Confessions of a Long Distance Lorry Driver

by Timothy Lea

  ‘You’ve got wonderful breasts,’ I say.

  I usually find it difficult to flatter birds but in this case it is no problem. You wouldn’t see a better pair of bristols in a picture gallery. They are big and shapely with nipples like brown gherkins. Not the puncture patches you find on some of the barrage balloon variety.

  ‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ she says, whipping down her tights with an inviting crackle of nylon.

  This is a difficult one to answer because I do say it to all the girls. If not about their knockers then something else. You seldom find a bird who has nothing favourable to comment on even if it is only the tattoo on her left bicep. A kind word does not cost you much and it pays tremendous dividends with the ladies. As I have said many times before, the way to get a reputation for truthfulness amongst women is to tell them that they are beautiful – or that something about them is.

  I look at Glady’s naked body with a touch of apprehension. It seems normal enough, but so does a pair of nutcrackers until you see them in action. I am also worried about my ability to keep my end up in the coming bout of in and out. I am not referring purely – or impurely – to the lead in the pencil but the pictures I can draw with it. Though no stranger to the manly sport of dongler dousing I do not have a double joint in my body and can only touch my toes after a couple of pints and a goal-charged, blood-warming edition of Grandstand Soccer Preview to fire my athletic imagination. In these circumstances, is it likely that I will be able to keep pace with Jumbo Lady?

  Nor is the physical challenge of Gladys all I have to contend with. There is a tremendous noise of honking and hooting close at hand and voices raised in anger. Also the sound of a second elephant doing a Louis Armstrong imitation. Maybe I had better forget about the game of furry quoits and—

  ‘Move over.’ Gladys interposes her body between mine and the call of duty. ‘It’s not very big, is it?’

  Her words wound me. ‘It gets bigger,’ I say, trying to preserve my dignity.

  ‘I’m talking about the bed,’ she says.

  ‘I realise that,’ I lie, hurriedly. ‘I thought, perhaps, you could screw a bit on it.’

  ‘You can, darling. You can!’ Gladys squirms her body against mine and hooks one of her legs over my thighs.

  Something lurches against the side of the caravan but I don’t pay too much attention. When the demon lust begins to close his fingers round you, all those promises you made in the boy scouts go clear out of the window. I am certain that whatever problems have arisen at the roundabout are being taken good care of.

  ‘What’s this, then?’

  Something tells me that Gladys is asking what is known as a rhetorical question. The practised ease with which her fingers latch on to my hampton suggest that this is not the first visit they have paid to the inside of a pair of Y-fronts.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I was going to ask you about it.’

  ‘He’s a gentleman whatever he is,’ says Gladys. ‘He certainly believes in rising for a lady.’

  The practised ease with which Gladys’s mitts range over my minge throttler would graft backbone into a plate of soft roes. I run my own fingers up the small of her back while my roses browse over her front. I find that women have differing degrees of sensation in the knocker department and it is soon clear that the mammarial caress looms large amongst the things that make life bearable for Gladys.

  ‘Oooh, that’s lovely,’ she says. ‘When you tweak them, it’s ooooooh!’ So saying, she puts a hammerlock on my hampton that threatens to turn it into one of the longest chipolatas below a line drawn from the crude to the downright filthy.

  Fortunately, when I open my mouth to yelp, her nipple drops out and the spell is broken – to say nothing of my knackers.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘We’d better put him out of harm’s way, hadn’t we?’ So saying, she pulls back the blankets and rises up above me. Before I can threaten to call for help she has bunged her snatch on my love wand and six and a quarter inches of glorious, firm flesh have the daylight denied to them. The lady must have very remarkable internal arrangements because the grip exerted on my action man kit is sufficient to draw a champagne cork. Gladys’s minge does not glide up and down the slippery pole of my Mad Mick but pumps it up and down as if using it as a pestle to pound my balls to powder. If this is being put out of harm’s way I hate to think what the lady would do if she really had it in for me – as opposed to merely had it in for me.

  ‘Stand by,’ she yodels. ‘I’m going to give you a hip role.’

  ‘What’s that – wheeeeeech!!’ I screech. Gladys gives a quick twitch of her educated hips and a ruckle runs up my Marquis of Lorne and rings the bell at the top with enough vibration to rattle my beechams. Talk about muscle control. She has got more grip than Joseph Stalin.

  ‘Give me a bit of notice the next time you do that,’ I gulp. ‘Like, about three months – aaaaargh!!’

  Regular readers may connect the appearance of an unbroken row of ‘a’s with the arrival of man’s best friend. They would be wrong. What has triggered off my vocal chords is not only the whiplash flexing of elephant lady’s thighs but the appearance of one of her charges through the window of the caravan. Not, fortunately, all of him, but merely the trunk, gripping a bottle of gin with the top smashed off. The sight might have been less frightening had the window been open at the time.

  No sooner have I responded to this alarming sight than the door of the caravan bursts open and Sid is revealed. The expression on his face leads me to wish that it was his hooter poking through the window while Rajah was before us, winding himself up for a few words.

  ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing!!’ he says after a couple of moments splutter. Once again, it occurs to me that the answer to this question is well known to the asker. I, of course, am not doing anything, but this information, relayed to Sidney, is hardly likely to change his attitude to the scene now bombarding his eye balls.

  ‘Hello, Sid,’ I say cheerfully.

  Gladys is less prepared to extend the hand of welcome. ‘Get out!’ she shouts. ‘Push off, you dirty sod!’

  I note that her grip on my action man kit does not slacken. If anything, like a cat menaced by someone seeking to remove its prey, she huddles over me protectively.

  ‘Do you know what’s going on out there?’ sobs Sid. ‘There’s hardly anything left of your load. There’s a traffic jam stretching back two miles in all directions and there isn’t one vehicle not heavier by the weight of a bottle of scotch.’

  ‘What about the police?’ I say. ‘Surely the police have arrived?’

  Sid delivers what I believe is known as a hollow laugh. ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘They’ve arrived all right. We’ve got them here from four counties. What I want to know is, how you can lie there getting your end away while our livelihood is disappearing up the spout? And you, missus. You might stop while I’m talking to him!’

  But Gladys is not a lady easily prepared to foresake her pleasures. Ignoring Sidney, she continues to throttle percy with her third hand whilst my open cakehole strives to deliver a few words of comfort to my clearly harassed brother-in-law.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ I say. ‘I’m just com-com-com-com-coming!!!’

  For a moment, I think I am going to develop a permanent kink in my snatch pounder as the lady’s complicated internal workings give a formidable imitation of an electric mixer. Perhaps disturbed by the noises I am making, the elephant drops the bottle of gin on the end of the bed and rips open the wall of the caravan as if it is a piece of newspaper. Sid steps back hurriedly and falls down the steps. It is still pouring with rain as I realise when a small fountain of water fills the spot where Sid was standing.

  ‘He’s drunk!’ shouts Gladys.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I say. Then, I realise that she is probably talking about the elephant. The creature is snuffling round my foot with its trunk. It occurs to me that it might well have a protective instin
ct towards its mistress – if not something even more unwholesome, and this thought is substantiated as it tries to throw me out of bed. Gladys is strong in the pelvic area but she cannot compete with an elephant and I hit the floor like a moggy that has been turfed out of an armchair. I am now aware that there are a number of bedraggled faces watching what is happening inside the caravan with something not far short of extreme interest. Most of them are clutching bottles of spirits and the sight of my erstwhile cargo disappearing down alien throats makes me begin to heed Sid’s words – the fact that I have just shot my own load makes it easier to face up to reality as well.

  ‘Get out of there!’ shouts Sid, struggling up the steps and trying to grab my arm.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve got my pants on the wrong way round.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. You’re not going to need the slit when I’ve finished with you!’

  ‘There’s quite a simple explanation for all this,’ I say as Sid bundles me out into the rain. ‘I’ll think of it if you give me a few moments.’

  ‘Look at that!’ says Sid.

  I follow his shaking finger and, I must confess, it is a most remarkable sight. The caravan, amongst others, is parked on the verge near the roundabout and every approach road as far as the eye can see is jammed with traffic.

  ‘You’d have thought that they would have moved the lorry by now,’ I say.

  ‘They’re not doing badly,’ says Sid, grimly.

  I look again and see what he means. Most of the blokes round Enid are staggering away with as much booze as they can carry. It is like a swarm of ants round a blob of jam. One of the elephants is lying in the middle of the roundabout with its feet in the air and the chimpanzee is sitting on top of the cab passing down bottles of brandy to a bloke with a peaked cap who looks like a chief inspector.

  ‘That’s enough of that, constable,’ he is saying as I approach. ‘Let’s have a few more of those vintage port.’

  The copper’s face is not unknown to me. ‘Inspector McGoolygrab?’

  The bule thrusts a crate of scotch into my hands. ‘Put that in the boot, laddy.’

  ‘I’m the driver of this vehicle,’ I say. ‘May I ask why you are removing its load?’

  ‘Drink this,’ says the dreaded McG, practically shoving a bottle into my cakehole. ‘What does that taste like?’

  ‘Brandy,’ I say.

  ‘Are you sure? Try again.’ He tilts the fat end of the bottle skywards so that the booze spills down the front of my shirt.

  ‘Positive,’ I splutter.

  ‘Right, constable. Take this man away and breathalyse him. By the throbbing tip of my wangy truncheon I’ll wager that the bag will turn so green we won’t have to add dye.’

  The chimpanzee drops from the cab and starts to lead me away past two constables who are dancing with each other on the verge – quite what they are on the verge of I don’t like to think for fear of upsetting my more sensitive readers.

  ‘You swine!’ I shout. ‘This is a frame-up.’

  McGoolygrab does not answer. He is too busy wrenching the top off a tin of cashew nuts.

  ‘Another fine mess you’ve got us into!’ I turn to find Sid at my side. That is all you need at a moment like this, a chimpanzee on one side and Sid on the other.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I ask.

  Sid looks round. Gladys is trying to remonstrate with one of the elephants that has just dropped the police car and started to throw bottles through the windows of the caravans and the two llamas are demonstrating that their feelings for each other are more than purely platonic. The rain is sluicing down and a party of schoolgirls are vacating their coach and clambering eagerly into the back of a five-ton lorry full of soldiers. The soldiers look eager too.

  Sid takes a deep breath. ‘Slip your friend a banana and let’s get out of here.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  What makes the whole thing worse is that Sid’s lorry has been nicked. Yes, terrible, isn’t it? We walk half a mile down the queue of traffic and then another half mile because Sid thinks that he must have mistaken the layby. With every step of the second half mile the stream of abuse that is pouring from his lips begins to falter to a trickle and then completely dry up as the horrible truth comes home to him.

  Thank God that the booze is insured, otherwise we might really be in the cart. When we eventually recover Enid there are only half a dozen bottles of Tizer left on board. Sid’s vehicle is found on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. All the booze has gone and somebody has left a ‘naughty Fido’ on the driver’s seat. Some people have no consideration, have they? Needless to say we do not get any further commissions from Parsimon and Mandrake and, for a few weeks, things are very dicey generally. Most of our roadwork is done driving down to the Labour to collect our benefit. It is more like being self-unemployed than self-employed. Then slowly things begin to pick up. We do a bit of humping for a local scrap merchant and Sid has a mate who runs a factory that makes cork mats. We take a few loads of his stuff up to Manchester and pick up tropical plants that we unload at Birmingham. Then it is garden tools back to London. It is not exactly ‘The Wages of Fear’ but we make a living.

  After a few weeks I begin to feel a bit of an old hand. I nod at blokes when I go into caffs and there is a geezer I help when his load comes unstuck who actually flashes his lights at me before I flash him. I even catch a glimpse of Shirley. She is bending herself double to get into an E-type Jag that has left a couple of inches of tyre over three hundred feet of road in an effort to stop beside her. One long leg flickers wickedly from her coat like a snake’s tongue and then is withdrawn from view. The door slams and the crouching greyhound springs forward and roars past me in a blur of red. I think about that leg and the red blur is replaced by a green blurr: jealousy. I shove my foot down on the accelerator and Enid reacts as if I have just kicked her in the stomach and signals that another two miles per hour and a tortured whine is all that she is capable of. I don’t think she has liked me very much since the roundabout incident. The Jag is disappearing over the brow of the road. I imagine Shirley’s knees pressed up against the dashboard and her coat dropping open to reveal the long sweep of her thighs … Enid’s scream becomes lughole-piercing and I ease my foot off the accelerator. One day … One fine day, I will catch up with lovely Shirl.

  One of the hazards of the game is the grub they serve at some of the caffs. You would think that after Mum’s cooking I would be able to take anything but the reverse is true. I am very sensitive about what my Teds bite into and some of the nosh they serve up would incite a mass break out at a pig farm. When I ask for a bowl of soup, I want to drink it, not use it to stick Formica.

  There is one place in particular where even the bluebottles won’t go for fear of getting food poisoning. I usually drive straight past but one day, when I am with Sid, he makes a particular point of asking me to pull over.

  ‘You don’t want to stop there,’ I tell him. ‘It’s diabolical.’

  ‘I know it is,’ says Sid, not without relish. ‘I nearly had a punch-up there and the bloke threatened to set his Alsatian on me.’

  ‘So why do you want to go back?’

  Sid pats the pocket of his flying jacket. ‘You’ll see.’

  When we get through the door, the smell of fat nearly makes the contents of my Derby Kell play ring-a-ring-a-roses on the two thirty Rory (two thirty: dirty; Rory O’More: floor. – Ed). or to put it more simply, I nearly toss a technicolor pancake.

  ‘Order a cup of tea and sit down,’ says Sid. This is one of the few places I know where they serve chips with every cup of tea – around the rim of the cup. The tea is not only the colour of mahogany – it tastes like it.

  ‘I’ll have a coke,’ I say. ‘They can’t mess about with that.’

  As it turns out, I am not so sure. The old bag behind the counter pours it into a cloudy glass the colour of the one Dad keeps his dentures in. In fact, I am so worried that I have a poke about
at the bottom with a teaspoon. I need not have alarmed myself, there is only a piece of chewing-gum.

  ‘What did you want to come here for?’ I ask. ‘Do they have a tea dance or something?’

  ‘Belt up,’ says Sid. ‘I’m waiting for the right bloke to come along.’

  ‘Blimey!’ I say. ‘I must say, you’ve kept it a wonderful secret. All these years and you were a ginger. How does Rosie feel about it?’

  ‘Swallow your lips, will you?’ Sid is not looking at me but studying the geezers who are coming in to the caff. ‘He’ll do.’ The bloke Sid has singled out looks like a gorilla in a blue overall. If his barnet started growing half an inch lower, his hair line would be below his mince pies.

  ‘You go for the brutal type, don’t you?’ I say.

  Sid waves his hand in my face. ‘Belt up, Cinderella. I want to hear what his number is.’

  In this place, when you order your nosh, you get given a number. You sit down and when the cook has finished squirting greasy germs over it, your number is called and you put on a pair of thick gloves and go and collect it. I think the expression ‘your number’s up’, meaning that you are about to snuff it, originated in this place.

  ‘One hundred and thirty-two,’ I say. ‘Blimey, no wonder the stomach powder dispenser is empty.’

  ‘Sit tight,’ says Sid. ‘When that bloke’s got his grub I want you to go and distract his attention for a moment. Ask him for a light or something like that.’

  ‘I’ll tell him that you fancy him,’ I say. ‘That should arouse his interest.’

  ‘Tell him how you got your broken nose,’ says Sid, menacingly.

  ‘What is all this about?’ I ask.

  Sid looks round and produces something from his breast pocket. ‘Recognise it?’ he asks.

  ‘It’s a fried egg!’ I say.