Taking The High Road
Published by Richard Jackson at Smashwords
Copyright 2012 Richard Jackson
This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This ebook is licensed for your own personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the author.
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‘I’m driving down to Somerset tomorrow for the Jazz Festival – anyone want to come?’ Steve announced to the assembled gathering of David, Daisy, Chloe and myself. What the hell, I thought, it would be fun.
‘OK, I’m game,’ I said. I assumed Daisy would be coming, being Steve’s girlfriend. I didn’t want to be the chaperone for those two, so I looked at David inquiringly. He was always more cautious, but I could see he was interested. Chloe was David’s sister, quite pretty and sweet. I had been going out with her recently, and I would have loved it if she could have come, but she was only 16 and I knew her parents wouldn’t agree to her going.
David and I were best mates. I first met David when he came to teach English at my Mother’s school for foreign students, and initially I disliked him intensely. I think I was probably jealous, he was a couple of years older than me and he had a proper job. Blonde, handsome, with an easy way about him, I thought he was insufferable. My sister Mary didn’t though, and within a few days they were going steady.
By now, Mary and David’s love affair was over, and I thought David was a great guy. As the evening wore on, David and I saw an opportunity to do what we’d often talked about – hitch-hike from Lands End to John O’Groats - from the bottom to the top of Britain. It was the summer of 1962, I had just finished school and the thought of travelling around Britain was still really exciting. At that time I hadn’t been further than Wales, and abroad was a distant dream.
‘The jazz festival is in Taunton, it’s not far from there to Land’s End, we can easily hitch a lift the rest of way,’ I said optimistically, not realising quite how far it is between the two.
The next day in the cold light of dawn it didn’t seem quite such a good idea, but we were all there assembled outside Steve’s house, Daisy, David and myself. Steve hadn’t emerged and it took a lot of banging on the door to raise his father, who opened the door wearing pyjamas and dressing gown, looking distinctly angry.
‘What do you want at this time of the morning?’ he said in a loud voice, then he caught sight of Daisy and his tone softened and he said: ‘Oh, I suppose it’s Steve you’re after, you won’t see him for a couple of hours, he’s not the world’s earliest riser.’
‘But he promised to take us to Somerset’ wailed Daisy.
‘Oh, he did, did he? Well I‘ll try and wake him – you’d better all come in out of the cold and wait in the lounge’ said Steve’s dad, and ushered us into the house.
Steve eventually appeared in his pyjamas looking half-asleep.
‘Was it today?’ he asked rather unnecessarily.
‘Yes’ we all chorused.
‘And you’d better hurry up and get dressed, we don’t want to get caught in traffic.’ I added.
Steve disappeared and re-appeared about 10 minutes later, fully dressed, clutching a Marmite sandwich in one hand and a mug of tea in the other, saying almost unintelligibly with his mouth full: ‘Follow me, the car’s in the garage.’
It was only when we got outside and he had opened the garage door (with some difficulty I might add, since he was still drinking his tea) that the full horror of what we had let ourselves in for struck me. The car was about 40 years old, and had only two seats. That is, it had two seats inside. The boot was open to reveal two extra seats open to the elements, known I believe as ‘Dicky seats’. I remember thinking you would have to a right Dick to sit in those if you had far to go, but Steve proudly exclaimed: ‘Well, what do think of her?’
I couldn’t answer truthfully, and I believe the car is now in a museum, which is where it should been then. It was a 1935 Austin 10.
Steve handed me the starter handle -
‘You’re stronger than me, and I need to hold the choke out, it won’t stay out.’ After several unsuccessful attempts to turn the handle, I began to think it needed Superman.
‘We’ll have to push it, that usually works’ said Steve. With Daisy steering, we all got behind the car and pushed. Nothing happened.
‘Take the brake off!’ Steve shouted to Daisy. That helped, and the car lurched forward, and spluttered into life. As quick as a flash Steve had pushed Daisy into the passenger seat and was revving the car up resulting in David and myself being almost hidden in noxious exhaust fumes.
‘Jump in’, said Steve, and we were off.
It was a tight squeeze in the back seats, surrounded by our bags, but the seats themselves were surprisingly comfortable. Sitting in the open with the wind whistling round our necks, it seemed that Steve was driving terrifyingly fast, but he probably wasn’t going more than 40 mph. The suspension didn’t help much, every time we went over a pothole the car bounced around uncomfortably and after 10 miles or so the seats didn’t feel so comfortable at all. Still, we were making progress. One extra problem was that we didn’t have a map and Steve seemed to have a hazy idea of geography.
‘If we keep the sun to our left we should be OK’ he said on more than one occasion. The flaw in this approach was that the road planners hadn’t followed the same logic. Approaching a major roundabout, I shouted:
‘Left.’ and David shouted ‘Right’. Steve went straight on – literally, finishing up in a flowerbed in the middle of the roundabout. We all got out to check the front wheels, which had taken quite a bang when they mounted the kerb round the centre of the roundabout. Daisy picked some flowers. The wheels seemed fine, so we all got back in and Steve continued driving straight on and that turned out to be the right way as it happened.
Motorways did not exist at the time (the M1 was still being built); journeys were slow, and few towns had bypasses. We were following the old A30 road most of the way, and we hit our first traffic jam at Basingstoke. Reaching the centre, Steve parked in the market square and we found a café for coffee and buns. Steve, who had a job, paid, while the rest of us thanked him effusively. This arrangement continued throughout the journey whenever payment was needed. David was always mean with money, and besides he was saving up for a car.
Our journey continued leisurely through the lovely old English market towns of Salisbury, Shaftesbury and Sherborne, until we came to our second traffic jam leading into Yeovil. It was at Yeovil that we needed to turn off the A30 on the old road to Taunton. We planned to stop in Yeovil for lunch (we had been told that you could get good Cornish Pasties there, although of course it is some way from Cornwall!) Eventually we crawled into Yeovil, starving and thirsty, to find a pub with home-made cider and the promised pasties.
Sufficiently rested, we continued our slow progress through the pretty quaintly-named villages of Montacute and Stoke Sub Hamdon. Nowadays you can race past these on a bypass, but this wasn’t built until the 1980s. Steve seemed a little more casual in his driving, possibly a result of the pint of cider. I was quite glad that we weren’t going back to London with him. This was before the drink driving laws were introduced, and the only test for being capable of driving was to walk along a straight line!
Finally we arrived at the outskirts of Taunton and followed the temporary signs to the Jazz Festival. We arrived at the site, a large car-park close to the town centre, and with difficulty found a parking-space. Most of the car-park was taken over by large tents and caravans. At one end a large open-air stage was being erected, and everywhere was the bustle of workmen banging and hammering, and small groups of musicians standing around holding impromptu rehearsals.