been cheerfully ignorant of, that
now caused me a sense of profound shame. How could such
streets and blocks of housing and the people who inhabited
them be so unknown to me when I had lived within a few miles
of them for the last six years? Where was the Christian presence
that might have made some kind of difference to the erosion of
morale and hope that surely must be the by-product of being
brought up and trying to secure some kind of an education in
this setting? I surveyed one particular street whose principal
feature was a rather large pylon, and wondered why anyone
agreed to live there. Let them try to put that in a respectable
private estate where house prices were steadily rising and
provided one of the most popular topics of conversation, and
where most residents knew at least one city councillor; the
mountain of mailbags of protest from Yorkshire’s ‘Disgusted of
Tunbridge Wells’ (perhaps the ‘Horrified of Harrogate’) retinue
would have resembled Kilimanjaro.

 Quite early in my venture into the world of minicab driving
I was directed to what I was sure must have been an incorrect
address, as none of the houses looked as if they could possibly
be inhabited other than by small rodents; most had windows
boarded up, hardly any front lawns had seen the business end
of a lawnmower for some years, and even were some kind soul
to make the attempt at such a feat they would have to clear
enough jetsam to fill a Cornish beach. A major excavation with
an industrial digger might unearth an eclectic mixture of weeds
and the odd blade of grass in the last throes of terminal illness.

 Even if the address on the screen was correct, I surmised,
there was surely no one living in this kind of estate who could
possibly afford a taxi. Just in case there was someone around,
however, I decided it might be expedient to reverse down the culde-
sac to which I had been directed, steering carefully through
the slalom course of discarded white goods and builders’ rubble.
The further down the narrow road I drove the more it resembled
the East End of London in the blitz. Just in case I really did have
a customer I entered the code on the datahead that rang the
intrepid commuter to announce my arrival. I prepared to lock
the car doors and prepare for as rapid a departure as the worn
piston rings in the old Skoda would allow in the event of an
all-out assault by the living dead who must surely be the only
possible inhabitants of such a desolate landscape. It was far more
likely that I would shortly be radioing Base to report a no fare.
I hadn’t been waiting more than 30 seconds when with a
screech of protest what appeared to be the only door still in
proximity to its frame was yanked through about 30 degrees –
just sufficient to allow the egress of what were surely the only
survivors in the devastation that surrounded me.

Sarah looked like a woman in early middle-age, but I
suspect she was younger – a year or two either side of 30;
slightly overweight, with a careworn face etched with the pain
that was the inevitable companion of survival in her kind of
world. Her light brown hair was interlaced with prematurely
grey streaks and had probably not been styled for many a year,
but her smile was engaging, genuine and generous; in fact she
was rather attractive. Most of her clothing, from her threadbare
jacket to shoes that I suspect had holes in the soles that more or
less matched those in the uppers, would have failed to grace the
shelves of a charity shop. Her voluminous bag, like most such
receptacles, was a living example of Murphy’s Law of women’s
fashion accessories – the amount of paraphernalia carried
will always expand to fill however much space is available.
Nevertheless, whatever else it contained I knew what little cash
it could boast would be regarded by most people as pitifully
inadequate for the acquisition of enough food to feed a family –
before the taxi fare was paid – and the worn but anorexic purse
would not be replete with the array of plastic most of us regard
as essential to survival in the modern world. But as I was to
learn Sarah was actually a fairly typical customer.