8 of 24 - The Road to Chudleigh, Summer 1972

 By the time I was fourteen my parents had moved out of the sleepy village and into town and were contemplating another move into Devon so that my father could start a new job as a corn merchant, a semi-autonomous role that was a real step up the ladder for him. It was decided that when they left, I would go into lodgings so that I could stay in my school.

I never really enjoyed school that much, certainly not secondary school. I tended towards disruptive behavior and smartassery and must have been a right trial for the teaching staff. For a while I was put into the remedial class, presumably as a kind of short sharp shock, an attempt to shame me into good behavior. Of course, it didn’t work because I found that in the remedial class, I was hilariously funny, much funnier than I was in the mainstream classroom and could create even more disruption than before. I stayed around for my CSEs which I think occurred before the easter break, but I didn’t go back to school after the easter holidays.

So, I left school before my 16^th birthday and I had been accepted on a 4-year apprenticeship at Holman’s in Camborne which started after the summer break and my plan was to have a bit of an adventure before it began. First, I had to pass the Harris' intestinal entrance exam.

I had got a temporary job in Harris’ bacon factory in Totnes. To my mortification before I could start in the Harris factory, I had to provide them with a small chunk of fresh turd to ensure that I was not going to spread potential pathogens. They gave me a small, labelled plastic jar to put it in. It was stressed that the sample must not enter the toilet water or be “contaminated” in any other way. I think that the collection of this stool sample was a kind of ingenuity test. Have a go yourself to see what I mean.

I would save some money by making sausages at Harris’ for a few months and then hitch-hike around the country.  I would tie in a visit to my brother who was in Middleton St George, which was a long way north. One morning sometime in July 1972 Dad dropped me off on the A38 at Ashburton and I stood with my wonky thumb out, waiting for my first lift. I would be staying in Youth Hostels, so had a reasonable idea of where I needed to end up, but the kindly souls who stopped for me were going where they were going, and that wasn’t necessarily in my direction. But I wanted adventure, so I travelled with them and made the best of it.

I hitched up to Bristol, and then into South Wales. Somewhere near the Mumbles I was picked up by a busload of students who were traveling up through Wales to Snowdonia. From there I went to Penmaenmawr where I met a fellow traveller and we decided that Penmaenmawr was a brilliant place to stop for a few days. We hired a rowboat and bobbed around on the sea, ate fish and chips, drank a few Newcastle Browns, then went our separate ways.

I cut across the country to catch up with my brother in County Durham, discovered Barm cakes, then hitched down to Selby where I stayed in a Youth Hostel on a old grain boat named Sabrina. In Selby I ran out of money.

I had been hitching for about 10 days, I think. I was about 303 miles from home and had just a few pence in my pocket. I remember that the Warden in the Selby hostel gave me a small amount of food that had been left on the boat, and that was all I had to eat until I got back home.

Midafternoon, somewhere around Bristol a small van stopped for me. There were two men in the front and no seats in the back, but I was happy to sprawl on the floor in the back as long as we were headed southwest. There were flagons of cider in the back of the van and the men invited me to help myself, which I did with zeal and poor judgement. I remember that the smell of the cider and the van floor’s vibration was pleasant and soothing as I chatted to the men in the front.

I was quite woozy when we got to Devon and the men pulled into a pub carpark and suggested we all went in for a drink. They told me they were heading for a Holiday Inn in Plymouth and asked if I would like to join them. I had just enough wits left after the cider to know that I was at one of life’s crossroads.

I made an excuse and stumbled off to ring Dad to come and pick me up. Double vision made it difficult to read the paper disc nestled in the centre of the rotary dial, but I thought it said Chudleigh, but that’s all I could manage.

When he arrived, I had passed out in the hedgerow next to the telephone box. I didn’t know it at the time but I had undertaken a risk assessment and put in a control measure to change the outcome of the situation, thankfully.

I suppose I didn’t know it then, sprawled in a hedgerow with cider on my breath and a rotary dial imprint on my cheek, but that moment in Chudleigh was my first real safety audit. No clipboard, no PPE, just a teenage gut instinct and a flicker of self-preservation. I’d set off with a wonky thumb and a vague plan, and returned with a few stories, a bruised liver, and the quiet knowledge that sometimes the most important control measure is knowing when to say, “No thanks, I’ll ring my dad.” It wasn’t exactly Kerouac—but it was mine.