At Dead of Night

by Tony Whelpton

  ‘Does that mean that you abandon that idea altogether, then?’

  ‘No, not at all! In fact I often revisit ideas that I’ve abandoned a couple of weeks or so ago, and I find out that, with a little tweak here or there, I’m able to make it work after all! Do you have any ideas for a new story yourself?’

  ‘Good God, no! The very idea! I thought you realised a long time ago that I’m one of the least creative of beings!’

  ‘There are times when I think that’s true of me too! But that doesn’t mean that it is the absolute truth. It’s often just a question of application – you apply the seat of the trousers to the seat of the chair and the ideas come flooding in! That’s what I’m hoping will happen this morning! It’s always been the same when I’m starting a new story. Right up until the time that I sit down, open my notebook and pick up my pen, I feel terrified that this time I shall be devoid of inspiration, and then hey presto! I start writing and the words just flow, as if they’re coming from nowhere!’

  ‘Then let’s hope it continues to work!’ said Margaret.

  ‘Too true, but I live in dread that it might not! It always has so far, but I have no right to believe that it always will!’

  ‘Is that why you always seem slow to get down to work on a Monday then?’

  ‘That’s not true! I don’t think I am!’ retorted David, who went on to remind her that on the previous Monday he had got up particularly early, and did some significant work before breakfast. ‘Anyway, if you don’t mind clearing away the breakfast things, I’ll crack on.’

  ‘I beg your pardon? I was under the impression that that is what happens every morning!’

  ‘You must be joking! I clear up after breakfast at least half the time! Anyway, everyone is entitled to believe their own illusions, I suppose, so I won’t argue – I’ve got too busy a morning ahead of me to sit around arguing about clearing the breakfast table!’

  Margaret’s response was to screw up a paper serviette and throw it playfully at her husband’s head. ‘Ha! You missed!’ he said teasingly.

  ‘I missed on purpose! I wouldn’t like to risk damaging those delicate little brain cells of yours! They are going to have to focus on higher things,’ said Margaret laughing, as David made his way to the study.

  Once seated at his desk, David picked up his pen, applied the pen to the paper, and, to his intense relief, the words did come pouring out.

  Des Wilson had been a long-distance lorry driver for just over thirty-five years. He had passed his basic driving test at the tender age of seventeen, then joined a road haulage firm in Canterbury, his home town, initially as a tea boy and a general dogsbody, but, even as a boy, he had always had an eye on becoming one of the drivers.

  He had had to wait for four years to achieve his dream, however, because of his age: at that time the minimum age to hold a licence to drive Heavy Goods Vehicles was twenty-one. But that was all long in the past: he was now in his early fifties and was by far the most experienced of the firm’s drivers.

  He would have been the last to claim that the romance of being a long-distance international lorry driver had worn off, yet these days he always breathed a sigh of relief when he arrived home safely, and the truth is that he was not one of those men who worry intensely at the very notion of impending retirement: the thought of sitting around at home with nothing to do held relatively few terrors for him, because he had many interests and considered that anyone who was bored had something fundamentally wrong with them.

  He certainly still enjoyed driving on the continent, deriving much pleasure from the comradeship which existed among the lorry-driving fraternity, at least among the older members; the younger ones, he felt with some regret, had a tendency to regard every trip as just another job, and they always seemed to be dying to get back home, instead of making the most of the opportunity to experience the rich tapestry of Europe’s many cultures.

  Not for them the pleasures that Des had enjoyed most, of spending evenings abroad eating and drinking with fellow drivers, from whatever country, and relatively few of them had Des’s inclination to learn enough French, German, Spanish and Italian to be able to converse and to enjoy the company of the men who were his companions every evening he was on the road. He was not really a linguist, but he had learned to communicate rather more effectively than many who had spent a long time in the classroom.

  But in every country of Europe, it seemed, the older drivers were gradually being replaced by the young, who appeared to have a quite different mentality and were less inclined to be sociable in their leisure time when they were abroad. Des himself blamed the invention of the mobile phone for that – what was originally meant to be a highly useful invention had, in his opinion, mutated into a slave driver, and most of the young truckers, as they had started to call themselves, seemed to spend their mealtimes communicating with people at home, whether sending or receiving texts, or actually speaking to people at home, and thus ignoring completely everyone who was sitting at their dining table.

  There had been a further change. Since the turn of the millennium, cross-channel lorries had regularly been targeted by would-be immigrants to Britain, but in Des’s heyday there was one phenomenon which had been virtually unknown to everyone, and totally unknown to him: stowaways.

  But one day, in the Spring of 1979, he was on the way back from a routine trip to Spain: having delivered a load of packaged medicaments and car parts to Barcelona, he was returning with an enormous load of Spanish tomatoes.

  It was a journey that Des used to undertake fairly regularly in the 1970s and 80s. It was just a little too far for a lorry driver to drive legitimately from Barcelona to Calais in one day, so Des usually chose to have a break at a Relais Routiers just outside Reims, a place favoured by many of his fellow lorry drivers because they could be assured of eating well there, and in good company too. This allowed him also a fairly leisurely drive to Calais the next morning, after which he would drive onto the ferry and have a decent meal and a rest before tackling the short journey from Dover to Canterbury, where he would arrive in mid-afternoon.

  On this particular occasion he made his way into the restaurant at Reims to find a number of his acquaintances already at the table and engaged in a conversation which appeared to be even more lively than usual, but not lively enough to prevent them from greeting him warmly and making a place for him.

  ‘So what’s going on?’ he asked in French. Such was the cosmopolitan nature of the group that he was not particularly surprised to find his question being answered in Spanish.

  ‘We’re talking about hitchhikers,’ said the Spaniard, whom Des had known for a year or two, and whose name was Miguel. ‘But not the sort of hitchhikers we’re used to having – these are not ordinary young people, they are not students, they are young families: mother, father, and two or three kids.’

  ‘That’s unusual,’ said Des, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had children in my cab before.’

  ‘That’s what we were just saying when you just came in,’ said a German named Kurt. ‘We’ve all got used to picking up the odd student off on their holidays, but these people are intent on getting into Britain and never coming back.’

  ‘That’s all right if they come from the European Community, isn’t it?’ said Des.

  ‘But that’s just the point,’ said Kurt. ‘These people aren’t. They’re usually from a country which is outside the European Union, like Romania or Bulgaria, which means that, unless they’re just on holiday, they are bound to be classed as illegal immigrants.’

  ‘But if they’re already in France,’ said Des, ‘they’re illegal immigrants here as well, which means that if there is a problem, it’s the responsibility of the French government to deal with it. But have any of you picked any of them up yet?’

  ‘No,’ said an Italian named Giovanni, ‘precisely because they generally want to go to Britain, and most of us European drivers stay on this side of the Channel. In any case, they prefer British drivers
, because they feel they are more likely to be able to help them once they get into England. What about you, Des, would you be willing to give them a lift?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Des. ‘It would depend.’

  ‘It would depend on what?’ asked Kurt.

  ‘It would depend on what their story was,’ replied Des.

  ‘I’ll tell you their story,’ said Kurt, ‘because it never changes. If they’re Romanian, which they usually are, they will say that they are tired of living in a Communist dictatorship, especially under a leader like Ceausescu. They will say they have no money and they want to live somewhere where their little kids will have a better life.’

  ‘And is their story true?’ asked Des.

  ‘Sometimes, but sometimes not,’ said Kurt.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t pick up any of them,’ said a Frenchman named Pierre, who had not yet contributed anything to the conversation. ‘It’s asking for trouble to pick them up. They’re illegal, and that’s enough for me! They’re criminals. The police should arrest them, and, like Des said, it’s the responsibility of the French government, so I can’t understand why the French police don’t do something about it!’

  ‘But what if these Romanians have small kids?’ asked Giovanni. ‘From what I’ve heard, some of them even have babies with them! Surely babies can’t be criminals!’

  ‘No, but the parents are!’ Pierre insisted.

  ‘Is it fair to punish a little baby because his father is so desperate that he’s willing to break the law in order to give his baby a chance of a better life?’ asked Giovanni.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ said Des firmly. ‘There are too many people suffering in the world as it is. I’d be willing to take someone with a baby.’

  Des’s response had the effect of making all the company start talking at once, and the fact that they were all speaking in their native language made their conversation seem even more chaotic. All of a sudden, the incongruity of it all made someone start laughing, and, before long, peaks of laughter started ringing throughout the room, as usually happened at that time in the evening, at the point where tiredness, wine and their natural garrulousness combined. ‘It’s time for bed,’ said Des, ‘I’m off! See you all soon! Bye!’

  Cries of ‘Arrivederci,’ ‘Au revoir’, ‘Hasta luego’ and ‘Auf wiedersehen’ greeted Des’s words, and he went up to his room, where he was soon fast asleep.

  The following morning he got up at about seven, had breakfast, and went down to his lorry at about 8.30. Just as he was unlocking the door of his cab, he heard a voice behind him. ‘Please can you help me, sir?’

  He turned round and saw a young woman holding a baby, who could not have been more than a few months old.

  ‘How?’ he asked. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Is this your truck?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you going to England?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We are going to England also, but we have no money. Can you help us?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Can you take us in your lorry?’

  Des looked at the young woman. She was probably not even out of her teens, she was pretty, but shabby and ill-kempt; her baby was wrapped in a tattered shawl and had no shoes. ‘Yes, all right, I’ll take you,’ he said.

  ‘Can you take my husband also?’ the young woman asked.

  Des followed the direction of her eyes and saw a young man, not much older than the girl and equally shabby, who was standing holding two little toddlers by the hand. ‘Oh, I didn’t realise you weren’t on your own,’ he started to say, but one look in the direction of the little family melted his heart. ‘Oh, all right,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you.’

  Because Des did not speak a word of Romanian, he motioned to the young man to climb into the cab, and directed him, again by gesture, to occupy the middle of the bench seat, then passed the baby to the father and helped the toddlers and their mother into the lorry too; once they were all safely installed, he went round to the driver’s door and climbed in himself. Very soon they were en route, and in no time at all his passengers were, without exception, fast asleep.

  They remained asleep until after Des had parked his lorry in the car park just in front of the entrance to the ferry port in Calais, and even then he had to wake them up, wondering, as he tried to rouse them, when they had last profited from a good sleep like that. Once the parents were awake, he said to them, ‘We’re just about to board the ferry, and you’ll need to show your passports.’

  His statement was greeted by a look of horror on the face of the young man. ‘But we have not passports,’ he said.

  ‘None of you?’ he asked.

  ‘No. In Romania it is only the very rich who have passports, and we are not rich. We are ordinary people, and ordinary people are not allowed to have passports. That is why we ask you to take us.’

  Des looked at his watch and saw that in just five minutes time the barriers would be closed and they would all miss the ship. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘there’s only one thing to do. You will have to hide in the back of the lorry, but it will be very cold in there. I have two blankets that I can lend you, but you will need to hide until we are on board the ship.’

  He was particularly worried by the fact that his lorry was towing a refrigerated container: necessary if you are carrying a load of tomatoes or pharmaceutical supplies, but not recommended for the well-being of a human being, let alone a little baby, even for a short time.

  In a matter of minutes he was driving his lorry onto the ship; he had done the trip so frequently over so many years that most of the port employees, including the French policemen and the customs officials, were on first name terms with him, and those who did not know him personally tended to be juniors, being supervised by an older man who had known Des for several years.

  Once on board the ferry, Des went up to the lorry drivers’ canteen, where, even though he had eaten a hearty breakfast already, he bought a number of croissants and baguettes; no one seemed surprised, or even questioned his apparently Gargantuan appetite, because the long-distance lorry drivers had a continent-wide reputation for being able to consume a quantity of food before which a lesser man would quiver. Unusually, however, he returned to the vehicle deck and made his way back to his lorry, and opened the rear doors. At first he was not able to locate his secret passengers, but he soon found that they had made their way as far from the rear doors as possible. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked the young mother.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘it is cold, like you said, but we are used to being cold.’

  ‘Is Romania a cold country then?’ asked Des, ‘I’ve never been there.’

  ‘Every country is cold if you have no home,’ said the man.

  ‘I expect you’re hungry as well as being cold,’ said Des. ‘So I’ve brought you some food and some water,’ he continued, showing them the croissants, the bread and some bottles of mineral water; the delight which spread across the faces of the little ones when they saw the food was so tangible that Des at once lost any qualms he might have been harbouring.

  ‘Thank you, thank you!’ said the adults, ‘You are very kind! Thank you!’

  ‘Not at all,’ replied Des. ‘The happiness on the face of those children is thanks enough.’

  The parents, however, continued expressing their thanks; not so the children, however, for they were too busy eating – at first, anyway, although the oldest child, whose name Des discovered later was Ion, eventually mumbled something which resembled ‘Merci’, which led Des to ask Ion’s mother if her little boy spoke French.

  She looked puzzled at his question, and replied, ‘No. Why you think so?’

  ‘I thought I heard him say thank you in French.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ she said with a smile, ‘the Romanian for thank you is usually multumesc, but very often Romanian people say merci if they want to say thank you. The Romanian language is very close to French, and to Italian too.’<
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  ‘So, if I spoke in French to your husband would he understand?’

  ‘Yes, but Italian would be better. Marius speaks Italian.’

  ‘Marius?’

  ‘My husband. His name is Marius.’

  It was not until that moment that Des realised the significance of the name of his new friends’ native country; Romania had at one time been a Roman province, and had maintained its name. So Des addressed Marius in Italian, and was delighted to find that Marius’s answer was easy to understand.

  From that moment onwards the conversation between the two Romanians and their host was free-flowing, despite switching unpredictably from Italian to French, from French to Romanian, and then back from Romanian to Italian again; it was just like having dinner with his fellow truck-drivers, Des thought.

  During the remainder of their sea voyage, Des was able to discover that Marius’s surname was Petrescu, and that his wife’s name was Ana Maria; their children were Ion and Cristina, whilst the baby was called Elena. Marius, it transpired, was a lawyer in Bucharest, but he had decided to leave his native land because his outspoken attitude towards the regime of the Romanian President Ceausescu had come to the attention of the Securitate, the state secret police, as dreaded in Romania during Communist days as the KGB in the Soviet Union and the Stasi in East Germany.

  Ana Maria, however, was more interested in finding out about Des and his family than in speaking about the stressful circumstances which had led to their leaving Bucharest. So she came to learn that Des was married to Thelma, that they had no children, although they would love to have had some of their own. Des, however, experienced such difficulty in trying to explain in Italian that the development of in vitro fertilisation had come too late to be of any use to them, that he did not even attempt to explain that the reason why they had not followed the alternative route of adoption was because at that time all the adoption agencies were run by the various churches, and anyone who, like Des and Thelma, were not themselves regular churchgoers, would stand virtually no chance of adopting a child. Even so, bit by bit, a genuine rapport was being established between this humble lorry-driver and his would-be illegal stowaways.