The return journey
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In 1976, when I drove the truck to Tehran there were, of course, no mobile phones and phoning from a call box required a lot of local coinage. So the practice was to return to Ankara where there was a telex station from which you could report back to base. But first, a fill up with local diesel at 2p a gallon was highly desirable. Indeed some trailers that regularly ran to the Middle East were fitted with belly tanks. These carried enough fuel for the whole journey but I didn't have one, so I filled to the brim and set off homeward.
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I felt I'd done it all, experienced every eventuality and have nothing to look forward to in some ways. But that turned out to be far from the truth. The route was known to me, but still the roads were rough and I had no comfort. For example, I pulled onto a patch of hard land to rest and fortunately spotted a single wire trailing from a shed to a post. It was 12' in the air and hung in a parabolic curve, so the centre was much lower than my trailer height. I could easily have uprooted this primitive power cable, plunged the locals into darkness and frizzed my beard and hair. Happily I stopped in time.
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Another moment that remains in my mind over forty years later was passing through the numerous tunnels of Austria. The sun was bright and sunglasses were essential. The tunnels were short often only a few hundred yards. Even so they could be very dark, so it was wise to snatch off the sunglasses. I'd done this a few times without any loss of vision. The truck cruised quite happily at 60 mph on good tarmac but in the next tunnel the road was unfinished, so there was a big drop from tarmac onto the substrata. In a big truck the steering wheel lies horizontally 3 inches above your knees and the well sprung seat ensures you glide up and down throughout the day. With a suddenness that shocked my torpor, the steering wheel hit my knees, my sunglasses dropped from my hand, my teeth jarred and I bit my tongue. I'd hit rock bottom and the monster was rolling on rough stone rubble, still at just under 60 mph. You soon gather your thoughts and bring things back to normality, but the memory does not fade - ever.
However, I was heading for Ankara, and had covered three days of muddy roads and coming into dryer and more fertile pastoral land at last. The main road was about 12 feet wide and covered with dusty gravel and scalpings. They seemed to have been bulldozed from time to time as there was a high bank of stone and dried mud to the side. In the dry period, the consequence was that you could see another truck approaching from a mile or two ahead. As trucks are eight feet wide and the bulldozed passage only about twelve feet wide you had to keep an eye out for gaps to pull in. That caused no problem, unlike the outward journey when I'd been stuck in the mud.
That afternoon I spied at a distance a very regular looking village of tiny white houses. As I came closer and could see the detail I realised the white lines were bee hives, not houses. It was quite a sight.
I was soon approaching the big city with the telex machine. I had seen several broken down vehicles but then spotted John Evans of Newport. This was a firm near home, and their lorry was in a ditch, big time - a big ditch. The cab and front half was deep in a ravine and the trailer was angled down the slope with the sign writing clearly visible to me from the road. So, being a good cooperative driver, I stopped and walked back to see if the driver was dazed, dead or just drunk. He was nowhere to be seen, but the engine and radiator were hot so it could only just have happened. After making sure he wasn't wandering injured in the undergrowth, I could do nothing but forge ahead. Within a few miles I reached the PPT where I was required to report that I was unloaded and on the way back. The plan was that the office would tell you where to re-load so that some revenue could be earned on the return journey.
Britain does not buy much from the Middle East, so it was hard to acquire a back-load that would help with the profitability of the round trip. The ideal load was considered by the drivers to be chipboard from Austria. There was a big demand for this from the forested regions of southern Europe and I expected to be instructed to pick up there. I stood in the queue waiting to telex. I can type and am familiar with foreign keyboards, where a few letters are different from the querty layout we know (such as Y and Z) and I was anxious to type my own message. But they weren't having any of that. The operator considered the State Telex to be her preserve, and I was sent back to the end of the queue to print the message that she would type. This was fortuitous as I then joined the queue adjacent to a chap who was holding his message and I could read it.
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It simply said, 'Temporarily off the road send £150' and it was addressed to John Evans & Co in Newport. I decided not to engage in conversation with him because I couldn't pull him up that steep bank even with an unladen big truck. He needed a tracked bulldozer and I felt if he recognised my local accent he might feel I would reveal his plight to others. So I left him to it and have never talked to a John Evans person since.
Black Sea
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My telex message was answered instantly with instructions to go to Samsun and pick up a load of peanuts. That was a very depressing thought for two reasons.
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Firstly, it meant re-tracking 400Km away from home in a north-easterly direction, to the coast of the Black Sea. It was at least an 11 hours drive, so with loading and return time it would add two days to the journey. The second was that I would be unlikely to obtain a permit to return home via the easier route through Austria.
When I eventually reached Samsun and found the warehouse, it was an impoverished area where no fork-lift truck had yet ventured. They put a plank of wood against the tail of the truck and a number of labourers ran up and down with 50Kg bags of nuts on their shoulders. 50Kg is very heavy and the plank was steep. I was glad to remain in the cab writing my memoires. Eventually someone said the load was ready and I collected the export paperwork and set off home.
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When I returned through Ankara, John Evans' truck had gone. I telexed to say I was loaded and was pleased to learn I had a permit to drive through Austria. Having driven from Tehran empty, the truck was now heavy to handle and slow to accelerate - noticeably so. There were hardly any opportunities to weigh a truck, but often at a border there would be a weighbridge and when I found one I discovered the gross weight was over 34 tonnes. That didn't matter outside western Europe, and even when you get into countries like Austria and Germany it was OK. However I knew there would be a problem in the UK where the maximum gross vehicle weight was 32 tonnes in those days. I was unable to contact the office, but other drivers said it wasn't a problem. They said my firm would send a unit without a sleeper cab that could pull the trailer from Dover to the Mars Bar people in Slough who wanted the peanuts I was carrying.
So I drove up through Bulgaria to Yugoslavia. It does have some stunning mountain scenery. A few miles further north at Belgrade, I turned left to Sagreb and thence to the Austrian border.
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Drivers on these long trips tended to drive. That sounds a bit obvious, but there is little incentive to waste time as the main desire is to get back home, pick up wages and look for the next high-earning trip. As I have mentioned, my routine was to rise with the sun. The trouble with travelling far south and through changing time zones is that your body is still working to Greenwich Mean Time and in any case, sitting in your own bubble universe, you don't need to react to local time. Consequently I woke each day when it was light. This was sometimes 2 am in 'my' time. I was in the habit of checking the trailer, in case someone had stolen any accessories, checking the water and oil (just for my own comfort, for the levels never changed much) and then start the 12 litre 330 bhp engine and set off in a cloud of smoke.
A couple of hours later I would stop for breakfast. Before leaving home I had decided to live entirely on food I could carry with me and chose to eat cold food throughout. Although many truckers had Primus stoves and could cook a hearty meal, I thought the complication too great. And too dangerous, not merely from having flames inside the cab, but from burns myself with hot fat. You may think I am exaggerating, but this is not so. At one border crossing where we were waiting for our documents to be returned to us, the hapless driver of an English right hand drive truck was just serving up a very English breakfast of bacon, eggs, beans and sausages when the Customs chap banged on his passenger door. For every other LH drive truck this was the driver's side, so the Customs official wasn't culpable. But this driver had his frying pan on the floor of the passenger foot-well, and as he opened the window and reached down to take the document pack, he stepped back into the frying pan, bare footed. He seared his right foot like a minute-steak and called upon the aid of God Almighty in tones of great anguish.
Squeezy cheese
My cold cuisine was wholesome with lots of variety. In those days you could get cheese in squeezy tubes like a large toothpaste tube. I carried Jacobs cream crackers with me and I mastered the art of squeezing a ring of cheese onto a square biscuit and eating it at 50 mph. I should remind you this was a left hand drive truck, so the engine was on my right. It was a very large block of vibrating, roaring power which was covered in a quilted tightly fitting plastic coated eiderdown. It was just about level and flat and ideal for culinary preparations. I had with me a 5 gallon plastic water container, and drank Penarth water for the month. Most drivers bought Coca Cola, but when it got warm it was less appealing. There was no refrigeration in the average truck in those days, so drivers hung a couple of bottles of Coke in a plastic bag from the external door mirror. These bottles were comfortably to hand when needed, and on removing one for a drink, the next could be put in the bag to cool.
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I had been driving about 500 miles a day and was feeling like a break, so I promised myself an evening away from the truck when I reached Saltzburg. I felt a Mozart concert would restore the spirits - I'd been listening to Simon and Garfunkel for three weeks.
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I crossed into Austria at Spielfeld well before lunchtime and even with the more exacting paper-trail required in western Europe, was on my way all too soon. Consequently I arrived in Salzburg in the middle of the afternoon and there was unlikely to be a concert until 7.30 pm. When you have a huge truck you avoid going into the city centre. I would need to find the ticket office of the concert hall and the prospect of a three hour wait was not attractive. Throughout the whole journey, the abiding passion had been to make progress, keep going and get back home as soon as possible. So the Mozart concert was abandoned and I continued on to the border with Germany, just at the boundary of the city of Saltzburg.
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With infinite attention to details the documents of truck, trailer, fuel tank and driver were approved and I was able to speed across Germany on the autobahn system. I was now back into Western Europe and driving records were essential. This was the time when Tachographs were just being introduced, but I still had the hand-written log book with carbon paper. I was required to write my driving times and breaks and I was warned by other drivers there was a real danger of being found out. It was said the Germans stamped your incoming documents at Salzburg with the time as well as the date. If you reached Aachen too soon, they might penalise you for speeding, but I escaped any meaningful check on leaving Germany.
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At this stage I was able to telephone the company and ask for a ferry booking to be made for the next day. I told them about the overweight trailer and was told to drive to Slough and if stopped, they'd find a solution. The next day I crossed the channel and was, indeed stopped on the hill leaving Dover. The check concerned driving hours and the vehicle wasn't weighed. When I reached Mars, they said:
'Don't stop here! Go across town to the fumigation plant. That load of sacks will be full of creepy-crawleys.' 'Now they tell me', I mumbled as I trundled another two miles.
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At the fumigation plant I was instructed to leave the trailer and go home - which I did. When you ditch a heavy trailer, the front half goes like a sports car. You can start off in 5, jump to 9, 13 and 16 as you speed down the M4. I returned home and unloaded my belongings before returning the lorry to its owner.
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I lived 'happily ever after' having enjoyed or endured an experience of a lifetime.