THE SEVEN SINS OF THE ROAD
By JAN STRUTHER
THE highway is a microcosm, and a long journey by road is the epitome of a lifetime. This was true even in the days of horse-drawn vehicles, but today the comparison has an added point. The qualities which make a good driver always were, and always will be, the qualities which make a good liver (in the ethical, not the epicurean, sense) : but the enormous increase in the speed and volume of traffic haire made to the importance of road manners a difference in degree so great as to constitute a difference in kind. What used to be a matter of pleasantness or unpleasantness has now become a matter of life and death.
Road travel in the old days was difficult, tedious and uncom- fortable, but it was comparatively safe. Axles sometimes broke, it is true, and wheels came off and horses ran away : but the number of actual deaths from these causes must have been negligible. There were gentlemen of the road, too ; but they had their code and their formula, and provided that you behaved reasonably you were far more likely to lose your money than your life. If it were possible for a modern motorist to receive premonitions of all impending accidents and to buy himself off from them as his ancestors bought their lives from highwaymen, how many millions of pounds would be abjectly handed over every year ? It is an interest- ing, though macabre, speculation. But it is an idle one. For death on the modern roads is no gentleman : he shoots from the hip.
It is this strong element of danger which has lent poignancy to the parallel between driving and living. For to start on a car journey nowadays is, literally, to take your life in your hands, and a few thousand other people's as well. And to be guilty of bad driving may very easily mean that you (or somebody else) will have no further opportunity of living at all, either well or ill.
' We are just entering upon the two main holiday months of the year, when there will be more cars on the road than ever before. It is (saddeningly enough) safe to assume that there will also be more accidents, unless some way can be found to appeal successfully to the intelligence and goodwill of every intending driver. There have been many such appeals in the past, both in the Press and over the air. They have done a certain amount of good, but only too clearly not enough. They may make a sufficient impression upon the hearer to improve his driving on the following day, or even the day after that : but they do not seem to have any permanent effect. This, probably, is because they do not go to the root of the trouble. As every psycho-analyst knows (and as a good many saints and sages knew before psycho-analysis was invented) the first step towards changing somebody's behaviour for the better is to discover, and to bring home to him, what it is that makes him behave badly. It would come as a rude and salutary shock to most motorists to be told that nearly all dangerous driving can be traced to one or other of cur old friends, the Seven Deadly Sins.
We learnt about them at school, Of course, while doing The Faerie Queene (and a fine time the poor English-mistress had, trying to gloss over the fourth one, which had for us all the fascination of an unknown and musical word ) : but now they are so much out of fashion as a conversational topic that it may be as well to give a list of them. They are Pride, Wrath, Envy, Lechery, Gluttony, Avarice and Sloth. In using them as a text for a homily on bad driving we shall have (like the English-mistress) a certain amount of trouble with the fourth : unless indeed we -are crusty enough to apply that trenchant dactyl to the behaviour of the young man who habitually drives with his left arm round a blonde. This would be harsh, perhaps : but in point of fact the milder forms of what Burns called hough-- magandie are a far worse danger on the road than the more advanced stages. For those, at least, it is necessary to stop.
The other six sins present no difficulty, as any journey on a crowded main road will prove. There is the vain man, proud of his car's speed, proud of his own nerve and skill, holding the crown of the road, cutting in, showing off, driving on his brakes and on his horn. There is the angry man, irritable and impatient, who is always on the lookout for other drivers' faults and who enjoys nothing so much as an orgy of righteous indignation ; the kind of man who, exasperated by a long crawl behind a deaf carter— which nobody denies is trying—eventually takes the risk of passing on a blind corner, head turned well over shoulder to let out a volley of abuse. The incident, on the whole, gives him pleasure : he will dine out on it—if he lives to dine. Then there is the envious man, who feels sore and soured because his car is not so fast as many of the others on the road. Instead of accepting its limitations with a good grace he perpetually overdrives it, refusing to let any- body pass him without a jealous struggle. He is not so dangerous as the last two, but he would be better off the road all the same.
Of the gluttonous man there is little need to speak. For gluttony (according to Spenser at any rate) means over- indulgence in liquor as well as in food ; and everybody knows what effect " the bouzing can " has upon a driver. " Unfit he was for any worldly thing " : and there are few occupations more worldly than taking charge of a car: The avaricious man commits his crimes indirectly. He may be the most careful driver in the world : but lie runs his tyres until they are as smooth as glass, skimps on overhauls, and grudges the cost of relining his brakes. Or he may not go on the road himself at all ; he may merely own'a fleet of lorries and force his drivers to work exhaustingly long hours on a faked time-sheet. This is homicide at an even further remove.
Lastly, there is the lazy man : and he is the most dan- gerous of the lot. His bodily idleness is bad enough—he cuts corners, cannot be bothered to give hand signals, and slumps down in his seat so that he does not get a clear view of the road. His mental idleness is worse still—he lets his attention wander, his judgement grow slack ; he makes no effort to visualise the consequences of his own actions or to put himself in the other driver's place. And his moral idleness is the worst of all. He has allowed his imagination to atrophy and with it his sense of responsibility. He doesn't, as the saying goes, give a damn.
" May seeme the wayne was very evill ledd, When such an one had guiding of the way."
The ancients were not far wrong when they condemned Accidie as the deadliest of the seven sins.
Well, there they are—as pretty a set of rascals as ever travelled the highway. But in The Faerie Queene, at least, they were suitably mounted. They rode upon a lion, 'a wolf, a goat, a swine, a camel and an ass. (Vanity had no mount, but was,' significantly enough, only an usher.) Whereas in real life, nowadays, you may meet any or all of them at the wheel of a supercharged straight eight. More's the pity.
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