by Tony Hawks
At this point it is worth taking a moment to mention an unwritten rule of the road. Generally speaking, in this chauvinistic dominion it is deemed forgivable if a woman fails to locate a petrol cap. Sometimes even a man can be forgiven, provided that he is an artsy-fartsy, namby-pamby type, who clearly wouldn’t make heterosexuality his specialist subject on Mastermind. However, there is a tacit understanding that those who drive around in large Luton vans are fully compos mentis with how their vehicle works. And by that I mean that they would be expected to throw the bonnet open at the slightest hint of engine trouble and sort the problem out with minimal fuss. Anyone in charge of a large van who fails in this regard lets the rest down very badly. It’s not unfair to say, therefore, that it is generally accepted that the driver of a big Luton van ought to be able to find the petrol cap when he is in a filling station. Unaided.
I, however, was not coming up with any answers as to the location of the petrol cap, and cars were beginning to build into a queue behind me. In desperation, I looked around for help. I needed to ask someone but I was scared. I didn’t want to admit that I was a bloke in a van who couldn’t find his petrol cap. It would just be too, too, embarrassing.
There were two other van drivers on the forecourt and I took a deep breath and tried to determine which one looked less like he had a criminal record, which, as it happened, wasn’t an obvious choice. I selected the stocky redheaded man on the grounds that his van was cleaner and that this might mean he was a more compassionate type. I was fully aware, however, that as soon as I opened my mouth I would lose all dignity.
“Excuse me,” I asked somewhat pathetically as he withdrew the pump nozzle from his shiny white van, “but I’ve just bought that van over there and I…I…”
I was so embarrassed it felt like I wouldn’t be able to cough the words out. I tried again.
“I…I…was wondering if you happened to know where the petrol cap is.”
The man looked over to my vehicle. He shook his head. “You just bought that?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “Bloody hell.” He just stood there looking at the van in amazement.
“You’re looking at its worst side,” I said, noticing for the first time how unroadworthy it appeared. “It’s not so knackered on the other side.”
“I should bloody hope not.”
“Yes. Now, about the petrol cap. Any idea where it is?”
“Course I do. The cap sits on top of the tank on those things. It’s on the passenger side underneath the vehicle. You’ll probably ‘ave to get down pretty low to see it.”
“Right. Silly me. Thanks.”
I walked away in disgrace, but at least I’d accessed the required information without getting beaten up. Nightmare over.
Or maybe not. Seconds later, having located the petrol cap, I then discovered that I couldn’t remove it. All three of the keys that Fred had given me completely failed to release the obstinate cap, however much I wiggled, twisted and forced. Despair. I looked up behind me to see the queue of cars building, with frustrated drivers reversing, tutting and pulling their cars into different filling aisles. A child on a bike was laughing. The woman in the car immediately behind me grimaced. There was nothing for it but to suffer the humiliation of seeking help again.
I looked around me and I didn’t much like what I saw. People were either consumed by their tank-filling duties or sitting in their vehicles looking decidedly pissed off with me because I was holding them up. So I decided there was only one thing for it, and I walked into the garage shop and got the attention of the last man in the queue. The stocky redheaded man.
“Excuse me,” I offered apologetically, “but when you’ve paid your bill—would you mind helping me get my petrol cap off? It seems to be stuck.”
The man looked at me in seeming disbelief. His eyes were penetrating and fierce and I was relieved that we were in a public place. He hesitated and then drew breath.
“Yeah, all right,” he said begrudgingly.
Major relief.
“Thank you very much,” I said, trying and failing to sound polite but not wet, before adding unnecessarily, “I’ll be by the van.”
The man nodded solemnly, and I turned to leave. As I walked towards the door, I clearly heard another male voice declare a succinct and unselfconscious opinion of me.
“Tosser.”
I didn’t turn to see who it was.
§
It was a relief to get the van home and shut the front door on it. The rest of the journey had been without incident, at least until I’d reached my house. Allowing myself to relax a tad, I’d begun the process of backing the van onto my driveway. With care I studied the wing mirrors and eased the vehicle towards the front of the house, but it wasn’t long before I was reminded both of the height of the van and the presence of the tiled porch that overhung the front door. This reminder came precisely at the moment the van smashed into the porch, removing several tiles in the process. This had been the van’s second accident in just under an hour and a half.
It would be important in the future to get this ‘accident per hour’ ratio down a little.
In the following days, the van posed outside my property, providing those in the neighbourhood with the opportunity to speculate on how and why my career had nosedived so spectacularly. In the meantime, I was not idle. I called Steve the mechanic (recommended by Ron) and charged him with the task of looking over the van and making sure it would make one long journey. Then I got on the phone to insurance companies and, despite huge difficulties finding any insurers who would provide breakdown cover for a van of that age, I did manage to find one who would cover us for France, but not the UK. Having bought the policy, I felt hugely relieved, because even if we only got the van as far as Calais, if it broke down then, at least we had the reassurance of knowing we could get towed the rest of the way.
When I arrived at his lock-up, Steve offered what was fast becoming a stock response for those viewing the van for the first time—a shake of the head followed by ‘bloody hell’. However, after a full morning’s work, he felt quite confident that it would make the journey. I was now armed with a new battery and alternator, and the front right indicator had been replaced, albeit with an indicator normally meant for a Ford Escort.
“It doesn’t look pretty,” said Steve, eyeing the van with anything but a sense of pride in his work. “But I reckon it will get you there.”
“Great,” I said eagerly. “All we need to do now is pack it, and then we’re ready.”
§
It was one of my former colleagues from the five-a-side football team who masterminded the loading of the piano. To my amazement, Brad had volunteered. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. For a creative type, Brad is good at practical things and enjoys solving problems. In the past he’d helped me build a little home recording studio, and quite an impressive shed for the garden. So he was someone I felt able to trust in supervising the daunting task of piano removal that lay ahead of us.
The plan had been to hoist it into the back of the van using four strong men, but Brad had other ideas.
“You don’t need to bother anyone else,” he said. “You and I can get it in there between us.”
I didn’t like the sound of where he was going. Even though mathematical statistics weren’t my speciality, I strongly suspected that by reducing the available workforce by half, that would double the workload for us.
“Are you sure about this?” I enquired tentatively.
“Yes. We need to create a ramp,” he said, looking optimistically into the back of the van, which must have come up to at least waist-high on him. “The piano’s got wheels on it, so that way we can just push it into the back.”
In the hour that followed, Brad improvised with all kinds of stuff that he found in the house—steel bedframe, wooden shelving, gaffer tape and half-inch screws—to produce a feat of engineering which would have made, if not Isambard Kingdom Brunei, then ce
rtainly Heath Robinson, proud.
Moments later the piano was slowly and painstakingly pushed up the ramp and into its new temporary home. I gave Brad a high five in a peculiarly un-British way.
“We’re on our way!” I said with a beaming smile. “Next stop—the Pyrenees.”
4
The Incredible Journey
Tim and I had decided on an early start. We figured that if we could be on the channel tunnel train for 8.30am we could steam through France and make Limoges before nightfall, in time for a well-deserved dinner. I rose at 5.15am and felt particularly good about things. I was looking forward to going to France, and I was pleased that I’d be able to spend time with Tim. Apart from the odd game of five-a-side football we’d not been able to get together as much as I’d have liked in the past few years, his life having been saturated with the exhausting but joyous task of raising two small children. The hours in the van would afford us a wonderful opportunity to fill the unwelcome gaps in our friendship that the paraphernalia of life had caused.
“All set?” said Tim chirpily, as he rolled round to my place at 5.30am on the dot.
“I’m ready,” I replied. “Let’s do it.”
We loaded our overnight bags into the back of the van, checked that our various boxes and items of furniture weren’t going to move about too much, pulled down the metal shutter and clambered into the cab.
“Here goes,” I said a tad nervously as I put the keys into the ignition. “Fingers crossed.”
There’d been no need to worry. The little beauty started first time. I smiled at Tim, revved up the accelerator, popped it into first, and allowed the engine to haul us out of the driveway and onto the road. It was 5.40am and we were on our way, off to France with our metaphorical bundles in the back of the van—off to seek maybe not our fortunes, but something. Just what it was, neither of us really knew, but perhaps the journey would reveal that to us.
I made a right at the end of my road and slipped the van into fourth gear for the first time. We began to gather speed and I started to swell with pride. There had been those who had scoffed at this plan. A significant few had expressed their doubts as to the wisdom of the ‘old van’ approach, but already we were only a couple of hours away from victory. Even if we did encounter mechanical problems in France, the recovery insurance would kick in and we could be happily towed to our final destination.
Tim and I began our first conversation of the trip, experimenting with the volume levels that would be required on board such a noisy vehicle.
“Sleep well last night?” I called out, perhaps slightly louder than necessary.
“Like a baby,” he shouted back.
I didn’t ask if this meant that he’d woken every two hours screaming and then fouled himself.
“For once I guess you were up before the kids.”
“Yup. They were still sleeping soundly as I—”
BANG!
A loud explosion beneath us. I felt all power die from the accelerator and all I could do was steer.
“What on earth was that?” I called across to Tim, who had gone pale.
“I don’t know, but it didn’t sound good.”
I tried the accelerator again. Nothing. I had no choice but to let the van drift gently and peacefully into a parking place that happily opened up for us in this busy residential street. I braked and the van drew to a halt. I stared ahead in disbelief.
“That wasn’t a good sound, was it?” I said, turning to face Tim.
“No. I’ve heard that once before—on my mate Dave Dilley’s car.”
“And what had happened?”
“The engine had blown up.”
A silence. I cannot speak for Tim, but I was suddenly swamped with an overwhelming sense of defeat. In just a matter of seconds my dreams had gone up in smoke, as a cough from Tim confirmed.
I turned the ignition key. Nothing. Absolutely dead.
“This isn’t good,” I said, once again stating the bloody obvious.
And then we both sat in silence for probably another minute. Tim, out of respect, was probably allowing me the time and space to evaluate the situation. He knew full well that it had been my plan, that it was my van, and that it was me who had to come to terms with the humiliation.
“What are we going to do?” I asked, breaking a deafening silence.
“Hmm. Tricky one that,” shrugged Tim, who clearly wasn’t about to adopt the mantle of’situation saviour’. “How long would it take us to walk back to your house?”
“About five minutes.”
“Well, shall we wander back, have a cup of tea and discuss the options?”
“Good idea.”
The TV programme The Weakest Link proudly boasts a ‘walk of shame’ in which contestants are filmed in close-up as they shuffle off the set when they are voted off the show. That ‘walk of shame’ cannot hold a candle to the one that I now walked. My walk home was longer (although not by a huge margin) and enabled the ‘walker’ more time to reflect on what had just occurred. Having proudly set off for a distant mountain range on the French⁄Spanish border, the vehicle in which the ‘walker’ had invested time, money and to some extent his credibility had exploded within a few hundred metres of his house. Each awful step took him past upsettingly familiar houses as the words of Fred, the previous owner, resounded in his head: “Oh this van’ll definitely get you to France.” Each agonising pace drew him towards the postbox at the end of his road and ever closer to his home and his kitchen kettle, still tragically warm from its all too recent use.
§
At the breakfast table Tim tried to be upbeat.
“We were lucky it happened here I suppose,” he pointed out. “Rather than in the middle of Kent.”
He was right enough, but it was too early for me to view anything about this incident as ‘lucky’.
“Is it worth getting the AA out to see if they can get it going?” he asked, mustering as much enthusiasm as such a sentence could allow him.
“Tim, that van is dead,” I muttered sadly and unequivocally. “I think what we witnessed there was the big end going.”
I’d often heard this expression used—“The big end’s gone”—and even though I had no understanding of what it meant in terms of mechanics, I was completely sure that this was what had just happened to my van.
“That van is scrapheap bound,” I continued. “I am not prepared to put a further penny into it. The only thing we can do is hire another one and start again.”
And in that moment I knew that my period of temporary madness was over and I had finally come to my senses. I was now doing what I should have done in the first place. It made no economic sense to carry on with this van. My outlay thus far had been:
COST OF RON’S WISDOM £20.00
COST OF VAN £150.00
FULL TANK OF PETROL £45.00
REPLACEMENT OF INDICATOR £50.00
NEW ALTERNATOR AND BATTERY £80.00
BREAKDOWN RECOVERY INSURANCE FOR FRANCE £50.00
2 x BUDGET RETURN FLIGHTS (since these would remain unused as we would now have to drive the hire van back) £120.00
TOTAL COST £515.00
It’s important to remember that this total of £515.00 had to be measured against the distance covered before the engine blew up. A measly 1000 metres. The van had effectively cost me 51.5p a metre. Calculated at this rate, the journey to the Pyrenees would have ended up costing about £515,000.
“I’ll make another pot of tea,” I said, authoritatively.
And why the hell not? There were another two hours to kill before the van-hire people turned up.
§
It turned out to be quite an exhausting day. Once the reams of paperwork had been completed and the new van had been hired (and boy did it look new compared to what we’d just been in), we had an unenviable task ahead of us. We had to empty onto the roadside the contents of a Luton van that had taken hours to pack, before loading it all onto a new one. Just as Tim point
ed out how ‘lucky’ we were to have a nice bright morning in which to complete the undertaking, rain clouds appeared, in preparation for drenching us and our gear at the most inconvenient moment. Fortunately the piano’s second movement (pun intended) was simpler than the first, because we were able to drag it from one van to the other by putting the vans back to back. Anxious onlookers emerged, no doubt from Neighbourhood Watch. They looked on in both wonder and dismay as Tim waved his arms and guided me and the pristine Luton van into position, butting it end to end with the stranded, disgraced and completely shitty one. The whole operation gave everyone a brief glimpse of a downmarket version of a rocket ship docking with its mother station in space. However, on successful completion of the mission there were no whoops and hollers from Houston, just dirty looks from disapproving local residents, followed by some eager piano-wheeling from two rather desperate-looking figures.
We were on the road again at one o’clock, with a load comprising two tired men (one with an empty wallet and bruised ego) and a considerable amount of damp furniture and boxes. Initially we made good headway, but then, as if we were being karmically punished for past misdemeanours, we discovered that the M20 was closed between junctions 9 and 10. A huge detour was necessary through rural Kent, affording us a snapshot of the idyllic ‘little England’ that each year people leave in their droves for retirement in Spain, Italy, France and elsewhere. In spite of this briefest of glances of the tranquil England of cricket greens, oast houses and quaint villages, it didn’t leave me thinking: why am I leaving for France when I can have this? Maybe this is because much of the English countryside doesn’t really feel like the country—more like large green areas with easy access to motorways that can speed you into cities. The quaint villages aren’t necessarily full of quaint villagers, and the nicest houses are invariably inhabited by CEOs and retired city traders. And even though it isn’t crowded, it still feels like it’s bang on the edge of crowded.