I have had another Adventure.
Last night was very, very wet.
I mean really very wet indeed.
Whilst we were at work it rained, and rained, and rained. Sheets of rain howled through the village, great fat raindrops hurtled on to the pavements and bounced off again.
It did not stop. The rain carried on, and on, and on.
This is horrid for driving a taxi. All of the customers are soaked and the windows steam up so that it is very hard to see where you are going. The seats get wet and the customers grumble, and it makes the evening very hard work.
I was outside the nightclub at the end of the night when Mark rang me to warn me about some of the worst floods. It had stopped raining by then, but the water was cascading in torrents down the fell sides towards the lake, and the roads were worsening rapidly.
Several minutes later I got a job that would take me through them all.
I am good at driving in floods. I have been doing it for years, and it does not trouble me. I am quite good at judging the shallowest bit, and the speed which will keep me just below the wave.
I looked cautiously at the biggest of them as I approached it. It stretched in front of me, black and grim, with probably a shark or two sloshing about in it somewhere.
I set off carefully, following the white line down the middle of the road, which is usually the highest bit. Everything went swimmingly, as it were, until we were about a yard from dry land, when the engine began to splutter. The headlights went out and as we chugged out on to the shore, the taxi slowly coughed to a stop
We were miles from anywhere on an unlit road. There was no moon, and the world was utterly black.
Of course I know that if your car engine gets water in it, the thing that you must not do no matter what is try and start it again.
I know this from driving taxis in the Lake District for a quarter of a century.
It is terribly tempting to turn the key and try, but if you do that then water pumps through and gets into everything. Your valves and pistons burst and your engine is finished for ever.
I apologised to my customer, who fortunately was from the sort of Eastern European country where they are resigned to mishaps, and he shrugged and stood at the side of the road with a cigarette until Mark turned up, driving on the pavement, to collect him.
They offered to take me with them but I thought I would rather stay with the sinking ship.
It was a tiresome mischance that I had spent the entire evening between customers being utterly gripped by an especially gruesome murder mystery. I read a bit more, by the light of my torch, whilst I waited on the dark deserted roadside, listening to the cries of owls and the rustling of creatures in the bushes. This was not an especially good idea from the point of view of peace of mind.
Of course I was not entirely alone. Several taxis, mostly the minivan sort which can manage floods, pulled up alongside me and offered a combination of help and ridicule, mostly the latter. I told them I had fancied a picnic and that Mark was on his way to join me, and they drove off again.
When Mark came back he said that my taxi had a very low air intake valve and that the plastic cover was broken. He thought that the water must have been too deep for it.
There followed some torchlit rooting amongst the taxi-detritus in the boots of the two cars to find some gear that would enable us to tow it back. We found some string and a hook, and managed to create a tow-rope that would work just fine as long as nobody saw us.
It was four o’ clock in the morning. Of course nobody saw us, and it is unlikely that they would have cared if they did.
It snapped once on the way home but we fixed it again.
We are accustomed to towing clapped-out taxis about the village whilst the rest of the world sleeps. In no time at all we had slid into the space outside the back of the house and the night was over.
We woke up this morning to the gloomy dread that we might have a completely clapped out taxi on our hands. Christmas is almost upon us, with its seasonal boost to business, but all sources of spare engines, by which I mean the local scrapyards, close.
The council closes and will not licence new cars, even if we could have afforded to buy one. If we only had one taxi we would earn hardly anything until January, when there is no work to speak of anyway. We would miss New Year’s Eve, we would have a huge bill, and Christmas would vanish in a haze of debt and hopelessness.
It was a miserable morning. The fire had gone out and the house was chilled and damp, and somehow our clothes had not dried properly on the rack. We shivered into life, and Mark went out in the rain to inspect the taxi.
He brought the sodden air filter inside and we propped it over the relit fire to dry out.
He took the injectors off and some other bits, I forget what, and then I started it whilst he looked to see what was happening.
There was an alarming bang and lots of water gushed out. The engine did not go because some bits were missing, but it pumped the water out.
He put the bits back and I started it again.
This time it coughed, and sneezed diesel, and fired into life.
It ran, sluggishly at first, but it ran.
We had not blown the engine.
I am on the taxi rank now. We have still got two taxis and we will manage to work over Christmas.
We lit a candle this afternoon.
The Gods have been very good to us indeed.
