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.

    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.

 

Last post for a few days as I'm away in France on holiday till Tuesday

 12
Hyde Park – The Drugs Trade

 My new work pattern would involve my first experience of
night-time work, and I confess to a fair degree of apprehension
at the prospect, largely fuelled by stories I had heard from
various night-shift drivers about just how dangerous the city
was during the wee small hours. I was accustomed to horror
stories by now – barely a week went by without hearing of one
of the night-time drivers being attacked, abused, robbed or
threatened. After a while I had come to see these tales from the
dark side for what they usually were – inventions or just possibly
gross embellishments. They were scattered like so much confetti
by drivers who preferred working at night and who wanted
to deter anyone who might think of following suit, and who
consequently would be competing for the available work. But
there was sufficient truth in enough of the graphic accounts
to which I was treated to convince me that complacency was
a luxury that I could ill-afford in driving complete strangers
around after dark. During my time in the business a local taxi
driver was abducted, robbed and murdered, and there were
more-or-less weekly accounts in the local press of assault and
robbery of cabbies.
In some respects there was little that could prevent such
things happening, and the odds are stacked against the safety of
the driver. No one in their right mind would drive their private
car around at night picking up a string of complete strangers and taking them wherever requested, and essentially private
hire drivers are doing exactly that. Black cab drivers generally
have the security of a screen between driver and passengers, and
doors that can be safely locked from within the cab, though even
these features don’t provide complete safety. Private hire drivers
have no such protection, since by definition their vehicles must
be ordinary models with no significant modification. The only
concession offered was the dubious privilege of an exemption
from needing to wear a seat belt; I discovered that the main
reason for this was that a number of drivers had been mugged
by means of someone holding a seat belt tight against their
throats while an accomplice located and purloined their takings.
So the driver is faced with the absurdity of risking serious injury
through assault and robbery or putting himself at the mercy of
road users at precisely the time of day when inebriated revellers
are taking to their vehicles convinced they are perfectly fit to
drive.

 It was a long time before I realised through experience that
night shifts posed only a slightly higher risk than their diurnal
equivalents. Partly this was due to the scare stories related by
night shift drivers with the gravitas of Orson Welles and the
malice of a Bond villain; in addition most of us have natural
instincts, sometimes whispering urgently, sometimes shouting,
that darkness is the hiding place of bogey men, ghouls, witches
and any number of other harbingers of death and destruction.
But looking back on this time I can recall only four occasions
when I felt under any kind of threat, and three of these occurred
during daylight hours. Two concern encounters with drug
dealers.

 One of the more inane and random dicta that emanated
from the management on those occasions when they probably
felt that drivers had not been sufficiently berated that week was
to the effect that we should not pick up anyone participating
in the distribution of illegal substances. Unfortunately, and
for reasons that evade my comprehension, the drug dealers
of West Yorkshire were not obliging enough to wear shirts
proclaiming “I’m a Drug Dealer; Stop Me and Buy Some.” The
only information we had access to was a name, a pick-up point
and a vaguely-defined destination, so how were we to know
what the customer was up to? In a wonderful and not untypical
example of Doublethink there was one occasion during my
time in the trade when we received third hand a word of thanks
from the police force for our help in supplying information
about a drugs gang who had been using our services. The
official disapprobation of the sullying of our hands with contact
with this particular underclass was by no means unwelcome; I
must have encountered a dozen or more during my time in the
business, and not a single one of them was the sort of character
I would choose to have a drink with, and certainly not have as a
passenger in my cab.
After a year or so in the business I learned how to avoid
these jobs, though even then occasionally came unstuck.
Any one of a score of streets for a pick-up or drop off began
ringing alarm bells, and there was a fairly common type of body
language of the customers, who obligingly were usually out on
the street waiting, that really gave the game away. Some of the
cul-de-sacs in the seedier parts of the city appeared to house
only drug dealers, and any job to or from them could only ever
mean one thing, though the telephone operators as far as I know
never sifted these calls. There were other locations that seemed
full of the people who bought and sold stolen merchandise
procured by some unfortunate miscreant desperate for another
fix. Seeing a customer out on the street with a computer tower
or widescreen television under his arm waiting to be taken to an
address that specialised in selling this kind of stuff on was a bit
of a giveaway.

The first episode that left me in something of a cold sweat
occurred in the middle of a quiet afternoon and early on in my
career. Later I would have known from the pick-up and drop-off
points on the screen what I was dealing with and simply refused
the job; naively I allowed four young men, the eldest of whom
I estimated should still have been at school, to deposit a rather
expensive looking TV screen into the boot before climbing
aboard for the short journey to what I was later to recognise
as one of the few streets I really didn’t want to find myself in by
day or night. I don’t think I have ever felt so invisible as they
immediately immersed themselves in animated discussion
about the state of “business.” It would have been impossible not
to have listened as, whether out of a sense of misplaced bravado
or imagined immunity to the reach of the law, they discussed
what was the going price for 32-inch flat-screen televisions,
the state of the person who had stolen it and exchanged it for a
supply of crack cocaine, the outcome and casualties of the most
recent knife fight with the neighbouring gang who were trying
to move onto their turf, and current profit margins on Class A
drugs in general. If it was an act it was an exceptionally wellperformed
one. What convinced me of its authenticity was the
matter-of-fact nature of the discussion, as if they were so many
respectable housewives discussing the price of gooseberries at
the Women’s Institute coffee morning. 

    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.

11
Bramley – Twenty-four – Seven

 The acquisition of my “badge” – the licence granted by the local
council to those considered fit to drive private hire vehicles –
resulted in an irrationally exaggerated sense of pride, since
it was hardly the most exacting qualifying process I had ever
undertaken. I had a handful of O and A-levels gained in those
long-forgotten days when it was actually possible to fail an exam
at school, and a fairly decent honours degree in theology. It seemed
odd therefore to be quite so exhilarated about a piece of paper
confirming a status somewhere between a 25 metre swimming
certificate and a Blue Peter Badge.
It was, perhaps, simply the product of the euphoria
generated by the feeling of being able to give the finger to those
who had previously rubbished both my skills and qualifications
in an attempt to discredit me and undermine my reputation; so
successful had this process been that I think I too had begun
to believe their propaganda. I also had little doubt that there
were those of my former acquaintance who, having undermined
my credibility as a minister, were now prophesying my doom
in this new world in the sepulchral tones of Old Testament
soothsayers – and with a similar level of macabre glee. Now
I had not only learned a new trade, but was making a decent
living from it and had jumped through the necessary hoops to  gain a proper qualification. I also realised that I had learned how
to do something that could always be a fall-back in the likely
eventuality that I would return to the world of the Church. There
are a few professions – undertakers being perhaps among the
foremost – who will always be in demand. There will always be a
need, too, for people who will drive members of the public from
one place to another for a decent fare when public transport, for
whatever reason, will not suffice. Perhaps it is the case that it is
not just that the grass on the other side of the fence looks greener,
but the grazing in the field recently abandoned also takes on
a particularly attractive hue. As I write this some years after a
return to ministry I can honestly say that rarely a week has gone
by without some kind of nostalgic desire to return to the private
hire world.

 There were a number of other advantages to qualification.
For one thing I was no longer compelled to drive the “unbadged”
cars provided by the taxi firm; these veritable wrecks of vehicles
were kept for those who were new to the game and the most
likely to be involved in collisions; most had been “round the
clock” twice, and gave new meaning to the expression “a wing
and a prayer.” Secondly because insurance costs were cheaper
for drivers with their badge I now benefitted from cheaper rates
of hire, immediately gaining for myself the sum of £5 per shift
before I began work.
The most significant benefit, though, was that I was now
able to apply for a “Twenty-Four-Seven” car, one I could keep
at home and drive at hours to suit myself.

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another attraction of the new arrangement was being able
to fill the fuel tank and not worry about running out of diesel.
This may sound a rather strange benefit, until you understand
something of how fuelling private hire vehicles used by shift
drivers actually works.
Renting a car by the day almost always resulted in a game of
brinksmanship with the fuel gauge and tank. It may seem a crazy
system, but the way it worked was that each driver who took a
car out was responsible for the diesel he used, the assumption
being that he would begin his shift with an empty tank. The goal,
therefore, was to bring it back with as little fuel in as possible
without actually running out. Should this particular catastrophe
actually occur and the driver needed to call Base for help it
would cost him £45 of his hard-earned cash, which prompted
some drivers to take a can of diesel with them whenever they
drove. This was problematic in terms of being frowned on by
management, not that management ever frowned in a literal
sense, they generally bellowed and hectored; if there was an
issue with a driver standard protocol was simply to blow a fuse.

Of course the sin that was only one level up from running out
of fuel was to bring the vehicle back with a few pounds’ worth of
diesel unused in the tank, representing a loss of available profit
from the shift, so the work of nursing a car back to Base at the
end of one’s shift became something of an art form. When at the
age of 21 I had passed my driving test the one fault I was advised
to correct was a tendency to “coast” – allowing the car to roll
along either in neutral or with the clutch disengaged. Far from
being a fault in my new world, this became a cardinal virtue,
and over time almost second nature, even in the early part of the
shift; as the day drew to a close it became almost an obsession.
Some drivers with several years’ experience of driving company
vehicles had seemingly so perfected the art of interpreting the
tiniest movements of the fuel indicator that the person using the
car next frequently ran out of fuel en route to the nearest petrol
station after picking it up. 

 

    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.

10
Harehills – Cwollifying

 I had been driving a private hire car for a
couple of months but by exploiting a loophole in the law the
company I drove for had taken me on as an “unbadged” driver,
operating a car as a “Public Service Vehicle” without a proper
licence. The give-away was that these cars carried no licence number, and whilst most members of the public never noticed
the difference everyone in the cab-driving fraternity knew that
you were both new to the game and unqualified, and afforded
you about as much respect as a disease-carrying tsetse fly; your
existence could not be ignored and was even significant for its
nuisance value, but you could be repelled by the insect spray of
a disdainful look, and kept at bay by means of the mosquito net
of contempt.

 To the considerable surprise of the drivers’ supervisor, and my
even greater astonishment, it had finally dawned on us both that
I could make a living at this game, and a mutually beneficial
relationship had broken the surface of the murky swamp in
which I was expected to drown. The busy period of the year
was approaching – the lead-up to Christmas – when the nation
seems to whip itself up into a frenzy of consumerist activity, and
the only way to complete a list of tasks as long as a roll-call of
failed English test cricketers is to have someone else driving you
around. Then you can concentrate on being stressed over what
to buy a maiden aunt (unseen since last Yuletide) for a tenner,
what you can get for half that price that gives all the appearance
of being a lot more expensive for the neighbours, and how to
manage Christmas dinner now your teenage daughter has gone
vegan. I hadn’t made my fortune by any means, but I was making
significantly more money than I ever did as a clergyman, and
the pressure was being applied to “go for my badge.”

 The combination of a desire to hold my head up at the early
morning refuelling rituals, the comfort of a well-filled purse and the warm if not entirely selfless encouragement of my supervisor,
not to mention the complete absence of ecclesiastical politics in
this feral world were more than enough to make my mind up. So
I decided to invest time (which was in short supply) and money
(which for almost the first time in my adult life wasn’t) in trying
to gain my licence.

 Whilst there are regional variations the general pattern is that
qualification is won by a driving test, a police check, a medical,
a two-hour induction course and the payment of a sizeable
sum of money to the local authority. The reward for success is
represented by a small piece of plastic with a picture taken by
one of those computerised cameras programmed to make the
subject look ridiculous, and the right to drive for the operating
company of your choice, so long as they are agreeable.

Arriving at the elegant domicile of the medical practitioner
appointed by the cab company, in a village inhabited by
professional footballers and lottery winners, I realised that I had
opted for the wrong career and reflected on where I could have
been had I worked a lot harder at school or played football every
weekend instead of doing a Saturday job and going to church.
I was shown into an area that looked like a general dumping
ground for unwanted furniture, newspapers and bric-a-brac of
dubious pedigree. Its status as a medical consulting room was
justified by the strategic placement of an eyesight chart and a
set of scales, offering only a mildly anachronistic contrast to the
eclectic range of moderately expensive junk.

 I had had a few medicals in the past, for life assurance
and, oddly enough, to ensure that my body was capable of
withstanding the rigours of clerical life, hardly the most
physically demanding profession to pursue. A psychiatric
evaluation would have been far more appropriate, though no
one sane enough would probably have been sufficiently stupid
to seek such a vocation. The only question that occasioned any
anxiety was just how much of my clothing I would need to
remove, and whether by wearing loose-fitting garments some
of the embarrassment could be avoided. The overeating that was
my inevitable comfort habit when facing the kind of insecurity
I had endured over the previous few years had resulted in my
overall dimensions reaching the point where loose fitting clothes
were the only type that did not make me look like a medieval
monarch; but I hoped that if sleeves and trouser legs could be
rolled up rather than removed a little less naked flesh would
need to be exposed. My concerns were completely groundless; I
was spared the embarrassment of exposing my more than ample expanses of flab by being asked to remove no clothing whatever,
and indeed such an apparent innovation would have seemed
pointless given that no physical contact took place between
the consultant and myself, barring the accidental touching of
hands as I offloaded a cheque for £40 some five minutes after
entering his residence. Having been asked to read a line of the
eyesight chart probably visible from an orbiting space station
and asked (loudly) if my hearing was ok there appeared to be
nothing more to be said or done. A sum that took me half a day
to earn had just been deposited in the hand of someone who
had done little else other than sign a piece of paper after a brief
conversation and an alleged examination that could have been
conducted by his housekeeper whilst dusting the sideboard. 

  The driving test centre was in one of those urban areas where there is an underlying sense
of both malevolence and depression, and to emerge from the
centre to find all four wheels still affixed to the vehicle occasions
a modicum of surprise. The waiting room was another alien
world – the only people who had reached the fourth decade of life
were the driving instructors, who were also identifiable as being
the ones exhibiting merely mild symptoms of anxiety. Their
perennial concerns about the survival chances of their vehicles
at the hands of learner drivers were probably compounded
by the fear that during the few minutes they were in the test
centre an army of joy riders would have stolen their pristine cars
and made bonfires out of their means of making a living. The
rest of the room appeared to be straight out of kindergarten,
and the atmosphere was replete with anxiety, anticipation and
adrenaline, all apparently oozing from the spotty faces and
expressed in the body language of the young hopefuls, who were
clutching car keys like maiden aunts at a speed dating evening.

 Entertaining the mostly forlorn hope that they were about to
secure their passage to independent transport they also seemed
to exhibit a passing curiosity about what I was doing there,
looking as out of place as a teenager starting primary school.
Youthful eyes turned briefly in my direction; only one of us –
Geoff or myself – could be the instructor, so which of us was
the geriatric prat who couldn’t be bothered to get his licence at a
sensible age, and for whom the imminent prospect of a wooden
box hardly made the exercise worthwhile?
It was with some difficulty and uncharacteristic restraint
that I resisted the very strong urge to pass my driving licence
round the room to present my credentials, or to declaim my
status as a qualified driver on a higher plane of existence than
the rest of them. Instead I opted to slink into the darkest, least
conspicuous part of the room and hope that attention was now
focussed elsewhere.
My cover was blown almost immediately. The door of the
anteroom opened, evoking memories of earlier driving tests which
came flooding back with gut-wrenching clarity. Each candidate
turns to see who is emerging from the examiners’ room, hoping to
be allocated to one of the few who do not look like they might have
been Stalin’s right hand man during one of his periodic purges. I
barely had time to look, only to hope that my name would be the
last to be called, so that I could remain incognito.
“Reverend Richards, please”, rang out the strident voice,
and suddenly the entire population of the room had ceased to
worry about the forthcoming ordeal and was looking round
to see who the bearer of this dubious epithet might be.

    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.

 

    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.

8
Rodley – Long Hours

 My final words to my wife the evening before my very first shift
were to the effect that I would start work at 5 a.m., and whilst I
knew I could keep my car till 6 p.m. I would not, of course, work
anything like that length of time. Thirteen hours wrestling with
the capricious and, at times, barbaric traffic of West Yorkshire
sounded like a descent into a netherworld reserved for the
purification of perpetrators of genocide, ethnic cleansing or
some other war crime. To my astonishment all thirteen of those
hours pretty much flashed by punctuated by a series of astonished
glances at the clock which, amazingly, still functioned in the
eponymous pile of crap. Having worked almost every minute
of those hours with only a couple of toilet stops I returned
home feeling exhausted, but scarcely able to believe that more
than half a day had passed since I had left home. I reassured
my slightly anxious wife that I would be unlikely ever to repeat
such a marathon, it was only that I needed to spend a day or two
familiarising myself with the way the system worked. Perhaps if I
had known that a pattern was set that would become permanent
I would have quit at that point. I opened my bag of takings; even
with my reduced rent I had barely earned the equivalent of the
minimum wage. Depression and anxiety competed with sheer
exhaustion to overcome me.
The rest of the week was pretty much a repeat of day one,
the welcome difference being the steady increase in my takings.

Out of bed at 4.15 a.m. and into a heap of excrement by 5, and
struggling to return the car to the yard after one last job through
rush hour traffic just in time for the rear end of a night shift
driver to land on the vacant seat.
The cars were thus run almost continually, perhaps having
a slight respite somewhere around 4 a.m. when work really did
become hard to find – though there were some day shift drivers
who liked to start about then. As I learned more about how to
go about making money in this new world, and the geography
of West Yorkshire became less like a Greek labyrinth, my takings
steadily increased, but my working hours remained more or
less the same. The working week of an average taxi driver is
something that places EEC directives relating to employee hours
in the “Noddy Goes to Toytown” category. Most people who
climb into the passenger seat of a private hire vehicle probably
expect that there are restrictions in place to ensure that drivers
do not work such long hours that they become a menace to those
inside as well as outside the vehicle. I was surprised to learn that
whilst such regulations are in place for almost every other job involving being in control of a vehicle the taxi and private hire
driving profession is inexplicably excluded.

 This is how the system worked in my company, and in most
others that hired out cars. I was a day shift driver, and in common
with all other shift drivers almost all of my costs were incurred
as soon as I picked the car up. I was charged a daily rent, and
since the policy was for drivers to return vehicles with empty
tanks another sum was spent putting fuel in for the duration of
the shift. This resulted in spending about £50 before taking any
money. The arithmetic then became simple. Once those costs
had been covered, everything else was profit (I sometimes used
to ring my wife – usually around 9 a.m. and announce proudly
that I was now working for myself!), and the difference between
going home with £75 and £100 was the difference between
stopping work when I felt tired and pushing myself to the end
of a thirteen hour day. Put another way a ten hour shift would
generate an income only a little above the minimum wage,
whereas a thirteen hour day could provide an additional 65%
and furnish butter and jam for the bread I had won. A really
good shift meant scones and clotted cream.

 The system seems ill-advised, and even potentially dangerous
to public safety, but it is the way most companies work, and in
truth it is quite difficult to see a preferable alternative. There are
a few private hire companies that operate a different system,
settling for a percentage of the driver’s gross takings, but this
is rare. It would require honesty and a level of trust between
operating company and driver that would have meant a
wholesale abandonment of the qualities that characterised the
typical bond. The relationship generally fluctuated between
genial suspicion and psychotic paranoia depending on what
sort of a week each party was having, and is seemingly almost
embedded in minicab culture.


 Autumn was beginning to yield in its unequal and futile
struggle with winter. For several weeks I had begun my working
day before the increasingly pessimistic sounding birdsong had
heralded dawn, and had dropped my car off well after the most
resilient creature had given the day up as a bad job. But if the
mood scales were weighted down on one side by the natural
melancholia of shortened days, the balance was more than
retained by ever-increasing quantities of available work and my
rapidly improving knowledge of the business I had entered. In a
formula of seemingly almost mathematical precision unpleasant
weather equated to increased demand for taxis. A dark, cold, rainy
early morning would witness hundreds of residents reaching for
that little card they had put somewhere advertising the services of
a local taxi company, rather than braving the walk to the nearest
(probably vandalised) bus shelter to be at the mercy of both the
elements and the largely fictional bus timetable.

   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.