William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

From this time next year (approximately September 2002) all minicabs will have to be licensed (in fact minicab firms are meant to have had their licence applications in by now but there has been some foot-dragging). But, within a year, as far as I understand it, all the new licensed minicabs will have to display a plate on the rear bumper; it will be permissible to hail them in the street; insurance will be checked and verified by the local council; there will be possibly two mandatory MOTs a year (at least one) and there may even be a meter to regulate fares. It will not be the same thing at all.

I came to live in London in 1983, in Fulham, and there was a minicab office at the end of our street. I’m a non-driver and so this firm (let’s call them Ferret Cars) became one of my principal modes of transport around London. I opened an account with them (I still have an account with them). I came to know the drivers well — it was quite a small firm in the eighties (it’s rather flash and grand now, with a huge fleet) — and, equally, they came to know me. I learned of their many travails and woes — whose marriage was on the ropes, who was gambling away his wages, who was drinking too much, who was going to get fired and so on. The drivers became familiar to me almost as friends are: Tommy, with his shocking emphysema; Jeremy, the redundant City trader, working a twenty-hour day to repay his debts; Trevor, who as I approached his car would greet me with a stiff-armed salute and a shout “Heil Hitler”; Ben the worldly and cynical ex-police sergeant from Antigua … because I used minicabs so frequently I grew to know them all. Ferret Cars and their drivers inexorably became part of my life.

As the years went by, unconsciously, almost by a process of symbiosis, I learned a great deal about the minicabbing life — indeed, short of becoming a minicab driver myself, I couldn’t have been more familiar with their world. I knew how much you could earn; I knew when car insurance went up; I knew why the old-model Ford Granada was the mini-cabbers’ dream car; I knew all sorts of shortcuts and back-doubles in London; I knew how to avoid a traffic jam on the M4 (duck through a particular filling station on to a road unmarked on maps). Sometimes I felt I lived in a minicab — whereas, in fact, I almost died in one.

Well, if not death, then I risked fairly serious injury. I had ordered a Ferret car to take me to some “do” in central London one evening, and was picked up by Colin, a genial man but the most compulsive liar I have ever met. He was telling me about some vast house he was building in Majorca (the week before it had been in County Cork) when he drove through a junction without looking and we were hit broadside on by — irony of ironies — a black cab. Luckily the black cab hit the central door jamb. A foot to the right and I would have been in the way. Colin’s car was badly staved in but the superstructure held (was it a Saab? I can’t remember). I was thrown across the interior (a few bruises) but was otherwise fine.

I staggered out of the good door, adrenalin fizzing, and sat on the kerb for a moment to calm down and check the damage. I seemed fine but Colin was in a state. However, his mind was working fast. He asked me to leave the scene as soon as possible and said I would not be charged for the ride (I was grateful but I suspect there was an insurance issue going on here), the only other stipulation was a plea that I breathe not a word of the incident to Ferret Cars. I promised I wouldn’t and went groggily on my way, looking for a tube station, leaving Colin and the irate cabby to sort things out.

So it was not surprising, given my intimate association with Ferret Cars, that minicabs duly found their way into my fiction — the seam was too rich not to be mined at some stage. And a minicab firm is very central in my novel, Armadillo , where the hero’s brother, Slobodan “Lobby” Blocj runs the family firm, “B&B mini-cabs and International Couriers” with his dodgy partner Phil Beazley. B&B are at the low end of the minicab food chain (nothing like Ferret Cars who proceeded to go from strength to strength) and it was one of the enduring pleasures of seeing the book adapted for television to witness B&B come to vivid and appalling life.

This sort of firm in a way presents the inverse of the Platonic Ideal: B&B mini-cabs, in a pure and idealized way, is as bad as it gets — and we have all hired cabs from a B&B at some stage. First of all, the premises have to be condemnable and very small — a tiny dispatcher’s office (soft-porn calendars obligatory) and a slightly larger bull-pen adjacent to it where the waiting drivers sit, smoke and talk (what do minicab drivers talk about? They talk about cars) which is furnished with laboratory standard fluorescent lighting, a carpetless floor, a couple of winded sofas and overflowing ashtrays. And the more pretentious the name of the firm, the better: “Elite,” “Transcontinental,” “Platinum,” “International,” “Exclusive”—these are the adjectives that tend to be associated with the meanest congregation of clapped-out motors.

The cars themselves are a vital adjunct to the picture: the older and dirtier the better. One of the Ferret Car drivers (in the early days) drove an ancient Ford Cortina, through whose floor the road could be glimpsed. This driver, moreover, was the angriest man in London. I remember getting off transatlantic flights and seeing him waiting to take me home, scowling, wordless, full of hate for the world — and my spirits would wilt at the thought of the M4 waiting for us and the gush of abuse that would spout from him on the endless drive to Chelsea.

Seeing the road through the floor is good; having dangling wires hanging from the dashboard is good; very loud music is good; joss sticks burning by the gearstick is good. Eventually you become an aficionado of all the archetypically bad aspects to the echt minicab. Perversely, you don’t want the glossy Merc picking you up, you want the 1978 Toyota Corolla with the rusted chrome and the driver with Tourette’s Syndrome. You want rap music and chain smoking, you want the monoglot Serb with his new A-Z . Rather like greasy-spoon cafes (the caff, that uniquely great British contribution to culinary matters) it is what is awful that delivers the real aesthetic frisson. We want furry dice hanging from the rear-view mirror; we want photos of the kids sellotaped to the dashboard; we want a boot full of junk with no room for your suitcase; we want a car that won’t move out of second gear; we want the driver-as-bore, the driver-as-kamikaze-pilot, the driver-with-terminal-halitosis. This is what makes the experience special, gives the journey its own frisson and texture — takes it out of the run-of-the-mill.

But it’s all going to disappear: clean, well-maintained cars, healthy, polite, heavily insured drivers will be the minicab norm — soon they’ll have to do the “knowledge.” But picture the scene: it’s 2005 or 2006, very late in the evening and you are almost the last to leave a dinner party far from your home. You turn to your host: “I’d better get a cab.” He says he’ll call a licensed local firm. Then he turns to you: “Or would you rather go unlicensed?” Ancient, uninsured cars, he says, all the drivers are asylum seekers. The hairs on the nape of your neck prickle. You realize how you’ve missed the authentic minicab experience. You decide to go unlicensed. Five minutes later you hear that old familiar peremptory honking outside. You leave; you locate your car. Strange music emanates from it, your driver speaks to you but you can’t understand what he says. The static from the radio cuts through your brain. You slide into the back seat, there is dampness under the soles of your shoes and an unfamiliar odour fills your nostrils. “Drive,” you say, a catch in your voice — it may be illicit, but it’s real.