I’d passed my test not long after my 21st birthday and was soon driving artics for a haulage company based in south-west London that specialised in machinery transport. The thrill of seeing all that vehicle behind you in the mirrors, and a tightening of the stomach when you arrived at a drop and were shown where you were expected to reverse into, had yet to pass. I could change gear without coming to a halt first, just - although I would still occasionally miss a gear on a steep hill and have to stop, select crawler and start again. I was new, inexperienced, young and keen. I was to mistakes what a match is to a petrol bomb.
I arrived back at our yard one evening after a couple of days ‘up the road’ - a phrase I’d heard the older drivers use and had latched onto with relish, along with other essential terms, such as, ‘trombone trailer’, ‘skelly’, ‘tipped’ and ‘he’ll never make a lorry driver while he’s got a hole in his arse’. Our yard was on an incline, and I reversed the lorry up this slight bank and parked it opposite the fuel bunker, which was encircled by a reinforced concrete wall.
I went to the office and picked up my instructions for the following day. I was tired: it had been a hard day, tipping after a long drive. I could have done with a break, a cup of tea, a proper sit down. But this was exiting. I was to go farther north than I’d been thus far. I was to carry plant. I needed to change trailers, so I dropped the flatbed I’d used that past week and hooked up under a step frame low-loader - a real trailer. I strutted, climbed up onto the load-bed and surveyed the expanse of metal and wood before me, moved chains from the front to the back and then back again, and made the noise of the heavy hauler at work.
I had soon placed my number plate in the holder at the rear of the trailer. Afterwards, I walked forward, wound up the short legs, connected the suzies and got into the cab. I had decided to fill up with fuel for the next day, so I released the park brake and made to pull forward. Nothing; we were riveted to our spot. After a moment’s thought, I realised the problem: the trailer’s mechanical brake was still on.
No trouble. I leapt out of the cab and went to the rear of the trailer. I could see why I had missed it: the lever was tucked right out of the way compared to the ones I was used to. Clunk, the brakes were off. I turned to walk back to the cab but something in the corner of my eye caught my attention. It was the wheel nuts of the trailer, they were moving. It took a fraction of a second for me to realise what had happened: in my haste, I’d not reset the tractor unit’s park brake. With all that weight behind it, and on an incline, the lorry was off on its own. I needed to apply the vehicle’s brakes somehow, and quickly.
The whole combination gathered a momentum that seemed to herald my doom. Every block of tread on those tyres that stamped a new print in the mud of the yard as the wheels turned, would help to stamp ‘sacked’ on my CV. Soon, reinforced concrete and fibreglass would meet in battle. The result: Mike Tyson verses Julian Clary. It would be no good saying, “Oh well, it’s only a Seddon Atkinson”, this was 1978; they were up there with the best of them. I’d be laughed at from the café to the pub. I’d be given a nickname that would remind me and everyone who heard it of that day. I was finished.
I now wished I didn’t have a hole in my arse, and not just because it might mean I would eventually become a real lorry driver. I panicked and started to bolt for the cab. If I could run round to the driver’s door, I reasoned, open it and climb up, I may be able to get the park brake on in time. It was too far, and I was hardly making progress against the speed of the lorry. The catwalk! I’ll climb up and remove the red line. No, too difficult, and what if I fumble with the connection.
The cab seemed miles away. I could see through its rear windows; I could see my furry dice hanging down in the centre of the windscreen; I could see the top of the driver’s seat and its head restraint - oh how I wished I was sitting in that seat. It came to me that there was one opportunity left, and I took it. I turned back towards the trailer brake.
With several tons of heavy trailer pushing down the slope, the vehicle had quickly built up speed. I focussed on the lever below the trailer and lunged at it in a sort of athletic back flip I couldn’t imagine ever doing before or since. With my left hand gripping the side of the load-bed, my body hanging backwards on my left arm and my legs stretched forward, feet digging into the mud, as if I was trying to physically stop the whole shooting match Mr Incredible fashion, I reached out with my right hand and grasped the brake handle.
I wound against the ratchet like a man possessed. I couldn’t see the cable and the slack I needed to take up. In-out, in-out, my frantic action went on for an age. I thought the cable must be broken, maybe it had snapped somehow. I felt the rotating tyre next to me chaffing against my shoulder, as we, the lorry and me continued, onward to our destiny of shattered dreams and broken glass.
I closed my eyes and imagined the first crunch. As the metal bumper and headlights impact the wall, the glass shatters and the bumper and its mountings twist and buckle with a deep cracking sound. The headlamp glass is insignificant compared to the mass of fibreglass and metal of the cab, and the sound of them breaking is lost amongst the splitting and tearing that follows. Just as I think it’s all over, and with the timing of the very best ‘main acts’, the windscreen pops from its mounting in the still twisting shell of the cab and belly flops onto the wall below. It’s all over in a couple of years, or was it just a second or two?
But, as I lay there, flat out on my back in the mud and next to the mercifully still trailer, I saw that my worst nightmare had failed to materialise. We’d stopped short of the wall. I breathed a deep sigh of relief and stood up. I looked about the yard, prepared to be ‘Pratt of the Week’, but not, now, ‘…of the Decade’, or ‘…of the Entire History of British Road Transport’. There was no one. No one had seen me elevated to the heights and then reduced to the lows in my first truck driving job.
Now, when I look at a trailer, an image comes to my mind of that day, all those years ago – the view through the back windows my disappearing cab. And sometimes I ask myself... what did we ever see in furry dice?
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