VT Coughtrey - on the road

NOTES	As I wandered aimlessly southwards across Parliament Hill Fields and through Kentish Town, I tried desperately to shut my mind off to the reality of what I was doing - disappearing without trace and not just for a few days this time. It was as though I was trying to slam a door shut and think only of future adventure, but icy blasts of terrible guilt and remorse kept striking me. All I could do was tell myself that I had absolutely no alternative. The Fates were in charge of events.
	When I reached St Pancras station I decided to camp for the night on one of the benches that all main-line terminal stations had in row upon row like church pews in those more civilized times. (Of course, it was people like me who caused them all to be removed, eventually). I found a discarded Evening News and read in it an item about a large house in Lutterworth in Leicestershire, which could not be sold, even at a ridiculously low price, because it was said to be haunted. That was it ! I would go there and in some way or other make a fortune out of it. Perhaps, for example, the wealthy owner would pay me a large sum for staying there and proving that there were no ghosts. Perhaps, having moved in I could say there certainly were ghosts after all, and make another packet out of the newspapers.
	I was so fired up by these brilliant ideas that after a couple of hours on the bench I set off, northwards. My idea was to walk back to Barnet, arriving very early in the morning to avoid being spotted by any of the very many people of the town who knew my mother, then hitch from there to Lutterworth. It was simply that I knew that Leicestershire was somewhere north, and Barnet was the place to start from if you wanted to go north. (The M1 began at Watford then, so most hitchers and even a lot of lorry drivers still used the Great North Road).
	After the three hour walk I arrived at the usual hitching place on Hadley Green at three or four in the morning. This was my very first attempt at hitching, my first experience of waiting by the side of a main road for an hour or two, increasingly poisoned by fumes, getting colder and colder and being zombiefied by the rythmic repetition of vehicle noise. All this is of course compounded by the strange feeling of rejection experienced by the lone hitcher as driver after driver ignores his thumb or, worse, hoots in derision. Then comes the golden moment when somebody actually stops.
	The first person ever to stop for me was a lorry driver. In a way, this was not surprising, because very few private motorists would have been driving overnight in those days. It wouldn’t have surprised me anyway, because I was under the same illusion as most other people, that lifts were generally given by lorry drivers. In fact, the era of lifts in lorries was already over as far as male hitchers were concerned. The private motorist had taken over that role, while the Knights of the Road concentrated on lone girls, many of whom were prostitutes operating out of the old-style transport cafés. (Does this still go on?).
	Anyway, my lorry driver seemed a congenial sort. He told me that the Great North Road was no good for Leicestershire, but that I might as well go with him as far as Huntingdon, where he could point me in the right direction. As we passed Hatfield I felt the thrill of adventure. At nine miles from Barnet, it was the furthest north I had hitherto been. When we got to Huntingdon my companion explained that the reason he was able to put me on the right road for Leicestershire was that he in fact lived in a place called Ellington, which was on that road, and he was minded to stop off there for breakfast. Upon arrival, he invited me in to share it. I was very happy about this, as I had had nothing to eat since my mother’s sandwiches about twenty hours earlier. After a very good breakfast, he invited me to take a shower, which was also very welcome. But when he called out that I needn’t bother to put my clothes back on as he was very broadminded, I began to suspect that all was not well. I emerged from the bathroom fully clothed to find to my horror that he wasn’t. I left in a hurry, feeling on the one hand alarmed because he looked as though he were thinking of restraining me and on the other hand guilty on account of the poor man’s tearful disappointment. My first encounter with a lorry driver had been a bit of a surprise.
	I started hitching again and got a lift to Kettering. There, I ascertained how to get to Lutterworth, but could get no lifts at all and had to walk all the way. I don’t know how far that would have been or how long it took (about twelve hours I expect) but I was in a bit of a state by the time I got there. I made one or two enquiries in the street about a haunted house, but nobody knew what I was talking about and I found I had neglected to bring the newspaper article with me. Freezing cold, desperately hungry and very dispirited, I thought of turning to the vicar for help. I located the vicarage and rang the bell. The vicar appeared and I asked him if he could put me up for the night. I was astonished when he said "Don’t be ridiculous! There are far too many of your type wandering about the country. Stick your thumb out, get back to where you came from and find yourself some work to do!".
	At that moment my atheism took on a quite different flavour. Up to now it had been an intellectual affair, part and parcel of Marxist or Regenesian theory and a matter of principle on an "I beg to differ" basis. Certainly, it might have been necessary to shoot a few vicars, come the Revolution. This was the ultimate fate of those with whom one begged to differ, but there was nothing personal in it. In fact I'd hitherto thought of vicars as nice, do-gooding cuddly people - possibly the best of folk, only misguided. Suddenly they were truly with the enemy, a totally cynical and unprincipled part of the general capitalist conspiracy. Extraordinary though it may seem, and in the face of all common sense, my view of ministers of religion has never quite recovered from that one trivial incident of so long ago.
	Anyway, I dossed somewhere, probably in a bus shelter, overnight and trudged on to Leicester in the morning. In Leicester, I went into a Citizen’s Advice Bureau, in much the same spirit that I had called on the vicar. That's to say, I had a vague notion that they were connected in some way with good works, so no doubt they would help me. As a matter of fact I scored in this case. Nowadays you would get very short shrift if you walked into a CAB and said you you were cold, hungry, unwashed and had nowhere to sleep. Not their department. But I regard that CAB in Leicester in March ’65 as my first intimation that ’The Sixties’ had started; that five-year period when a substantial minority of mostly middle-class young people (and a few older ones) briefly entered a new world of tolerance, liberalism, experimentation and - well, you name it! The girl I encountered there was the first of many of a certain Sixties type of female that I was to meet over the next few years. They were militantly generous and helpful, sometimes to the point of masochistic self-sacrifice. Occasionally they were willing to give you anything at all, if they thought it would make you happy. Certainly none of them minded being asked in my experience.
Well, there's still a hostel in Ashleigh Road, but not run by the Church Army. It seems that they've long since got rid of most of their hostels.	This particular one happily made me sandwiches and coffee, allowed me to have a wash in the kitchen and invited me to hang around until closing time. She called the local Church Army hostel and persuaded them to take me in for the night and, after work, drove me over there, to Ashleigh Road, Braunston. Does that little hostel still exist?