A Pleasant Job For A Qualified Passenger

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30278, 2 November 1963, Page 8

A Pleasant Job For A Qualified Passenger

(By EDWARD HY AMS in the “Financial Times”)

To those country noises celebrated by 24 generations of English poets—the song of the lark, the mournful but pleasant mewing of gulls, the cawing of rooks, the mooing of cows, the grunting of pigs (hitherto, however, uncelebrated, that one), the hooting of owls, the crowing of cocks, and the high, thin voice of the bats if you are young enough to detect it—must be added nowadays, of course, a number of the hideous mechanical sounds with which advancing technology has blessed us.

The noise of a tractor at work is not offensive; and one soon gets used to the rhythmic thumping of toe baler. The modern farmworker’s car makes no more noise, as a rule, than the city worker’s. But the motor-saw for tree-felling, with its unsilenced little two-stroke engine, makes a noise probably unequalled in any city, a noise which, if toe thing is within 50 yards, is well above toe threshold of pain. Second to it is toe farmworker’s moped or small motor-cycle. We had, in our village, and for that matter we still have, a man of romantic disposition who acquired, as a means of locomotion, a “scramble” or racing motorbike. It was quite unsilenced, its owner having an almost Italian feeling about noise, that is $o

say the more uproar she makes, toe more sure he is that he’s alive and well

For some reason connected with his work he, for about 10 days, was in the habit of starting up this contrivance at just about the time in the evening when the village mothers were getting the babies off to sleep. The police, not only locally but all over England, must, I think, have some perverse love of noise, for they rarely invoke the law which, however inadequate, does exist to check this sort of nuisance.

But the young fathers of our village set an example which the whole nation might follow: a group of them tacitly accepted by the rest as natural spokesmen or leaders informed the owner of the machine in question that if he made that noise just once again, both he and his bike would find themselves in the river. It was enough.

The acquisition of motor vehicles by farm-workers has led to prosperous days, during the last seven or eight years, to my respected acquaintance, Mr P., an old-age pensioner now in his eightyseventh year. Mr P. is toe grandfather in a family of smallholding fanners who grow some corn, keep some cows, pigs and sheep, have an apple and a plum orchard. I calculate that in toe course of his life, Mr P. has, by unremitting toil, provided food, or at least toe basic foods, tor 24 of his fellow-country-men: he has at toe same time raised a family whose members now have families whose members are about to have families. Most of this tribe are engaged in producing food, like their father and grandfather before them.

For his services to his country and to humanity, Mr P. has received, taking his whole working life into account, that is during a period of 74 years, a good deal less than £2OOO. Nor, ignoring the pittance given him by the State which serves, with great care, to keep a man or woman from actual starvation, is Mr P. a burden now to his family or to his country; he still works, gathering and chopping kindling, attending to poultry, helping in the dairy. In addition he practises a trade which, as far as I know, he invented: at least, he is the only professional Learner Driver’s Passenger of my acquaintance.

It is illegal, of course, for any Learner Driver to drive his car on toe public highway without a pasenger who must hold a full and valid driving licence. Most of our farm workers who buy cars —those, that is, with families who therefore prefer a car to a motor-bike—can handle a tractor, a reaper-binder, even perhaps a bulldozer, with skill and confidence. But they still need to get a licence to drive a car and to go through the usual test, or rather tests, for they very rarely pass at the first attempt. One friend of mine has failed twice <m toe grounds that he drove too slowly; probably he is so accustomed to toe speed of has tractor, or toe stately and rather shiplike progress of toe enormous

combine harvester which he pilots with such dignity, that anything in excess of 20 miles an hour seems to him dangerous which, of course, it is. These things being so, the new owners of cars need a licensed driver to sit beside them when they drive into

the market town or take their families for a ride. Mr P. is that passenger, and for his services in sitting beside them he receives a consideration. I do not know what it is; it is not necessarily in coin; and if I did know I would not tell, for like all working. pensioners Mr P. is in constant anxiety, lest the State, finding him out in adding to that enonnous sum of £2OOO which he has received for 70 years, probably about 300,000 hours, hard work—it comes to about three halfpence an hour—dock his miserable pension. Mr P.’s services as a Professional Passenger have become so well-known and so much in demand that he has been obliged, like other specialists, to keep a note of his professional appointments; one of has granddaughters

acts as his secretary, writing toe appointments on an old piece of roofing alate which hangs by the back door.

As to Mr P.’s professional qualifications, they are of interest. Bom in 1876, by toe year 1900 he had already worked for 11 years as a farm-boy and on the family holding. He was not satisfied about his future prospects. A friend, servant in a great house, roused his interest in a machine recently bought by his employer, a Benz motorcar. The landowner in question drove toe thing himself; Mr P. offered to learn to drive it and look after it, to become in fact, a chauffeur-mechanic.

The suggestion was accepted, and Mr P. practised this new trade until 1914. Whenever it was that driving licences became necessary, Mr P. acquired one. From 1914 to 1918 be was driving lorries and old London buses in France. But in 1919, after be-

ing demobilised, he returned to the land, having married a local girl during his first leave from France.

Religiously, year after year, Mr. P. has renewed his driving licence; his reason for doing so was purely social, and in no sense economic; he had no occasion nor opportunity to drive. His father, later himself, thereafter his sons, had not the means to mechanise the small-holding; they continued to use horses for toe work of drawing plough, harrow and reaper. Not until toe second World War was it possible for them to have a tractor; and then, of course, it was toe sons and grandsons who operated it. Mr P. stuck to horses until he gave up the heavier sorts of work altogether as his strength failed.

No, his reason was that, in his view, the possession of a driving licence confers a certain status on a man; in his young manhood it was, indeed, sort of professional or trade diploma; and although it cost a hard-to-eam 5s a year, br whatever it is now, he would no more think of saving the money and going without the useless document, than an impoverished landowner who never goes near London can quite bring himself to cancel his subscription to at least one good club. And this, as I have explained, turned out very well in toe end; for it is, of course, toe possession of the driving licence, one over fifty years old, and granted, as they all were until quite recently, without any kind of driving test, which enables Mr P. to make himself so very useful to his fellow-parishioners, and at toe same time to earn a little something for the family and himself. It is to Mr P. that toe police

the State, look, in all those motor-cars he rides in for so many hours of every week, to make sure that the Learners he accompanies do nothing dangerous, make no fatal technical blunders; it is to him that they look to take over the cars if the Learners accompanied by him get into some motoring situation which is beyond their skill. And this, I thought was not bad for a man nearing 90 when he came, one day, with a grandson, to give his advice in the matter of an old yewtree which we had felled and were finding it difficult to move without damaging a valuable stand of other trees. It was he, once and for some years a forester, who advised that the bole be split in situ; his grandson set about it with such wedges as we had but they were clearly inadequate. Mr P. had, he said, a wedge at the farmhouse which would be the very thing; he would go and fetch it. Now the distance is a mile and it is up hill all the way and although Mr P. is hale and straight still, one does not forget his great age. “Don’t walk it” I said, “take the car. its in the drive.” Mr P. chuckled. “Why, Lord bless you m’dear,” said the whole district’s professional Learner’s Passenger, ”1 couldn’t do ■that Must be aU of three and forty years since I touched a steering wheel, can’t see out of me left eye nor much out of me right come to that No. no, m’dear, TO just walk over the hill, ’less you like to drive me.”

I drove him; by the time we reached his house, say four minutes, the old man was asleep. He apologised for that saying that it was force of habit; he always slept he said riding in a motor-car.