Like housemaids, tinkers and gynaecologists, truckers tend to exist at the periphery of our consciousness, shadowy figures up to something beefy in the provinces. Truth be told, until Brian Finke informed me about truckers, I didn’t know what one was.
Brian Finke: You know, Lady Mary. The men who drive the big lorries on the motorway?
Lady Mary Crawley: Would you like a cup of tea, dear?
Brian Finke: You must have seen them all parked up in the service stations?
Lady Mary Crawley: It’s time for Winterbottom to dust the peke for fleas.
However, since sitting with Mr Finke, looking at his lovely pictures and hearing his tales of truckerly derring-do in overlit cafeterias and unsavoury lavatories the length and breadth of the Colonies, I confess to having become curiously fascinated; in a fluttering, D.H. Lawrence kind of way. They are just so manly. A latter-day hybrid of pirate, highwayman, gypsy and village idiot. They have grizzled jowls, stained undershirts stretched across vast plains of surplus tissue and bee-stung lips flecked with brown saliva. They make no concessions to any etiquette other than their own. With unashamedly frightful table manners, they fork indeterminate matter into their graveyard-toothed mouths like the orangutans of Borneo, before going on to expel titanic bouts of flatulence into their little mobile carriages while listening to middle-aged men in cowboy hats singing songs about how proud they are to be dreadful. Their speech is coarse and guttural – bronze-age hominids chuntering giddily over bones and whittled sticks and little dollops of animal excretia.
And yet I find myself, of late, waking in the night in a skein of perspiration, my dreams full of them. I feel their rough palms on my shoulders, their knuckles sprung with hairs thick as the legs of the common garden spider. I gaze into the sallow pools of their eyes, all moist and slippery and yellow with amphetamine and inexpensive beer. I feel their breath on my cheek, like a warm Mistral from the rectum of Satan himself. The insistent nudge of their bellies – like giant facsimiles of starving Biafran children – all pregnant with appalling promise.
And then I ring the bell and Mrs Bunyon comes and tucks me in, strokes my hair and whispers tales from Beatrix Potter in a voice coarse as a mangel-wurzel; just as she has since the days when I nursed at her breast, like some giant deflating dirigible, because Mama found it disgusting and anyway, it ruins one’s bosom.
I do hope Mr Finke comes over for tea again soon. For an American, he’s really quite convivial. By the way, would you care for a glass of sherry, my dear?
Lady Mary Crawley
