Conquering Europe
ARTICLE BY MIKE
I’ve chosen this story because it was my very first trip and opened my eyes to a completely different world and how deception and lies and small time bribes were the key to the transport industry back then and how this one trip taught me so much.” This is a very sensitive and expensive consignment, the driver that was going to take it has gone sick so you are the only one available don’t let me down” A week earlier I rocked up to this transport company lured by the logo on the side of the trailers ‘ Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan ‘ now this was what I was looking for, now we’re talking. I was taken for a driving test by one of their experienced drivers who made me familiar with the truck which was way more modern than I had ever driven before, I mean it had 16 gears, it had two proper bunks to sleep on and had a fantastic stereo system retro fitted which was now booming out a Hot Chocolate cassette tape which was all this driver was interested in to be honest having only bought it that morning. After a short drive in and around Oxford he told me I was fine and we returned to base and I was offered the job and told to go home and wait for my first adventure.” You are to collect it from a parking area on Greenham Common, ship Newhaven to Dieppe midnight and drive straight to Charles De Gaulle airport for it to be air freighted onward to South Africa. Phone me when you arrive before you unload as I will have another instruction for you. Remember, before you unload”.
It wasn’t Iran but it was my first job abroad and I was excited. Gay Paris here I come. “One more thing, you may have some difficulties with customs in Newhaven. If you do its essential you phone me”. Later in my career when I was given that kind of instruction a sense of foreboding would set in as I learnt how blatant lies and cover ups are the normal in the transport industry, now however I just took it at face value and after kitting up the truck with my personals went on my merry way, happy to be a newly fledged member of the International trucking community and a community it very much was back then.
I rolled into Newhaven early evening and submitted my T forms (customs consignment papers which every individual consignment needed to be able to be exported) to Customs for approval and stamping. All T forms were examined, checked eligible and had taxes calculated. Every single item that is exported has a unique reference number from a 100ton generator to the smallest nut or bolt and that is what is important, not the description. On the T forms the load was described as machine parts, and there it is again, another red flag I was not aware of.
Later experience taught me that the description machine parts covered a variety of questionable exports. For example a load of machine parts from an unmarked red brick building in Bridgewater….”stay in your cab driver and we’ll tell you when its loaded and sealed”….. to a back street high security warehouse in St Etienne turned out to be crates of rifles and machine guns bought for some African military regime. I had no idea, I mean I could have been bloody hijacked or killed without even knowing why FFS. Imagination running riot. I digress and probably not for the first time.
So, I was called to see the Customs officer who proceeded to tell me as I was carrying parts for ground to air missiles for South Africa and there was an export embargo in place the load would need to be examined to be sure the parts did not comprise of complete unassembled missiles as opposed to spare parts and may take a couple of hours. As requested I made the essential phone call to the transport office to be met with ” Shit that’s fucking awkward, now listen, right on the front of the trailer there are 10 small 20 litre drums that were imported without paperwork and I need you to deliver them back to the forwarding agent in Paris after the CDG delivery. Whatever happens do not let the customs officer see them or if he does, try to convince him they are part of the main consignment. If not we are seen as smuggling” I replaced the receiver. Well, bugger, bugger, fuckin’ bloody shit on it!! Why me? My first trip and I was unwittingly smuggling, however not now unwittingly, it has just been confirmed to me. A rookie shouldn’t have to deal with this. So now I may or may not have a dodgy load of ground to air missiles subject to export embargo but to top that off I’m smuggling goods out of the country that were smuggled in. Could the day get any worse? Apart from a potential gaol sentence and the truck being impounded and load seized, probably not.
Thinking the problem through I needed to offer my help to join him in the trailer to examine the load so as to try and avoid the discovery of the drums. I returned to the office where he was poring through enormously thick hardback books that were like the Encyclopaedia Britannica on steroids or one of those gargantuan bibles you see in a cathedral and listing out what the unique reference numbers referred to in hard metal items. When he finished he asked me to wait outside while he made a private phone call.
To my relief he gladly accepted my offer of help and up on the trailer we jumped and we proceeded to prise open and reseal some of the crates and slowly worked our way through the load. We had to miss out some of the crates because they were double stacked and unmovable, it was then it hit me that he was not being as thorough as I thought he might be. The private phone call maybe? I will never know. Aha I might yet get away with this. Reaching the front of the trailer the nerves began to kick in and I was aware I was talking too much and asking him lots of random irrelevant questions without listening to his answers and hoping he wouldn’t see the offending drums jammed between the final crates and the headboard. He did. “I don’t seem to have any drums on my listing, maybe I missed them”. We couldn’t get to them to see the labelling so my quick thinking reply was that they must be some kind of paint. Thankfully he agreed and said they wouldn’t be relevant to denying shipment anyway. Phew! I wanted to hug him, kiss him on the forehead but instead offered him a can of coke from the vending machine as he was sweating from the exertion of the check and I was sweating because of a potential court appearance and impounding of the truck.
Load deemed legit and T forms stamped I embarked the ferry. French ‘trucks only’ ferries back then were not known for the world famous French cuisine that we all know. The galleries were generally staffed by a permanently pissed chef who was liable to cook the seagull he caught round the bins that morning and the garcon serving your table could not give a shit whether you actually got the meal you ordered an hour ago. The complimentary wine was always good and safe though. One undercooked garlicy burger and chips with buttered baguette later, washed down with a nice red and I was throwing up over the side. It was a choppy sailing and I had not yet developed my sea legs. Staggering to the little duty free booth I bought a 200 pack of ciggies for the trip. “C’est suffice chef ?” enquired the knife scarred steward incredulously. “Oui” I replied, and thought why would I want anymore, I’ll stock up properly on duty frees when I return home.
I was second off the boat and followed another driver who promised to show and see me through the simple presentation to French border control. We parked up and went into an old cheerless building, into a big foyer with a desk at the end and waited with a straggly line of drivers behind me for the appearance of two old Douanes. They were only interested in two pieces of paperwork, T forms which they stamp and a thin green booklet, the Permit, which they also stamped that enables the truck to transit the country. Annually, transport companies applied for Permits and were allocated them according to the number of trucks they operated. However, these Permits were finite and only had so many trips allowed on each one and when used up then the truck could no longer travel abroad. This led to a black market in the sale of unused permits between companies and forged permits known as Mickey Mouse permits.
Anyway, remembering the transport managers parting words ” and make sure the Permit doesn’t get stamped ” I duly gave him my T forms which he quickly glanced at and stamped. Next he asked for the Permit which I lay on the desk before him, he picked up his stamp and on his downward stroke I whipped it back and after stamping a circular “Douanes Francais” on his desktop he looked up sharply and said “You have wine?” to which I replied “No”. “You have cigarettes?” to which I also replied negatively thinking he can get lost if he thinks he’s going to confiscate them from me. Why that irrational thought went through my head I don’t know as they were legally allowed. So he looks me straight in the eyes and says “Permit”. Its not a request this time so I hand it to him and grasping it firmly to avoid my snatching it back again it is stamped. He handed it back and waved me away. As I left feeling shamed and having failed my task I looked up at the line of drivers and saw that they were all holding either a bottle of wine or a carton of cigarettes. It was then the penny dropped, it all made sense now. That was the cost of not getting your Permit stamped.
The rest of the trip went exceedingly well apart from a underpants filling moment when I came around a corner and was faced with a low bridge indicated at 4m high. I was on top of it unable to brake in time still trying to calculate metric into feet and inches. No time. So I went under that bridge ducking, like you do, gritting my teeth and an iron grip on the steering wheel. So 4m was doable after all. Delivered to CDG and found the agent in the Customs compound in Paris to unload the offending drums and phoned base. I was told to go to Le Touquet airport on the coast in Normandy to await a load arriving the day after tomorrow for England. I met another driver there who showed me how to relax on the job. We unhitched his tractor and went to the beach for a well earned day’s rest. What was the fuss all about? This job was going to be a cinch.
The job with this company only lasted for 8 weeks and they called it a day. Iran was in revolution and that was the mainstay of their business model. It was the beginning of the end of middle east trucking for everybody. I never ever got there and had to be content with conquering Europe. I was intending to include some other funny experiences in this article but never expected it to turn out so long, so maybe another time over another pint.
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