Chapter 3

On The Road For The First Time

Don roused my from my stiff and exhausted slumbers. No cup of tea, no gentle waking, just a quick punch on the arm and a hoarse whisper of “C’mon, Bernie, shift yer lardy arse, mush’

The first job to do was to start the trucks. I had had little experience of motor vehicles at this stage in my life having seldom even travelled in one, but these beasts were a major revelation. Bastardised and converted from a range of different sources, the array of vehicles on the recreation ground that morning only had one thing in common; any one of them would give a 21st century MOT tester an apoplectic fit.

I was dragged by Don to the front of a mid-sized AEC truck, where one of the other men was ramming an enormous crank handle through the front bumper. He lined it up so the crank was upright and then lashed a 20 foot length of ¾ inch rope to the handle. He, Don and I then took up position tug-o-war style, whilst the driver primed the engine. Then we heaved. It took four repeats before we managed to get the engine to fire and on each repeat, we were pulled almost off our feet by the sheer weight of the engine’s flywheel righting itself. When it did catch, the roar was deafening and we were immediately engulfed in clouds of thick, black, greasy smoke. As our colleague on the rope disengaged the starter handle from the bumper I heard him call to the driver, ‘You let the bastard stall and you’re on the f***ing rope next time!’ Since the road laws were still rudimentary, and the MOT test was still three years in the future, this vehicle, and many others lacked many of the features that later would be thought of as fundamental, such as a battery and a starter motor.

At this stage I thought we were ready to go but Mr Rose called us over to a stubby great monster of a truck that I recognised from my dad’s days with the Yanks, it was a Diamond T US Army truck. You could still see the outline of the white star-in-a-circle on the door, even though it had been painted over with new livery. The engine was already running and it had been manoeuvred to a heavily laden trailer which clearly held most of Mr Rose’s beloved Waltzer. Mr Rose wanted us to hitch up the trailer with a rigid drawbar. This wouldn’t have been too much of a strain if the whole lot had been on hard standing, but both truck and trailer were on the relatively soft grass of the Buckhurst Hill Municipal Recreation Ground and the recent rain had made the ground softer still. The trailer was very heavily laden and the truck had the two enormous Gardner diesel generators mounted on its back. It took a good ten minutes of grunting, sweating and swearing to get the two aligned and coupled together. I couldn’t help noticing as we did this that another group were coupling two other trailers together and manoeuvring them onto the road...without a tractor to pull them. I didn’t say anything because as the new boy, I presumed that everyone else knew what they were doing. Mr Rose drove the tractor-trailer combination off the rec and reversed it expertly up to the front of the twin trailers and the gang immediately coupled the dodgem trailer to the twinset. Mr Rose now had a ‘train’ of one huge six-wheeled tractor unit and three massively laden trailers behind it, the weight of the four pieces must have been in the region of thirty five ton tons!

Mr Rose beckoned to me to join him in the cab of the six-wheeler.

I climbed up the side of the vehicle and joined Mr Rose and a fellow he introduced as ‘Fred the Brakes’, I was wary enough not to ask the reason for the slightly odd name.

A lad ran down the side of the assembled convoy and each driver signalled that he was ready for the off and with a huge roar, massive clouds of oily black smoke and much grinding of gears, the mighty snake of vehicles set off at ten thirty precisely.

Conversation wasn’t an option that morning for two reasons; firstly the cab of the truck lacked any side windows and the noise of our own and other engines was so loud as to render any chit chat impossible. And secondly, it rapidly became clear that driving this rig required a concentration from all in the cab that was too great to allow the kind of multi-tasking that would, in later years contribute to many road accidents.

The Diamond T was a hard enough vehicle to drive anyway, but for reasons of economy, the original American petrol engine had been replaced with a British Gardner diesel engine. This was not a factory conversion, but a back-street garage job with a degree of ingenious improvisation. Added to that, the massive train that was behind us was in potential danger of snaking and so Mr Rose spent almost as much time looking in the wing mirrors, to keep the trailers aligned, as he did looking forward to see where he was going.

Fred’s unusual moniker also became clear every time we started down the slightest incline. The three trailers were generally a dead weight that caused massive strain on the Diamond’s engine, clutch and gearbox, but as soon as we were going down a slope, they threatened to become a runaway train of gravity-induced missile. Fred had a ratchet lever beside him, which was connected to each trailer by a complex system of steel cables. With Mr Rose orchestrating and Fred straining on the lever, the speed of the trailers was kept under control behind us.

Designed as a tractor to pull large artillery pieces across rough country for the US Army’s artillery regiments, the Diamond T had a high ground clearance, and to assist the crew in getting in and out of the cab, there are running-board steps beside the doors. The bonnet of the vehicle was virtually flat, parallel to the ground and about seven feet long. Either side of the bonnet was a long, flat-topped mudguard made of heavy steel.

The drizzle that had been with us the night before had returned and the windscreen slowly built up a surface of raindrops, soot and road grime that became more opaque with each hundred yards that we travelled. As the windscreen became less see- through, Mr Rose slowly, but perceptibly, began to lean forward and squint to see where we were going. I was just reaching that state of panic, where my reticence at questioning the boss was outweighed by my sense of self preservation, when Mr Rose pulled a big wad of cotton waste from under the seat, tossed it blind towards me and called across the cab, ‘Off you go, lad, I can hardly see a bloody thing’

‘What’s wrong with the wipers?’ I asked pointing to the large, rubber bladed wipers mounted in the roof of the cab. ‘They haven’t worked for three years...’ he replied with a wry smile, ‘..and that’s what we’ve got you for; you didn’t think we brought you for your good looks, did you?’

I stared at him dumbly; unless I misread the situation, he wanted me to climb out of a moving truck and wipe the windscreen from the outside. We might only be going at about 15 miles an hour but it still wasn’t a job I fancied at all. I was also acutely aware that the clouds ahead were darker and more foreboding than those above, and that we hadn’t yet covered eight miles since we set off. I also knew that we were heading for St. Alban’s, some thirty-five miles from Buckhurst Hill. He just had to be joking. Right?

I smiled at Mr Rose and rolled my eyes, to let him know that I got the joke. However, his face turned serious, ‘Lad, unless you want us all to be scraped off the pavement shortly, you are going to have to get out there and wipe that windscreen.’

Fred stared studiously ahead and it became quite clear that though this was no joke. It was also an important rite of passage. I had to prove myself. I took a deep breath and picked up the wad of cotton waste.

Opening the door and getting out on to the running board was easy, then I had to shuffle backwards and hang on for grim death whilst Fred pulled the door shut, locking me on the outside of the truck as it thundered along the road. Next, I had to shuffle forwards until I could get one foot onto the mudguard and therefore lean across the windscreen and wipe from the nearside pillar as far as I could. Mr Rose gave me a thumbs up and then pointed to the 30% or so of the windscreen on his side that was still filthy.

‘Oh, God’ I thought, ‘I’m actually going to have to lie on my belly across the bonnet to be able to reach.’

Had the vehicle still had its olive drab paintwork it would have been less slippery but the several layers of brush applied gloss paint, wet with rain, were a slick as a frying pan, and nearly as hot.

I searched for something solid to hold on to in order to carry out this death-defying feat, ironically the only thing that I could both see and reach was the unserviceable windscreen wiper, and even that didn’t look too solid.

With my heart in my mouth, I grabbed for it and spread-eagled myself as much as I could across the top of the bonnet, through my clothes it was pleasantly warm after the cold of the cab, but I didn’t let myself get lulled into a sense of security. I quickly wiped the windscreen clean and slithered sideways back to the mudguard and then the running board. Once I was at the very back of the running board step, I called to Fred to let me back in. Needless to say, the bastard feigned deafness and asked Mr Rose if he could hear a squeaking noise. After a few seconds, which seemed like hours, they let me back in and the cab seemed warm and safe after the bonnet.

After a few minutes of silence Mr Rose turned to Fred with a smile and said, ‘See, I told you it could be done, we just needed to find someone stupid enough to do it!’

If I’d been a bigger man I’d have brained the twat.

We were heading for St. Albans and, in those days, the roads were pretty empty on a Sunday. Our average speed must have been in the region of ten to fifteen miles an hour, but when we came to climb a hill, it dropped to less than walking pace. If a hill was steep in any way the train we had; three heavily laden trailers behind a relatively underpowered and over-laden truck, just couldn’t make it. So the showmen had a complicated but effective method of getting everything up the slope.

Whilst the rest of the convoy trundled past up the hill, Mr Rose stopped the Diamond T at the foot of the hill as close as he could get to the start of the climb. We didn’t need to find a lay-by, the traffic was so light that it didn’t really matter that we blocked our side of the carriageway. Fred applied the brakes on the train and then, leaving the engine running, Mr Rose, Fred and I all leapt out of the cab. We ran back and hand locked the brakes on the second and third trailer and then chocked each of the trailer’s rear wheels with timber packing from the belly boxes. We then uncoupled the second trailer leaving the tractor and the first of the trailers ready to tackle the hill. We got back in the cab and slowly, with much grinding of gears and gouts of greasy, black smoke, we hauled the remaining trailer to the top of the hill. There we parked up, braked, chocked and uncoupled the first trailer, leaving it with the rest of the convoy, who, by now had parked up and made a brew or even lunch for us all. After a cuppa, Mr Rose carried out a forty-seven-point turn of the Diamond T and headed back down the hill. Another forty-seven-point turn put the truck in front of the trailers and the process was then repeated twice to get all of the train to the top of the hill. Then everything was coupled up again and after a delay of a couple of hours, we were back en route.