Daventry
March 31, 2010 by admin
Filed under Linger Longer
Linger Longer: Driving the Trans-Siberian
Chapter 2: Daventry
Before I can say “naturellement, quand la slitude me pese
un peu, je me parle a moi-meme, ou a mes betes, en particulier
a mon chien”, Chris strikes up the Sierra’s sixteen
year-old engine and drives the car off the ferry onto French
soil. It seems strange that not more than three hours ago
we were stuck in a traffic jam on the M25, and now we’re
in a different country surrounded by weird road signs,
weird number plates and weird people who speak a foreign
language and eat frogs legs for their tea.
‘Well, here goes,’ Chris grins, pulling away from customs
control.
‘Yeah, n’ailez-pas! Ma-un-ami-a-une-chambre-avecdouche.’
‘You what?’
‘It means, “don’t go! My friend has a room with a shower”.’
‘I thought you did German at school?’
‘I did, but when in Rome, Chris, when in Rome. You
never know when a little bit of French might come in
handy, if you know what I mean?’
‘Uh … yeah, I know exactly what you mean,’ Chris nods.
‘So where are we heading first?’ I ask, opening the road
map out on my knee. ‘I can’t remember what we said. I
think we decided to go north into Belgium, didn’t we?’
‘Yeah, from Calais to Belgium, Germany to Eastern
Europe, through the Baltic States into Russia, and then
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head east over the Ural Mountains, across the entire length
of Siberia until we hit Vladivostok and the Sea of Japan,’
Chris replies, turning to me with a smug grin.
‘Bliemy, is that it? You make it sound like we’re about to
go on a Sunday drive with Grandma.’
I peer down at the map and slide my finger across the
globe from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. The distance is
immense. For a start, Siberia alone is BIG. It’s so big you
can scoop up the whole of the US and drop it into Siberia
without even touching the sides. Add to this Alaska and
all of the European countries, except Eastern Russia, and
still there would be an incredible 300,000 square miles of
territory left.
‘If either of us want to chicken out, we should say so
immediately,’ Chris mutters, indicating onto the A16 to
‘I’m not chickening out. Are you chickening out?’
‘Piss off! I didn’t pay sixty pounds for a Russian business
visa for the fun of it, you know.’
‘What about the Russian Mafia and the KGB? Knowing
our luck we’ll be kidnapped by Chechen terrorists and
held hostage in a dirty shed for fifty years.’
‘Nah, we’ll be all right, Si.’
‘How the fuck do you know?’
‘Well … I don’t, but it’ll be OK. Trust me.’
‘I suppose things do seem to have improved since Putin
came on the scene.’
Chris frowns. ‘Putin?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘But that was years ago, wasn’t it?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. He only came into power in 2000,
since he left the KGB and worked his way into politics. I
saw him recently standing outside Number Ten with Tony.’
‘Oh … you mean Vladimir Putin!’ Chris smiles. ‘The
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Russian President.’
‘Yes. Who did you think I was talking about?’
‘I thought you meant the dude with the big beard from
the eighteenth century.’
‘What dude with the big beard from the eighteenth century?’
‘You know … the old Putin.’
‘Chris, I don’t know who you’re talking about.’
‘He saw a vision of the Virgin while working in the
fields and started a cult.’
I narrow my eyes with irritation. ‘You’re talking shit!’
‘No I’m not, you know who I mean. He charmed
Catherine the Great with his beliefs that sinning through
sex, then repenting could bring people closer to God. His
orgies were legendary. Come on, Si, don’t be a dipshit, you
must have heard of him.’
‘Wait a minute!’
‘What?’
‘His name wasn’t Putin.’
‘Wasn’t it?’
‘No. It was Rasputin, you fool!’
Chris clicks his fingers. ‘That’s the one, Grigory Rasputin
… the priest of sex. What a genius that man was.’
Six months ago, Chris and I travelled across the US in a
brown van called Hank. Returning home after such an
amazing journey had been an anti-climax. For the first few
days we were treated like respected explorers – our presence
to our family and friends had been a novelty, but
sadly this quickly disappeared and before we knew it reality
kicked in.
I hadn’t lived at home for nearly eight years, not since I
first flew the nest to go to college in London, and the idea
of moving back to our mother’s house in the small market
town of Daventry was daunting to say the least. I was a 27
year-old man and dumping my rucksack on the floor of
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my old bedroom, which hadn’t changed much since the
day I’d left, could only feel like regression. What struck
me the most about being back home was how people
appeared to have little concept of what we had seen, or
the effect our journey might have had on our lives. As far
as they were concerned we’d been on a little holiday, got
the travelling out of our system and we would now settle
down again – slip back into working life and a career.
Continue on as we had before.
Within a matter of weeks, we decided the only way to
combat the travellers blues was to quickly find some
short-term work – pay off our debts, store up some cash
and buy ourselves some options. We didn’t know where
our next journey would take us, and smoking the last of
our duty free cigarettes out of the kitchen door we’d spend
most evenings trying to devise a cunning plan.
Daventry held a lot of memories from my childhood. I
had gone to the local school until the age of sixteen – it
was where I had kissed a girl for the first time, experienced
my first fight. There were old class mates still living
in Daventry that I hadn’t spoken to since those days,
and the idea of bumping into them in town made me feel
unreasonably uncomfortable. I feared their questions. What
have you been up to over the past ten years? What are you
doing now? All I could think about was the negatives. How
could I answer their questions without looking like a freak?
‘Are you married?
‘Uh … no, I’m single right now.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘I’m living with my mum at the moment.’
‘With your mum? I heard you’d moved to London.’
‘Yeah, I did for a while, but I decided to leave.’
‘Why would you come back to Daventry? Someone told
me you had a really good job.’
Mentioning my fears to Chris, he had tried to put my mind
at rest.
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‘Don’t worry about it, Si, school was years ago. Nobody
gives a shit about what you’re doing now. So you’re living
with your mummy, who cares!’
‘But what if I bump into Kerry Middleton?’
‘Kerry Middleton? She was your girlfriend when you
were fourteen, wasn’t she?’
‘Yeah.’
Chris sighs. ‘That was fucking years ago. She’s probably
married with three kids by now. She doesn’t give a fuck
about you.’
‘Three kids! Do you reckon?’
‘Si, this is Daventry. People settle down a lot younger
around here.’
‘OK, what about a job, then? We’re going to have to work
in a warehouse with scumbags. What if we end up working
with the Depford brothers? I don’t think I could do it.’
‘Si, you’re living in the past, mate. All those lads are either
in prison or they’ve moved away. Besides, you’re forgetting
something.’
‘What?’
‘They were young kids back then. They only seemed
scary because you were a kid yourself. You’re a twentyseven
year old man now. It’s different.’
‘Do you reckon?’
‘Of course it is! All those lads got girls pregnant when
they were eighteen. They don’t want to fight anymore,
they’ve got responsibilities.’
‘But what will the people be like in the factories? What
if they take the piss out of my hair?’
‘Si, believe me, it’ll be OK.’
Determined not to return to the mundane world of the
office, I agreed to stay true to our plan and we quickly
found temporary work in a gigantic freezer on an industrial
estate close to our mother’s house. From the Nevada desert
and the Caribbean beaches of Mexico, to an ice cold dis-
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tribution warehouse in the East Midlands. It certainly
took a while for us both to get used to the change in temperature,
but nothing was going to stop us from saving up
some cash and doing another drive.
Our first night in the freezer had been an education.
Emerging from the changing rooms wearing steel toe-capped
boots, insulated dungarees and a large thick ski jacket that
made you look twice your normal size, we were ordered
to sit in the canteen and await instructions. To say I was
nervous would be an understatement. I had never worked
in a manual job before. Hunched over tables at 7 o’clock in
the evening, the room fell silent as a large man in a high
visibility vest entered the canteen and made his presence
known.
‘Right now, guys!’ he bellowed. ‘Great shift last night,
we picked seventy four thousand in total with no accidents
to report. The forecast for tonight is ninety thousand.
We’ve got a few new lads starting on the agency, so
we shouldn’t have a problem. OK, let’s get working. Big
push, lads, big push!’
On that note, everyone stood up and headed for the
freezer. A man with thick stubble nudged past me.
‘Good luck,’ he growled in my ear.
We had been warned by our employment agency that the
work in the freezer was tough, but nothing was to prepare
us for that first night. The place was like an enormous
prison. The supervisors were our prison guards, walking
around the factory spying on the workers and looking
down from metal walkways. You couldn’t stop for two
seconds without one of them shouting at you. To the
sound of loud thrash metal blasting from speakers around
the warehouse, we lifted heavy boxes through the night.
The only way to stay warm was to work, and the only way
to stay sane was to think that with every hour that passed
we were one step closer to being free again.
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I wouldn’t say working in the freezer had been any better,
or worse, than my experience working in an office. In
fact, after a few weeks I actually started to enjoy my new
life as a factory worker. There was a real sense of achievement
stacking boxes and loading lorries. We were distributing
frozen food to the nation. We had a purpose, and finding
many of my fellow workers to be very decent, intelligent
men, there reached a point where I would actually look
forward to a good nights graft. My fears of working in a
factory had suddenly disappeared. For the years I worked
in mundane office jobs, I had heard people consoling
themselves with lines like, “At least we’re not digging the
roads”. This statement no longer made any sense to me,
and I quickly began to realise that the only negative aspect
of work in any environment is that if you solely rely on a
wage to support your existence…you’re a slave to it.
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