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.

 

7
Stanningley – Road Works

Up to the point when I drove cars for a living, things like
road works or new sets of traffic lights were a bit like in-laws;
necessary up to a point, best avoided but endurable most of
the time in moderate doses. Like most generally law-abiding
citizens I had never seriously thought about what was going
on when sections of road were coned off, temporary traffic
lights were erected and miscellaneous items of machinery were
scattered about the roadway with as much apparent forethought
as driftwood at high tide. Call it naïve if you will, but the
assumption many of us make is that essential maintenance,
repair or renovation work is taking place and is being undertaken
by hard-working contractors with a conscientious concern for
the cumbersomeness to which the hapless motorist is being
subjected. Work is therefore proceeding as quickly as possible
in order to relieve the decent hard-working road user of any
unnecessary delay or inconvenience. The absence of workmen at
any given time may be attributed to shift patterns, unfavourable
conditions due to climactic variables or an unfortunate delay
caused by necessary supplies being unavailable at this particular
time. The road remains coned off, we trustingly assume, because
the workforce are taking a richly deserved tea break, and at any
moment now a veritable army of road builders armed with
tarmac, paint and pneumatic drills will return to continue the work.

The advantage – or disadvantage if you will – of the taxi driver is that he is likely
to pass such a point several times during a shift and observe
what is really going on – or, more to the point, what is not going
on.

It was in my former selfless mood of public-spirited altruism
that I spent the first couple of weeks avoiding the jams or,
when absolutely necessary, sitting in them willingly doing my
bit for world peace by not ruing too much the cost in takings
good work. Given that most commuters will only pass the road
works on their way into and out of the city, before and after a
day’s work, the illusion that back-breaking labour is on display
during office hours is somewhat easier to maintain. For me the
frequent observation of the Stanningley Road / Armley Ridge
Road renovation works was to evaporate that myth like so much
salt water in a child’s bucket, gradually perhaps, but relentlessly nevertheless, as the realisation grew that what one was
encountering was not a strange combination of circumstances
but more of an immutable law of nature.
My debut as a private hire driver had coincided with the
commencement of these road works at a junction that had
seen far too many collisions, some fatal. Quite reasonably, the
Highways Agency had decided enough was enough and a new
set of traffic lights to enable traffic and pedestrians to cross the
main highway in safety was deemed necessary to prevent further
loss of life and limb. 

Stanningley Road is to Leeds something
akin to what the aorta is to the human body. Cut the flow of
traffic and the city will very rapidly cease to function due to the
massive internal haemorrhage of cars and commercial vehicles
that will be compelled to find an alternative route through the
capillaries of Armley and Wortley.

 During the course of an average day shift I must have passed
these road works at least twenty times, and early on I tried to
assess just how much work there was to be done and how long it
was likely to take. A bit of central reservation had to be dug up,
a short stretch of each carriageway resurfaced, road markings
altered, cables laid and traffic lights installed and sequenced. I
am no civil engineer or highway expert, but it was difficult to see
how it could possibly take more than a month, and given a fair
wind maybe the whole project could be completed in a couple
of weeks. So when the crossing point of the road was put out of
use, and blood supply through the artery was reduced by 50%, I
anticipated a speedy return to traffic normality, when the whole
situation would be greatly improved for everyone concerned.
The penny began to drop when, after passing the same spot
for what must have been the 100th time in a week, I recalled
that not on even a single occasion had I seen anyone actually
working there. Roads were blocked off, and lanes were closed,
but workmen were once again conspicuous only by their
absence, and a similar state of affairs had persisted for the whole
of the week. The weather was as benign as it was ever likely to
be in a Yorkshire autumn. I could see the necessary equipment
was available to do the work, much of it chained to lampposts
blocking the pavement, as if some eccentric sculptor had hit
upon the idea of a grotesque mechanical charm bracelet to
exhibit to the commuting public.

    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.

 

6
Holbeck – “Working Girl”

It was at this time of day one Sunday when the sterile sanctuary
of the puritanical cell I had constructed for myself was violated
for the first time. So long as I was able to consign anyone whose
manner of life was out of sympathy with my sacred creed to a
large box marked “Sinners” it was never necessary to see them
as people. The lazy, undemanding and safe thing to do with
anyone who made a living from the sex industry in any form
was to consign them to the moral cesspool from which they had
emerged and was, I had convinced myself, merely a staging post
on the fast track to hell. It was that morning that I encountered
Debbie, the first person to challenge my warped value system
and compel me to take a long hard look at myself and my
prejudices.

Months later I would have known that collecting a young
woman from this particular area so early in the morning could
mean only one thing, but I had not yet had sufficient experience
of the reality of the seedier side of life in a large city to anticipate
the existence of someone like Debbie. I understood that not all
young women were tucked up in bed by protective parents with
a nice cup of cocoa by ten o’clock in order to protect their virtue,
but nothing could have prepared me for her, or saved me from
the subsequent collapse of the prejudices I had heretofore seen
as cardinal virtues.

Debbie was, I would judge, in her early 20’s, but her youth  was marred by the scars of abuse – some self-inflicted. Dressed in denim jeans, cheap slip-on shoes with no socks she was  struggling unsuccessfully to keep out the sub-zero temperatures
by drawing round her neck a quilted top that reminded me
of something left over at a church jumble sale that nobody
could be persuaded to take. Her appearance aroused a curious
combination of sympathy and curiosity – even a protective
reflex, since she was about the same age as my daughter who
was away at university at the time. Her mousy hair had clearly
not seen the business end of a hairbrush all night, but the
smile was disarming and warm, girlish yet engaging – what
you might call “cute”. Whilst this was probably in part a look
that was cultivated to appeal to her customer base it seemed
far from artificial. My turgid brain (well it was only 5.30 a.m.)
and my imagination finally cooperated sufficiently to cause me
to wonder if this was one of those scarlet women I had heard of
and believed to be as good as doomed to hell, and if so should
I make myself ritually unclean by transporting her anywhere?

 I dismissed the thought as she was wearing neither a short
skirt nor layers of cheap make-up, which were surely what all
such people wore, didn’t they? My natural defences receded
and my previously inert better nature invented several naïve
explanations to account for her walking the streets at this time
of day. The self-imposed delusion didn’t last long; five minutes
into the journey and in the middle of an inane conversation
about something as riveting as the Yorkshire weather she let
slip casually that she was a “working girl” and had been out
all night. By then it was too late; I had neither will nor desire
to turf her out. I had realised she was friendly, interesting and
– well, just plain nice. The barrier had been breached, and I
was talking not to a prostitute, but to Debbie, who seemed
normal and pleasant, and could have even been a member of
my flock. Try as I might, I could no more see her as a member
of a subclass of undesirables than as a Carmelite nun.

 ... here was I – someone who had always considered
himself the Indiana Jones of the Christian world – meekly sitting
in my cab without the faintest clue as to how I might help this scrap                                             of wasted humanity. The resulting silence – embarrassing
only for me I suspect – as I sought in vain for something concise
but incisive to say that would give God the upper hand, was
mercifully interrupted by an instruction to pull up in a street
adjacent to the one housing the purveyor of illegal narcotics;
later I would learn that she could have chosen any one of half a
dozen houses in this particular road. As Debbie made off with
the nonchalance of one all too familiar with streets I would be
reluctant to allow my wife to walk in broad daylight without
a sizeable detachment from the SAS I tried to prepare for the
second leg of the conversation by trawling through my database
of ready-made conversation scenarios guaranteed to bring
sinners to their knees in repentance, and succour to them once
they displayed the appropriate contrition. It was like playing a
game of chess where your opponent has just made an opening
move you have never come across before and you try to work
out what sort of defence, gambit or counter-attack might bring
you the required result.
I had considered and discarded a dozen or more when
Debbie returned with the same relaxed air that had characterised
her departure and we headed off for what passed as home. My
rising sense of frustration, even panic, at not being able to work
out something worthwhile to say was almost palpable when,
unexpectedly, Debbie herself broke the silence with a bombshell.
‘I believe in God … I used to go to church when I was little.’ 

   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.

5
Drighlington – Survival Day

The journey from the first shift to becoming an established driver
is straightforward in the same sense that a solitary egg in a lump
of frogspawn is guaranteed a transition to royalty courtesy of
a kiss from a princess. A minority would reach tadpole status,
but the odds against making a good living over the longer term
are heavily stacked against anyone entering the minicab world.
Because attrition rates are so high most companies adopt a
policy in keeping with the laws of natural selection – recruiting
as many new drivers as possible, knowing that the majority will
not last beyond a few weeks, many not beyond the first few days,
and not grieving too much over the inconsequential loss to the
collective gene pool of the taxi world. The level of mourning
expressed over the premature demise of yet another would-be
cabbie is generally on the level accorded by evolutionary
biologists to the extinction of a primitive protozoon.
Each week new drivers would appear at Base clutching
their bag of equipment like eleven-year-olds on their first day
at senior school. In keeping with their juvenile equivalents the
bag was as much a source of security as anything, containing
a packed lunch with some comfort food, as well as a pristine
street map, a pile of change and a money bag with a far more
substantial appetite than was ever likely to be satisfied.
Survival for the first two weeks or so was the key for most,
the feat of completing ten or twelve days work depending on
a number of factors, only some of which were within the
individual’s control.
Recognising the importance of some of the tadpoles
surviving to maturity most companies try to manipulate the
process of natural selection somewhat by creating a favourable
environment for the genes of the vulnerable new drivers.

Like soldiers arriving at the Western Front in 1914 full of
romantic hopes of Christmas in Berlin after a couple of minor skirmishes
there was little that could prepare most of us for the
feral and, at times, psychologically brutal life of the average taxi
driver. The apparently mundane reality of the mud of the Somme
concealed seemingly limitless possibilities for demonstrating
the vulnerability of the human body to shrapnel, machine gun
bullets and barbed wire. Climbing into the driver’s seat of a
private hire car was unlikely to cost anyone their life, but would
ruthlessly expose human frailty, psychological and physical, to a
wide variety of unseen hazards.

Those first weeks were precarious to say the least; it felt as
if the juggernaut of my life had come to rest with almost half
hanging over the edge of a cliff. It would not take a great deal
of weight transfer to terminate my existence; one or two bad
experiences and the elusive terra firma I still held would slide
into the ocean of ignominious defeat after breaking my back
on the malevolent rocks below. Whilst there was a part of me
that sought the comfort of noble failure the constant, if largely
mechanical, discipline of leaving home early and working long
shifts boosted not only the family bank balance, but also, more
importantly, my self-respect. I may have had to work mercilessly
long hours to achieve the objective, but here I was doing
something I had never tried before, and making a living out of
it. I was becoming dependent only on myself and the natural
resources with which I had been endowed. It was so much better
than feeling held to ransom by the whims and prejudices of a
religious institution obsessed only with its own preservation
from the infections of a world it was finding ever more difficult
to keep at bay.
On one particular day, and for no particular reason, I
experienced a sensation familiar from what seemed a previous
aeon. It was akin to rummaging through the boxes in the attic on
a rainy Saturday afternoon, and encountering my county schools
under-15 cross country trophy, and sensing the same feelings as
on the day it was presented to me as a spotty youth. This strange
feeling I was experiencing, rising through the swamp of years
of morale-sapping criticism and a mire of self-doubt was pride;
not the nose-in-the-air self-promoting X-Factor sort of pride,
but a tangible response to a tangible accomplishment. I seemed
to have reached a point where at the very least I would not add
taxi driving to the substantial catalogue of things I had tried and
failed at in recent years that had so substantially filled my wellstocked
store of personal disasters.

    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.

 

4
Gildersome – Where the **** is that?

 Optimistic self-delusion had supported the myth that
having lived in a city for six years I “knew my way around.” An
hour gazing in bewilderment and incomprehension at a string
of addresses shattered it. The meagre grasp of local geography
I possessed related to the kind of area where respectable
churchgoers made their home; I would be working mostly in
areas unlikely to be frequented by genteel men of the cloth
trading pastoral care for a warm beverage in a china cup.

 

I gazed at the legend on the datahead, fighting the rising
panic. The realisation I had suppressed for the last day or two
– that the city I had come to call home was as familiar as the
back streets of Calcutta – crashed through the flimsy screen of
optimism as a high velocity bullet through a water melon. Six
months later I would have a Sat-nav to do the job for me. At this
stage the frugality that was an essential tool for survival for a cleric
bringing up a family of four children militated against that kind of
profligacy, certainly until I had established whether I could make
a living out of the job. I consulted my five-year old yet pristine
A-Z, and with a huge sense of relief located my initial destination.

 

 The first panic was over as with a sense of
triumph and a newfound optimism I arrived at the address and
awaited my first customer; I pulled myself upright in my seat
and tried to exude the pheromones appropriate to a seasoned
professional taxi driver. I tried to glance nonchalantly at the
young woman towing her semi-comatose toddler down the path
to the car whilst holding on with the other arm to a new-born
infant who must have only recently shuffled onto the mortal coil.
In a month or two I wouldn’t regard the sight of a young mother
with two small children calling a taxi at this hour anything other
than normal, but this was one of many sights and sounds that
caused my jaw to drop alarmingly during my first week. Having taken a second or two to regain an air of competence I decided
I could afford a fleeting smile and even condescended to collect
the folded buggy from the front doorstep where the disability of
only having two arms had necessitated it’s abandonment. I have
always wondered why God didn’t equip those women who he
knew would become mothers with an extra arm and had come
to regard it as a design fault along with the appendix and nasal
hair. Of course what I should have been doing all this time was
scrolling down through the writing on my screen to see where
the customer was going and try to work out where it might be.
I soon paid for my mistake as I suddenly realised that I had not
been summoned because she fancied a cosy chat in the company
of perhaps the only taxi driver in the county with a degree in
theology. 

The euphoria was short-lived, and even the earlier
panic was made to look insignificant by that occasioned once I
remembered that we were supposed to be going somewhere.
Tracy (there seemed an oddly disproportionate quantity of
customers called “Tracy”, followed quite closely by those who
revelled in the appellation of “Stacey”) would expect to find
a taxi driver occupying the vehicle. I was a taxi driver in the
same sense that an eight year old boy is a gunfighter because his
parents have bought him a cowboy outfit for Christmas, though
perhaps I enjoyed fewer natural resources than the said juvenile.

I don’t recall the destination of this particular Tracy, but
future Tracyesque interchanges those first few days followed
a familiar pattern and developed about the same level of
unpredictability as a set of rail tracks: –
TRACY: – I want to go to Priory Medical Centre please love
ME: – Gulp
TRACY: – You know – just off Green Lane
ME: – Errrrr… Is that in Armley?
TRACY: – O no, not another fuckin’ new driver without a
bleedin’ clue. 

    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.

 3
Wortley – First Day

 Being advised to pick up my car for the next day’s shift any time
from 5.00 a.m. onwards, and wanting to give this job a decent
chance of success, I felt compelled to introduce the alarm clock
to the aforementioned unfamiliar arrangement of its digits. I
decided that I would arrive early, though probably not bright,
for my first shift. Starting work a full four hours before I was
used to doing anything more than emerging from a stupor and
imbibing coffee was, to put it politely, a novel concept, but I
was off to bed at 10.00 p.m. – the time I was normally settling
down for a few hours of decent telly – with the alarm locked and
loaded and anticipating a good six hours of dreamless repose
before rising refreshed and prepared for a new challenge.
I should have known by then that life is never that simple.
Perhaps it was that bed was unfamiliar territory at that time of
night, and however many yawns I forced out I was simply wide
awake. Then there was the constant thought that I had better
get to sleep quickly otherwise I would be too tired to start work,
accompanied by an ominously undefined and unspecified dread
about what tomorrow would really be like; whatever the case the
next six hours and fifteen minutes were spent counting enough
sheep to fill a Yorkshire Dale and changing positions more times
than a politician caught fiddling his expenses.
I believe that my sleep tally that night was exactly zero;

 

 But this was 16th September 2005, and an entire continent
of new experiences awaited me. Unlike our plucky colonial
ancestors, cutting swathes through virgin territory to plant their
flag and impose their way of life upon reluctant beneficiaries, I
was scarcely able to force myself through the practical processes
by which I began work. Apprehension and determination fought
for control of muscles still atrophied by the absence of sleep I
had endured in the course of a night when the clamorous voices
of certain failure announced their verdict on my latest stupid
idea.
Fuelled partly by caffeine and partly by a dogged
commitment to what seemed an increasingly bizarre exercise I
arrived at “Base”, the name given to the complex of buildings
and their associated activities from which private hire vehicles
were collected for the day’s work. After a while I discovered this
epithet functioned equally well as a moral metaphor as for a
quasi-military one, but today I was the new boy in class and
hoping that the teacher was nice, that the school bully wouldn’t
notice me and that I wouldn’t have to undress for P.E.

I had hoped to meet a mild-mannered avuncular figure
anxious to calm the nerves of a new boy who would dispense
the keys to one of the myriad Skoda Octavias sitting in the
convalescent unit called “The Yard” with genteel good-humour.
Instead I encountered Dave – at this stage the visual epitome
of all that I dreaded in this strange new world, though later
someone I recognised as one of the most genuine people I was
privileged to meet on my new planet.
Dave’s job was to arrive at the office in the middle of the
night and issue car keys to drivers working the “day shift”, a
technical term for any stretch of eight hours or more from 3
a.m. to 6 p.m. the same day. This function he carried out with
a unique and at times beguiling mixture of belligerence and
affection. Dave’s physical appearance could best be described
as intimidating, the sort of man who would be picked out by a
witness at a police line-up almost on principle.

Clutching the key to the “pile of crap” between anxious
fingers I located the four-year-old yet geriatric vehicle allocated
to me, tried with limited success – and enough creaking and
groaning to wake the neighbours from their beds – to adjust
the driver’s seat and experienced mild surprise when the engine
spluttered into life with the kind of sound you would expect
from a dozen chain smokers all coughing at the same time. Dave
checked the vehicle over, a vital task since he knew every dent
and every scratch on every car – material enough to fill half a
volume of an Encyclopaedia Britannica – and so could verify
whether any further damage was caused by the driver taking the
car out or had been inflicted by its previous incumbent.

    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.

  2
Armley – Give us a Job

So it was that my initial encounter with the world of minicab
driving had taken place the day before the assault of the alarm
clock courtesy of an introduction from this friend who appeared to make a decent living from it. Lulled into an expectation of relative refinement by his congenial demeanour I could scarcely have anticipated the seismic cultural shift I was about to experience, and whether motivated by a sense of fun or a desire not to frighten me off he had deemed it sensible to allow me to discover first-hand what I was letting myself into without prior warning.

 It is difficult to describe adequately the sense of rising
panic I experienced in the next few minutes. To reach the
office complex I had to navigate the treacherous swamps of
this alien planet. A number of natives soon crossed my path; a
mechanic wielding a wrench much like a terrorist brandishing
an AK47; a handful of drivers rendering the verbal atmosphere
a colourful shade of azure as they recounted tales of their most
recent experiences of exploitation and victimisation; a couple of
operators – the people who answer the ‘phone – unable to last
another minute without an infusion of nicotine, having spent
all morning taking calls from people who were in one place and
desired to be in another five minutes previously. Nearly all of
these people I would come to appreciate, and some I would be privileged one day to count as friends, but on that particular day I felt as if I had entered another world, a planet with a jungle full of wild, dangerous animals; big cats running loose, the primate cage door left ajar, and someone had forgotten to replace the lid on the snake pit. Not that there was anything necessarily intimidating about the appearance or demeanour of the human specimens dotted around the place – even the bloke with the large spanner wouldn’t have been physically intimidating in a different context. It was simply the case that I had left behind anything vaguely resembling a comfort zone what felt like half a galaxy away. It was, perhaps, like being dropped in the Amazon rain forest thousands of miles from civilisation with a beach towel and a tube of sun cream and expected to make the best of it.

 I was later to understand why potential new drivers were
about as welcome as a dog turd on the sole of your best pair
of brogues, but the failure of anyone even to acknowledge my
presence coupled with the alien atmosphere made me feel like
beating a hasty retreat before I made a complete arse of myself.
There was surely no way in which I could find a home working
in this environment.
Just as the flight response was delivering the coup de grace to
its more aggressive counterpart and I was debating how to exit
rapidly but with a modicum of dignity intact the member of the
management team who dealt with drivers showed up and almost politely directed me to a rather pleasant glass office at the top of the stairs – things were looking up perhaps. Or perhaps not.

The Collar and the Cab part 1

    
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.

 

1
Woodhouse - Strange New World

It was two o’clock on a frosty January morning, and I found
myself in the still well-populated main entrance of Leeds
General Infirmary. Work was plentiful and my warm minicab
was waiting just outside, but whether it was my semi-dormant
pastoral instinct or simply a sense of common humanity I was
unable to leave the side of the rather frail, elderly woman I had
just transported from her home some twenty miles away, even
though the ward staff had assured me that someone was “on
their way down”; I had been around enough hospitals in enough
cities in my previous professional capacity to understand what
“just coming” was likely to mean in relation to the imminent
arrival of the grossly overworked and underpaid members of
the nursing profession.
A fare from Halifax to Leeds in the early hours of the
morning paid for by the NHS was something to put a spring
in the step of any taxi driver, but on this occasion the elation
generated by the job was at least tempered by the knowledge
that the lady I would be transporting had been summoned by
the staff caring for her husband because he was nearing the end
of his life.
Seamlessly and entirely subconsciously I found I had
switched vocations when the customer emerged from her house,
and functioned as a member of the clergy on the 30-minute
journey to the centre of Leeds without ever mentioning the profession I had spent most of my adult life pursuing; I was somewhat relieved to discover that pastoral care of people in extremis still seemed to come quite naturally to me. Having
announced our arrival at the reception desk I felt responsible for
her until a designated member of staff had come to relieve me.
This gave me an opportunity to look around and observe those
who had little better to do than observe me. Until a little over a
year previously in exactly the same place at exactly the same time
of night, in many respects fulfilling the same function, I would
have been dressed in a clerical collar, and that alone would have
commanded a level of respect, possibly deference, even from
members of the higher echelons of the medical profession.
Now dressed in my company sweat shirt with a plastic badge
announcing my credentials hung around my neck I would have
looked like any other middle-aged private hire cab driver.
The delay gave me the opportunity to try to work out what
others seemed to make of me. Making an allowance for a certain
level of innate paranoia what I picked up was not pleasant; a
combination of suspicion, mistrust and even latent hostility
seemed to float in a vaguely malevolent fashion from the facial
expressions and body language of medical, clerical and auxiliary
staff, and even from the recalcitrant individuals who were
compelled by recent legislation to leave the building in order to
feed their nicotine craving.
None of this came as a great surprise. I was aware by this
point of just how many people had had unpleasant encounters
with members of the taxi-driving profession by being “cut up”
in a line of traffic, “ripped off” by excessive fares or otherwise
brutalised with some metaphorical sharp object. More
particularly I was not surprised because I was reminded of my
own views of only a few years previously.