THE ROAD ARMY
By M. P. BIRLEY
MUCH has been heard during the past few weeks of transport difficulties and of impassable roads ; little of the men who in the last resort have to cope with these things. At 6.15 on the Sunday evening of the great gale, in a Morris 8, I left Chesterfield, in Derbyshire, for Oxford. I finally arrived at 6 a.m. on Monday, having seen plenty of the difficulties and also been helped by the men who are out driving—some of them—every night and all night, and have been so throughout this apparent brief return of the Ice Age. The following remarks, therefore, are based not on any careful or prolonged observation of the lives of lorry-drivers, out merely on the haphazard experiences of one memorable night.
The first thing that strikes the lonely driver of a small car in such circumstances is the need for companionship. It was like being in a rather sticky place in the Army ; one wanted now anti again to find somebody to talk to, in order to reduce a little the sense of imminent catastrophe. After being brought to a standstill six times between Lichfield and Coventry—four times by water an the sparking-plugs and twice by fallen trees—and having found all roads South from Coventry and Kenilworth 'blocked, I arrived by a happy chance at about II p.m. at a transport café on the edge of Coventry—an unaesthetic but most desirable haven of warmth, light, tea and conversation. The right note was struck at once— by an Irishman, of course. "No one can say," he announced, "that we don't live in stirring times. just had the greatest war ;n history; then the worst winter in living memory ; and now the, biggest gale in creation." This was a comforting way of looking at things ; for a moment we listened almost proudly to the dismal ululation outside, which was, from his point of view, simply con- finning our own peculiar superiority. Soon several drivers—their lorries mostly stuck on the London road—came round the fire ; and the situation was reviewed.
It seems impertinent to offer generalisations about " lorry- drivers," as though they were a peculiar class of men—a race apart from the rest of us, to be studied dispassionately from outside. My only excuse is the strong impression which these men gave of a certain solidarity and independence, which is found in few places now in peace-time. There was the same atmosphere, as among soldiers in action, of an emergency to be dealt with by emergency measures; the realisation of difficulties which must be overcome by co-operation and without outside help ; the cheerful damnation of anyone—in particular, senior officers or employers—who was com- fortably asleep, and the desire to ring them up and pull them cut of bed too; and the readiness to help anyone else—for example, "civvies" like myself—who might be victims of the same circum- stances, just as a soldier would often spare a moment to give a wandering " civvy" a hand along the road with his family and his handcart of possessions. In fact, there was just that attitude which the Government is hoping to produce in the country as a whole. Only, as one Fred put it, "Trouble with this country :s that one half of it's working against the other." With him there seemed to be general agreement.
Inefficiency was what disgusted Fred. "You'd think," he said, " with transport so important, they wouldn't ruddy well allow the roads to get blocked. There's other countries have it worse than this, and they don't allow it." Maybe Fred expected too much ; but 'what further moved him to a vigorous- freedom of expression was the fact that there was no breakdown service in Coventry— none nearer than Birmingham one way, and Stony Stratford the other—Fred knew ; they all knew the really important facts—and at the moment all the official help they had was one copper (who had lost his hat ; a point, I gathered, in his favour). And all he was doing was "writing it down in his notebook." There was little the poor man could do—true enough ; but for Fred he represented all officialdom and all administration, which had let him down by allowing the road to become blocked and providing no means of clearing it. This does not mean that the drivers were doing nothing. They were doing a lot. The position was that both parts of a dual carriage-way had been blocked by trees about a hundred yards apart ; and the lorries which had tried to get across
the grass centre between the two roads had become bogged. At that time none of the towing-ropes available had proved strong enough to pull away the trees or tow out the lorries ; and no one had a chain. Fred's had been lent to some other truck. Another driver (a large Yorkshireman) was sure he had one somewhere, but "they" must have packed it into the middle of his load.
By 2 o'clock, incidentally, they had cleared the road somehow. But the point was that their outlook, automatically and uncon- sciously, was matter-of-fact. Their politics were practical politics —a form of activity which seems almost to have disappeared since the war stopped. In all their conversation, both on particular and on more general matters, they showed this attitude ; the inde- pendent, "use-your-loaf " attitude which characterises the war-time C.S.M. and the peace-time janker-wallah. If a boss knew what he was doing ; if he gave practical orders, with a practical realisa- tion of the difficulties to be met ; if he was prepared to stand by the man who worked well for him—for example, by providing a good representation in the police-court if a driver were summoned —then these drivers were nearly all the sort of man who would produce the best possible results by any means that came to hand. Of course, they would take any chance of profit that showed itself " on the side," too. That is democracy—and, incidentally, private enterprise. One driver, snowed up in London, instead of leaving his lorry and going home or back to the firm, set himself up as his own haulage-contractor in the London area—and came back a week later £m) to the good. There were other stories like this ; in fact, the Yorkshireman went on telling them non-stop (including reminis- cences of driving in Germany) for two hours.
There was the one about the man who had rung up his firm ;n Northampton to say he couldn't get through to Baslow. He was told to return ; but half-an-hour later the police were ringing up his firm to complain that his empty truck was blocking a street— outside his home in Northampton. -Bad luck, that. He was quite right—he knew it was impossible to reach Baslow—and by all the rules he should have had another few hours at home. There were men who had made immense sums by picking up junk and dropping it off at home when returning empty from a run. One had bought a truck-load of bicycles, abandoned by a camp-full of departing Americans, for 3os. This was not so good as it sounds ; for some reason, no clearer to him than to me, it was considered necessary to run over all these bicycles with a tractor before selling them, and then to go along slashing up their tyres. But he had a word with the tractor-driver first ; and, anyway, even the cog-wheels brought him back his 3os. in the first two minutes of sales.
These people dealt generally in big money, and no doubt some of what some of them carried had found its way to the black market. But their job is not like other men's. It takes them all over the country at all hours under all conditions ; and the man who never stops to take a side-chance when it offers is also probably the one who fails to find a way round or through, when no book of instruc- tions or public road-service is going to do it for him. There was one such man—clearly a scrupulous type, and equally clearly lacking something of the initiative that most of them possessed—whom I heard ringing up the Coventry branch of his firm and explaining that he couldn't travel any farther that night. He had plenty of excuse. His door had already blown off its hinges, and the top of his bonnet, having once blown up in his face, was now tied down with rope. But one felt that this would not have deterred most of them from going on; and that there was something uncomfort- able about the silence in which they listened to him on the 'phone, as though in some way he was letting them down.
By 2 a.m. the sky had cleared ; trees were no longer crashing, and I took to the London road. After my halt in the café I found it most comforting to be hemmed in by the stream of lorries nom travelling down the road they had cleared ; and after each unsuc- cessful attempt to cut across country to Banbury it was almost with a sense of relief that I rejoined them again. In future I shall remember that on a main lorry-route there may be discomfort but never disaster. One is picked up and temporarily attached to an army which takes everything with it that is going the same way ; and if they can't get through, at least one can endure failure in excellent company.
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