HITCH-HIKING: Melosina Lenox-Conynghammisses the pleasures and pitfalls of thumbing a lift
IN SPITE OF the spiralling price of petrol, I was sitting in a traffic jam surrounded by other car owners alone in their cars. We were all going in the same direction. Why not double up? Why not hitch-hike? So when I wanted to buy milk in the village, I stood on the side of the small road near my house.
No vehicle passed except the "Pet Taxi". It was going the wrong way, but stopped for a chat while Blackie, once a sad stray, barked ungratefully at me from his seat in the van. He was being driven for his daily walk in Riverside Park. I retreated home for a milkless lunch. When I tried again, I was picked up by a woman who told me that in her youth, she had hitch-hiked the 15 miles to work every day, though she would not encourage her daughters to do it now.
Then there was a long, long wait when I wished I had bought a book on identifying hedgerow plants. Only enormous lorries or busy vans passed by. Eventually, a Polish builder who had just been laid off took me into the village. I had a lift home with a local and got the news of the neighbourhood.
My first experience of hitchhiking was when I was a student in France. My American roommate and I set off from Grenoble. We had no backpacks, but carried bags and suitcases at great inconvenience to ourselves and to whoever was giving us a lift.
For the protection of our persons, we took with us a pepper pot with which we planned to blind our attackers, though if anyone threatened us, we would have had to ask them to wait while we searched for the pepper pot among our luggage.
It was a far better way of improving our French than the dull old lectures we had attended. The people who picked us up were diverse and eager to chat. We learnt about the hardships of being a plumber - actually, for me this was more physical than academic, as I had to crouch in the back of the plumber's little van among the tools of his trade. When the plumber took both hands off the wheel in order to emphasise the intricacies of a double inlet joint, the little van swung across the road and I was banged on the head by a couple of loose pipes.
One couple who picked us up were engaged in a titanic row that we might have caused, as they indicated with a wave of the hand or shake of the fist in our direction. We trembled in the back, trying to follow the insults, but our French was not up to it. The car slammed to a stop to allow them become more physicallyinvolved, and we bundled out so fast we left a bag of doughnuts behind.
A few years later I was holidaying by myself in Norway and took the train from Oslo to Bergen. My reserved seat was beside an American girl who had been in Europe for too long. She had condensed her experiences into very personal anecdotes. Paris was where the American Express office had been closed; she had been real sick in Rome; the heel of her shoe had broken in Vienna, or was it Athens. The sun streamed through the mountains and into our train window. "It is beauty to the right, beauty to the left, but gee, you get sick of beauty," she said as she snapped down the blinds.
We stopped at a very small station and I abandoned the train, to find there was no train until the next day, nor any accommodation. The porter-cum-ticket collector had to take me home with him so his wife could give me coffee. He suggested that I should take to hitching. I thumbed many lifts over the next two weeks, going up to the Arctic Circle. Most of the people who picked me up were interesting, though the roads were so frightening, with steep precipices on one side and cliffs on the other, that my mind was not always on their conversation or on the remarkable views. There was a German who drove me up a series of hairpin bends at breakneck speed while he told me how only cowards drove slowly through the mountains. I made him let me out on a desolate mountain so that I could be sick and walked eight miles to the nearest village.
The only other frightening experience I had was with two youths who had picked me up in the very far north and hardly spoke to me all day. I was looking out at the scrubby landscape where there was little sign of habitation. Suddenly, the car turned off the road and up a barely discernible track. This, I thought, was it. I wondered whether my mangled body would ever be found. The car pulled up at a little old farmhouse beside which an elderly couple were turning hay. They greeted us with delight, and pressed us to coffee and cakes in their parlour hung with lace curtains and photographs. They were, it was eventually explained, the driver's uncle and aunt.
Hitch-hiking is meant to be the prerogative of the young and poor, but why? I have to realise that I am no longer one and twenty and definitely do not have the same appeal as in my youth, but then my grey hair looks so respectable that I must be considered much less likely to mug the driver.
So, if you see a woman with a shopping bag on the road, remember that if you give her a lift, there will be one less car on the road and one more place to park your car in town.