Listening
We might as well call it God's voice
Just a quick story from life on the road, during the week just gone…
I never know what routes I’ll be taking during a six day shift, but there are only a few options at the end, when returning to base in Witney, Oxfordshire. There’s no direct route from the South West - i.e. the Swindon area - because of various vehicle dimension limits, which leaves a couple of options. The shortest is to head towards Oxford, turn left through the town of Faringdon, then negotiate a tight right turn in Lechlade, then north to Burford, then turn East on the A40 towards Witney. The other longer and simpler route is to head north west along the fast A419, then turn off and head up the straight A429 to join the A40 near Northleach, then east through Burford from that direction. It’s about 10 miles longer, but the travelling time is about the same and it’s much simpler. For this reason it’s the route I almost invariably take, when coming from that direction.
But on Friday I had a strange feeling that I should take the Faringdon route. I don’t know why, it just felt like the right thing to do.
Another thing I do on my last day is stop somewhere before I get back. I’ll spend an hour or so packing away my kit, and cleaning out the cab for the next driver. On the Faringdon route, there’s a large layby [parking area] just by the turn for the village of Souldrop, after you’ve come through Lechlade. And at that time of day it was in the shade, which was important because it was an unusually hot day.
After getting everything squared away, I fired up the DAF, and pulled forward to rejoin the main road. There was no traffic at that moment, but while looking back to check I saw something that didn’t quite add up. About 100 yards behind was a pedestrian crossing the road. Small, female, quite brightly dressed. That was odd. The nearest houses were about half a mile away, the person didn’t look like a hiker, and there was no footpath alongside the road at that point. The same feeling I had when deciding the route came back, this time telling me that I should investigate further. So I reversed the truck back to where it was, watching my mirror cams intently to see where she was going. Instead of taking the lane towards Souldrop, she did indeed walk my way along the lay-by, clearly looking at and heading towards my vehicle. She even broke into a little run at one point.
As she got to the cab, she spoke first: “Are you going that way? I’m going to Retford, do you go to there?”
“Well, I’m not really supposed to carry passengers … where are you going again…? Burford…?” I thought I’d misheard. I know the area quite well, but the only Retford I know is Nottinghamshire. She was short, slight and I guessed in her late seventies. She was wearing a vivid turquoise dress, and incongruously carrying several pairs of shoes, along with an expensive looking black leather handbag. She certainly wasn’t a homeless wanderer or a hiker.
“Oh… sorry to bother you then,” she says, and goes to continue walking north.
“Well I don’t think you should walk along this road, it wouldn’t be very nice,” I say. The A361 from that point is a fast flowing country road, with plenty of blind bends, and no footway or even verge at many points. It wouldn’t be a safe place to walk for anyone. By this point it was obvious that something was very wrong. Before she passed away, my mother had dementia, but even without that experience anyone could see this lady wasn’t quite with it.
“Where have you come from? I can see you haven’t come far.” She was wearing white and cream training shoes, which were clean and unmarked, as well as being otherwise very presentable.
“Oh, from back there,” she gestured back towards Lechlade. But when I asked if she knew her address she just looked confused. I asked if she was staying with anyone, perhaps family? She then told me her family were in Retford, and it transpired she did indeed mean Retford in Nottinghamshire. She kept insisting she had walked there before, despite it being 130 miles away…
Right, it was quite clear I couldn’t leave her to fend for herself. She was very pleasant and polite, but clearly wasn’t all there. Walking up that road would’ve been incredibly dangerous, and she was also willing to get in a strange vehicle with someone she didn’t know. By this stage I was out of the cab, talking directly to her, and wondering what to do. Her name was Susan. She knew her surname, but couldn’t spell it. She told me she didn’t have a phone on her, or any address where she was staying.
“Did you come from Little Farringdon?” That was the nearest settlement back in the direction she came, I was thinking perhaps she was staying with someone there, and had wandered off. But she couldn’t answer, and just looked confused again.
“Shall we walk back that way, see if we can find someone who knows you?” I was hoping someone was out looking for her, and perhaps we’d bump into them. Little Farringdon is just a few houses, so at worst I could start ringing doorbells and asking if anyone knew her.
But then what if she hadn’t come from there? OK, it was now time to call for some help.
“Susan, perhaps we should find a nice policeman to come and find out where you should be?” For a moment I pondered calling the police non-emergency line, but decided that, no, her safety was at stake, and I dialled 999. I was glad that, throughout all this, Susan remained placid and unperturbed by what was going on. It was also good that the police phone operator took it seriously.
“Would you say she’s of sound mind?” was one of the first questions.
“No.”
“Ok, we’ll get someone out to you, and I’ve made it a priority one call.”
The controller asked me to ask Susan a few more questions. Her date of birth was in 1948, she knew that much. As I closed the call, a car pulled up. Aha, I thought, someone is out looking for her. No, the woman driving wasn’t looking, but she was a neighbour who recognised Susan, and knew where she lived. It turned out Susan wasn’t from Little Farringdon after all, but had actually walked more than a mile from Lechlade. Considering her age, the heat, and the distance she had walked, she looked remarkably fresh. We said this, and she then enthusiastically told us she had done ballet when she was younger, a subject she would return to several times during our conversation. It can be quite sweet how people with dementia can recall the things that really meant something during their lives. I wonder what mine would be…?
The neighbour and I discussed if I should call the police back and tell them everything was in hand, now that she was able to take Susan home. In the end we agreed that it was best to have them attend. They were probably well on their way by that point, and they might be able to put something in place that would prevent this happening again. The neighbour knew Susan enough to ask closed questions, like “you have a husband don’t you?”, so we started to get to the bottom of things. But then blue lights in the distance heralded the arrival of Thames Valley’s finest. As the police car pulled up, another vehicle arrived: it was the husband. Apparently another neighbour had driven past, and saw Susan. They had called him to say she had been seen.
I must admit the guy’s behaviour could’ve been better. He seemed to be annoyed with her, remonstrating with her that she should’ve just gone into town. I also don’t recall him thanking us for preventing his wife from walking up a dangerous main road. But then I suppose it must be very difficult to have someone you’ve known for years lose their mental faculties.
We informed the solo female police officer of the situation, so then my work, such as it was, was done. I said my goodbyes to the husband and the neighbour, gave Susan a hug - she really was very sweet - and made my way back to the truck. As I left, I could hear the officer say to the husband, “Have you thought about…?” Good. I’m glad someone was thinking about preventing this whole thing from happening again.
Although something else had definitely been prevented: me, getting back to base! As this was going on, my duty time limit had been running out, so I had to spend another night in the truck.
Let’s go back to the start…
I don’t usually take that route, in fact I’ve never taken it to get back at the end of a shift. Yet I had gotten a strange sense that I should go that way, on that day. Similarly, Susan had made for a relatively unusual figure to be seen crossing the road, but I don’t normally stop for every slightly out of place looking pedestrian I see, let alone back up to see what is going on. Yet I had a similar indefinable sense that I should.
What if I hadn’t followed these senses…? There was no one else in the lay-by when it happened. Presumably Susan, a slight 78-year old woman, would have at least tried to walk north along the A361, a relatively dangerous road, with traffic passing her at fifty or sixty miles per hour. Or what if she had been found by someone less benign than me…?
I’m quite a practical, no nonsense kind of guy, I think. But I have had these kind of senses before, and I hope I have them again. The Christian framing of this, is that it was God’s prompting, that He suggested a course of action that saved an old lady. I don’t have a problem with framing it this way. The secular counter-point to this would be to ask where is God when all the other terrible things happen. And I don’t have an answer for that.
But I think sometimes, most of the time actually, things don’t have to be intellectually resolved. I think one of the great mistakes in the world right now is how people demand to have a consistent theory of reality before they do anything. Expecting this all the time means we don’t hear the voice that suggests a certain route, or to look more carefully at something we see.
The world is full of talk of great overarching themes of existence, this very Substack has looked into many, be they money, or politics, or fame, or technology. Yet society happens one life at a time. Something, or Someone, decides that the life of a humanly unremarkable old lady needs protecting, and that a similarly unremarkable truck driver, tired and on his way home, is going to be the tool to do it. Sometimes we just need to listen.