Chapter 15: To the Moto!

Cambridge to Wolverhampton

Birmingham

I got out by the M25 and was immediately thrust into the humdrum rumble of city life. I rattled home on the Metropolitan line, watching the expressionless faces bobbing this way and that in unison with the train. There were no conversations to be had. It filled up steadily as we clattered into town and by the time we got there I was standing. There were people of every persuasion, size, shape, and age dressed in every kind of clothing, hats and beards, electric dresses, tweed coats, saris, hijabs and drab grey suits. It was Pride and people with sparkled eyelids and magnificent costumes came and went. London was a different world to the roadside I’d inhabited for the last month.

I got off the tube and a small woman in a headscarf pressed into me and looked up at me with a sad, pleading look. “Please sir,” she said, tears bubbling in her large eyes, “it’s my daughter’s birthday and I haven’t got anything to give her…” I gave her some money feeling I owed the world something after the kindness I’d been shown. She wanted more and I relented again, giving her another note. Still, she persisted and with nothing else to give I had to walk away, feeling nothing but guilt. It was strange being back in the city. In the countryside, poverty hides inside while kindness walks down the street. In the city, kindness hides inside while poverty lies in the street. I immediately missed the outside world.

It was a few weeks before I managed to hitchhike again. 6 weeks to be exact. I had to earn some money and the rhythmless routine of doing so made the eclectic conversations and spurred excitement of my trip all but a fond memory. The city has no equivalent to hitchhiking, in my experience at least, and meaningful interactions with strangers are hard to come by.

It was a planned journey to Manchester that inspired me to dust off my thumb and get on the roadside once more. I confess though, I nearly didn’t bother. As with the start of every journey, you question the point. I could get the train, or even the bus, I thought, and I knew I’d be there at an exact time. The bus cost less than £10 I noticed as I tempted myself. Routine breeds routine and the random, unknowing element of hitchhiking seemed an inconvenience rather than something to be sought and celebrated.

Fortunately, I overcame the urge for security and found myself standing by junction 14 of the M11 one Monday morning. The network of roundabouts and slip roads was fresh, the tarmac shone, and it felt like a brand-new housing estate with no one living in it. Very few cars passed and again doubt crept into my mind about why I’d decided to do such a stupid thing as hitchhiking.

A car pulled over with taxi plates on it. There was a slightly awkward conversation in which I tried to explain I wasn’t looking for a taxi. He peered at me like I was a weirdo before driving off leaving me alone again.

After exactly half an hour, a young man driving to Birmingham picked me up. I jumped in, feeling the familiar hit of excitement. All the anxieties and fears drained away, replaced by convivial conversation and the exhilaration of a new connection.

The driver's name was Julien and he was mature for 20. He sat in his seat cooly, his elbow on the window, unperturbed by the presence of a total stranger in his car. He had black curly hair, that hung over his forehead and was shaved neatly above his ears. He was on his way back to uni several weeks before term started to get ahead with some work. When term began he was a busy man. Birmingham’s massive student population were ripe game for the nights he ran and he had his own company stradling nightclub events in Birmingham and his home city of Cambridge. By strange coincidence, he lived on the same road in Cambridge as my old school. Julien DJ’d a fair bit too and the back of the car was full of equipment and all the clobber required to move into a new uni house. He’d decided this year to live on his own so he could make as much noise as he wanted.

We talked about his mechanical engineering degree and his father’s job. He ran an engineering company that specialised in cleaning niche parts of oil rigs and tankers based in Baku. Judging from the smart Audi we were in and the shining watch on his wrist I guessed it did quite well.

He told me how he’d spent the first half of his life in Azerbaijan and how his parents had met out there. He was in fact half Azeri but had done his secondary schooling in Britain. He liked it in Baku and he liked it in Britain too. He’d also just returned from a year abroad spent in Salt Lake City and he liked it there too. It was a strange place he thought, everything was incomprehensibly massive, nothing more so than the landscape that stretched on forever and ever. It was amazing how you could be right in it so quickly he explained, hiking or cycling or just driving down the dead straight desert roads. The sense of freedom was infectious and he wanted to move back when he got his degree. He told me how the lakes and reservoirs were drying up, how the waterlines were lower than they’d ever been and how barrels, cars and even bodies were being discovered for the first time.

We got on well and the long road to Birmingham was behind us in no time. Coming off the motorway that crawled with a million cars we dropped down underneath to a petrol station where he left me. I looked bemused at the map, trying to figure out which of the countless strands of grey spaghetti led onto the road to Manchester. Huge concrete pillars rose up imposingly above, obscuring the sunlight and plunging the dirty, litter-filled world below into an exhaust-ridden darkness. The deafening noise of engines vibrated through the thick air. It felt like one of Piranesi's hellish ‘imaginary prisons’ where endless staircases and infernal machines twist into each other, locking you inside his horrifying vision.

My prospects for hitching didn’t look good either as I stood by a fierce metal gate, trying to catch eyes with the drivers as they avoided my gaze at the lights.

Birmingham.

Fortunately, though it didn’t take long for someone to stop. It was another taxi and I thought my luck was out but the driver was friendly and welcoming. I explained I was hitchhiking and he looked momentarily offended. “Of course!” He said, beckoning me in. He knew the score.

His name was Yusuf and he embraced my hand with a large warm handshake as we pulled out of the darkness onto the crawling M6 above. The first drops of rain the country had had for weeks speckled the windscreen tentatively, desperately trying to end the drought that had quietly gripped the summer.

Yusuf began by telling me how much he loved travelling. He’d hitchhiked before and he loved the sense of not knowing where your breakfast would come from or where you’d sleep that night. He was a well-travelled man and had been to 49 countries in all. Next month he was planning on going to Morocco to walk 1000 miles through the Atlas Mountains, an expedition that would take him two months in all. He couldn’t wait. Hiking was a relatively new hobby of his. Previously he’d been into bodybuilding and you could tell. He wore a grey t-shirt and his huge chest looked like a boulder.

Yusuf was very keen to help me out as much as he could and I could tell he was a deeply kind man. “Wherever you want to go my friend, I will take you! ” He bellowed, holding his index finger vertically to the sky. He couldn’t take me that far though as he was only going to Wolverhampton. “I will take you to a Moto!” He continued, “There people will be stopping for the toilet and for the coffee and there a very nice man or woman will pick you! I will take you even if it’s TEN miles further my friend!”

For Yusuf, making people’s day was an act of great significance. He lived by Mark Twain’s advice that “the best way to cheer yourself up is to cheer someone else up,” though Twain was not his inspiration, his own life experience was. He aspired to do so, through words or actions, at least once every day.

He was also aspiring to live a life of minimalism. Living in Britain had made him tired of the constant excesses that do nothing to make us happier. It was not easy and he’d been training himself for 10 years to need nothing more than some basic clothes, a pair of shoes for winter and a pair of sandals for summer. His flat was completely bare but for a sofa and when his friends came round they’d say he was crazy. Many of them were also taxi drivers. “They spend so much money buying things, all the time buying things,” he explained passionately with his loud accent, “and they never feel like they have enough money. They have so much clothes they cannot breathe! They are always stressed, always need to work more, they always want more.” He thought we were victims of cheap, worthless plastic from Asia and he hated the fact, though the word ‘hate’ was not one he’d ever use. He wasn’t a hateful man.

His fine silver beard hung from his chin like an upside-down papal mitre and he twiddled it with his fingers as he spoke, his sonorous voice filling the car.

Yusuf had been in Birmingham for 26 years but was not from there. He had been born several thousand miles away, in Kabul. His family was middle class and educated: his sister was a doctor and his father an accountant. He himself had a degree from Kabul university. However, in 1996 he had to leave it all behind. War ripped through Afghanistan and suddenly his home in Kabul became a battlefield, reduced to rubble by the Taliban’s rockets. The insurgents took the city and he fled.

Yusuf was under no illusions about the deep causes of the conflict. “Big countries like the US or Britain or Russia, they fight each other in our countries. And we are the ones who suffer!”

I asked how he came to the UK. “Ha!” He exclaimed, pausing before beginning again. “I paid $25,000 to be trafficked! That was me. I was trafficked!” His voice was unwavering. “I travelled in the back of lorries, trucks, cars, tractors. Sometimes walking through forests. I came all the way to the UK like that.” A Bidfoods lorry pulled past us, a rural scene made out of food stuck on the side. He pointed to it, “That says it is full of bread, but there was no bread inside. We were inside. Thousands of us. Thousands! And many died. I knew many who died. But what could you do? You stay in Kabul, you die. You leave…50/50.”

After months of agonising travel, he arrived in Dover. For Yusuf, Dover and Hastings and the south generally, the first of Britain he saw, was too quiet. “I needed a big city. A city where I could fight! You cannot fight in the countryside, I needed a city. In the UK there are so many opportunities. There are too many opportunities!”

So he arrived in Birmingham, sometime in 1996, hungry to rebuild the life that had so cruelly been wrenched from him. He became a taxi driver. He worked hard initially, all day every day, saving every pound he earned and steadily, over the years, he built up a new life. He got married and had 3 children and worked even harder to provide for them. His eldest, he told me, is about to go to university.

“Where’s he going?” I asked.

“He got into Oxford, to study law,” Yusuf told me, “But he turned it down.”

“Wow,” I replied.

He continued, undisturbed as if this exceptional achievement was completely normal.

“…I said ‘Son! Why you turn down Oxford? It’s Oxford!’ And he says, ‘Dad, I don’t want to work 14-hour days studying. I don’t want that. I want to go out and party and have fun and play rugby, not only working.’ And I am happy for him because I want him to do what makes him happy and he has made his decision based on this. That’s the most important thing.”

Bemused by this remarkable success, I was close to tears as he finished recounting his odyssey. He’d been through so much but through sheer determination had survived it all and then, through yet more determination, had given his children the greatest opportunities in the world. On top of all of that, he’d educated them to have a self-understanding and wisdom that meant they could turn down the most prestigious institution in the country because they understood that there’s more to life than hard work.

At a time when boats of people with stories just like Yusuf’s are being vehemently rejected, left to drown in the Channel or cruelly flown to Rwanda, his extraordinary story could hardly be more relevant. And despite all that he’d been through, Yusuf held a tranquility of mind that made him just about the most inspiring person I’d ever met.

“Where can I drop you, my friend?” He said warmly as we pulled into the Moto, “I want to take you to exactly the right place!” I got out and he came around to give me a huge embrace and another hearty handshake.

He set off back to the motorway with a wave and a hoot and I collected my amazed thoughts, swallowing the lump in my throat.

I couldn’t believe I’d almost got the bus.