SOMEWHERE NEAR Baldock north of Stevenage, I got stuck. It was the late 1960s and I was a lanky teenager hitchhiking alone from Teesside to London along the A1. The details are a little hazy now, but I remember it was snowing and nothing at all was moving on The Great North Road.
It’s unlikely that I had set out alone. I would have been with my lifelong pal Alan Smith when we got to Scotch Corner. But even in those days motorists were less likely to pick up two teenagers than just one, so we would have split up. We might even have seen it as a race, I seem to remember that we did that once or twice.
We would have been wearing our hiking uniforms: Donkey jacket, Aran sweater and - for me anyway - my school trousers and thin desert boots, with our black, yellow and red grammar school scarves thrown artfully over one shoulder to make us look like university students. We might have had enough cash for breakfast at one of the transport cafes, but nowhere near enough to pay for lodgings or a train home. This was long before either of us had credit cards or bank accounts, or even money (and in those days mobile phones were pure science fiction.)
Anyway, I had managed more than 200 miles and my last lift had dropped me off by a roundabout with less than 40 miles to go. And then night closed in and nothing happened. Nothing. Zilch. It was very still and quiet and I stared up an empty road for hour after hour with fat flakes of snow settling into my shoulder length hair. I was beyond freezing.
In the small hours of the morning, I gave up hitching and started walking through snow shining orange in the glow of sodium lamps. I walked a mile, maybe two, to the next roundabout where I saw a grey van parked up in a lay by. It was the first vehicle I had seen in four or five hours. I walked up to it with no real plan in mind.
In the driver’s seat there was a man of medium size and middle age. He had a stubbly chin and was slumped in his seat fast asleep. I rapped on the van’s window, and peered in.
The man woke with a start and stared at me through the glass from inches away … and then he wound the window down. I told him my story, and how I was freezing and didn’t care where I went to so long as it was warm. And the man said words to the effect of: “Get in, kid.” I clambered in, glad of the chance to sit down at last, he started the engine and put the van into gear.
It sounds like the beginning of a horror story, doesn’t it? But, no, the driver took me to a transport cafe and bought me a pint mug of tea to warm me up. A little later, he went on his way and I stayed in the caff snoozing, head down on folded arms until dawn, and then started hitching again in the sunshine.
I don’t know how many times we hitchhiked to and from London, but when I applied for an apprenticeship at the local newspaper I added it to my list of qualifications, just underneath my indifferent A-level results: “Hitchhiked 3,500 miles in England.”
The editor peered at me over his glasses and asked in a sonorous Scottish accent what on earth it meant. I told him that it proved I had a sense of adventure and was more than happy talking to strangers. In fact, I said, it was the talking to strangers that was the best part of hitchhiking … I got the job.
You never see people hitchhiking in England these days. Mostly that’s to do with motorways and the pace of traffic. The M1 was under construction when Alan and I were on the road, and the A1 was still the most popular route north to south. Unlike motorways, the A1 in those days had lots of roundabouts, and traffic had to slow down to get round them - so the place to stick your thumb out was just past the roundabout, especially if there was a lay by where vehicles could pull in.
You simply can’t hitch on motorways these days, it’s illegal. And even if you were dropped off at a service station vehicles leaving it are speeding up not slowing down. You’d have to accost strangers in food courts over their chicken McNuggets and breakfast burgers. Good luck with that.
Then there’s the fear, of course. People are frightened of hitching because it is dangerous (obviously). People are frightened of picking up hitchhikers because they are dangerous too (clearly). Films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre have a lot to answer for. So, I suspect, does social media, which has given a platform to a lot of people with disturbing ideas - and you wouldn’t want to have one of them in your front passenger seat for three hours, would you? Best listen to the radio then.
But in, I guess, 18 months to two years of weekly hitching, I only had two lifts that I considered hazardous - and both of them were on the short four mile run from my girlfriend’s house to my home. One was with a motorcyclist who wanted to show me how fast his bike would go. When he dropped me off, he said he’d ‘done a ton’ with me on the pillion seat. Neither of us were wearing crash helmets. The other was a chap in a mini who squeezed my upper thigh, leading to what became a rather interesting conversation. He grew agitated and it was clear that he wasn’t simply going to drop me off where I wanted, so I waited until we got to the roundabout at the end of a bridge over the Tees where he would have to slow down, and leapt out of his moving car. He did have the courtesy to brake once the passenger door was open.
For the most part, though, people were very kind. True, some of the lifts were odd - Alan and I did one trip (most of the way from memory) perched in the back of an Austin A35 van on icy cold oxyacetelyne cylinders used for welding. It wasn’t what you would call comfortable. But the lorry driver who treated me to a slap up breakfast at Tony’s transport caff near Peterborough was one of the many who made up for the occasional discomfort.
Why did we do it? Boredom. Lust for adventure, for something new. Escape from the drudgery of A-levels. Sheer teenage stupidity. It doesn’t matter, does it? The fact is that we did it, and we got away with it and it was kind of character building (although I recall that our parents and teachers didn’t see it that way).
I also remember the sheer joy of being on the A1 at Scotch Corner at night with my best friend howling Incredible String Band songs into the night air with what we believed were perfect harmonies, but almost certainly weren’t.
The natural cards revolve, ever changing
seeded elsewhere, planted in the garden fair
grow trees, grow trees…
Come to think of it, there might have been a good reason why we didn’t always get lifts together.
NB In 1971, just a few years after the Baldock incident, there were 19 million vehicles on the road in Britain (most of which would be regarded as vintage now). Today there are more than 41 million.