Outside is hostile

Lee and I spent the whole day traveling. We caught the No. 78 Shuttle into Attlee Square at nine, caught another bus out to Binston Park and within five minutes got a lift from a wealthy, name-dropping woman in her fifties. We shared the car with her two dogs and I was forced to maintain dull conversation about job prospects for American Lit. graduates and horse-jumping, etc.

She dropped us on the A31, a few miles outside Farnborough.

Lift number two was from a silent Yosser Hughes look-alike who took us into Oxfordshire, and Sonningley near Reading—a miserable suburban area of large semis, detached mansions and wide, well-kept verges and gardens . . . We thought we were done for, so far were we from the main routes into London, but fortunately enough a car stopped and we were dropped off right outside Paddington tube station.

We caught the tube to Kings Cross St. Pancras, then Euston, and on from there to Colindale where we wasted an hour looking for the motorway. Back to Brent Cross and a tiring walk through a jungle of flyovers, intersections and dual-carriageways to the beginning of the M1. It was growing dusk and the sun had set in a pool of orange over the urban horizon.

We stood, arms out, thumbs erect, and the river of traffic roared past.

At about four we got a lift; all the way to Knutsford service station, nearly in Manchester, on the M6, from an advertising salesman on his way to Blackpool. Lee had to do his office work for him part of the journey, and although he was a bit of a prat, he redeemed himself by buying us both a sandwich and a can of Coca-Cola.

We reached Knutsford at eight and for an hour-and-a-half, we had a cold despairing wait on the slip road to the motorway. We had our names taken by motorway police in a Range Rover—affected friendliness, calling me by my first name . . . There were half-a-dozen other people waiting for lifts to Carlisle and Scotland, but soon, even they were gone and we really did expect to have to wait at Knutsford all night.

Finally, at nine-thirty a car drew up and the driver said he was going to Haley Hill.

It was quite foggy on the M14 and our driver played The Pop Group’s Y and then Einsturzende Neubauten’s Kollaps on his cassette player. The latter’s pounding metallic urgency suited our headlong plunge through the orange gloom, a haunted journey racing along the near-deserted motorway with only rivers of road-lights above us for company. A Whitehouse tape greeted our arrival in Haley Hill and we were home.

We were in such a jubilant, loud and enthusiastic mood as we boarded the Easterby bus that we almost got thrown off for putting our feet on the seats. After a fourteen-hour journey it was so good to the stout architecture and lights sprinkling the inky blackness as we crested the hills into Easterby. It cost us £3 to get back.

Lee’s Mum gave me a lift home.