This one will sleigh you!
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AMMY CLAWS rubbed his odgy hands, partly to keep off le cold because he couldn't fford to heat his office properly, ut mainly because he was )ntemplating the most imporint contract in his life.
From the St Nicholas factory : the North Pole goods had aen trunked in to the wareuse by elephants three times day. He had been lucky to land is contract in the face of great :mpetition from one C. O'Boy ho traded as Twankey aulage.
O'Boy had old scraggy reiners who were ill-fed and had 1 vet checks. Not for him that :edless sophistication, the tao. He believed in primitive ethods. Why shouldn't his !et calculate its driving hours th reference to the position of re sun.
His fleet was shamelessly rerloaded on its hind legs beuse the penalties were so )all it paid him to do it. After Deated offences, though, the lole fleet was finally given /9s.
D'Boy had also employed a insport manager with a broken se, trousers halfway up his is so that he seemed poised certainly between childhood d adolescence, and, after the ion jack socks, size 13 boots. spindly youth he was who ad to add bulk to his puny me by wearing an outsize ercoat heavily padded at the ulders, making his shaven 3d look like a billiard ball bal:ing on a coat hanger.
Irian Brain belied his name.
e only time he seemed to anite was when he got anyere near the various kinds of lesives O'Boy had littered oss his desk. The haulier re-ed to these as his mainten2 kit.
n d the only interest Brain played in transport was when would snatch open those cylers which arrived by post, vrap the manufacturers' cedars, and float over the exotic 3tures who introduced each nth.
rain was capable of feeling Dtion only in so far as he retied there were only twelve nths in a year. Though he did Dw passing interest in gpins which he thought J1d, if painted various colours stuck through his nose, pret a fearsome deterrent to any so foolish as to think of breaking into O'Boy's bombsite which he called a yard.
Now it was time for Claws to wake up his reindeers. They'd been idle for so long he'd almost forgotten what they looked like. In some cases no bad thing.
There was Dennis, angular, academic, fond of smoking a pipe of tobacco so nauseous that exhaust fumes smelt sweet indeed beside it. His habitual greeting "Good morning Sires and how are we?" may have seemed quaint to some, but it irritated Claws. And his repeated invitations to repair to a nearby hostelry to sup a flagon of ale probably sounded odd even in the age of Elizabeth I, with which Dennis apparently wanted to associate himself.
Next to him, snorting in whatever dreams reindeer have, lay Buffalo, a blunt, bulldozing, blustering creature who rode roughshod over everything in his path. "He's a heart of gold beneath it all," Claws was told when he acquired the beast, but he had yet to find it.
At his right, and in total contrast, snoozed the slender form of E. R. F. Reindeer who had been told that if he didn't trim off those extra pounds it could be curtains for him, and he would end up joining the fleet of the dreaded O'Boy.
Next to him slumbered the fresh-faced All-American Mack with air-horns, chrome antlers, and aluminium hoofs.
And in the shadows dozed a shortsighted reindeer, with a great dome of a cranium, whom the others called the Mekon. Daffy, for that was his real name, often mislaid various items, lost his way, and had an inexhaustible fascination in all that was trivial.
Sammy lingered in front of Miss Renault. Nice-looking, yes, but she baulked in muddy conditions and always spent far too long going through the wash.
Next to her, IVECO. Why did she have to sign her name in capitals? Willing enough, but temperamental. Still, mused Sammy Claws, with an Italian mother and a German father what else could you expect? Yet they would both certainly enjoy the chance to go out again, always complaining that no one ever took them anywhere, was Sammy ashamed of them or something? Claws sighed. He had tried to explain to them that he had hit hard times, but it was difficult to make them see reason.
He paused fondly in front of Baby Dee — he was but a pup learning his rounds but with all this Christmas work now on he would have to do at least as much as the others.
Then his spirits sank. He caught sight of Dodger — how was he ever going to get him to do anything? He was always coming back with half his load, pulling off into laybys almost as soon as he was out of sight of the yard, seemed to have an innumerable string of grandmothers who died at the rate of at least one a week, and a back injury — who knew how or when the accident happened — which no physician on earth had a hope of curing.
Dodger always spouted about how more teamwork was needed, but his motto seemed to be — all work together so I don't have to do anything, and he was a past master at delegating responsibility.
One by one Sammy Claws Woke up his extraordinary fleet and affixed tax discs to them with no real problems apart from Dodger who, when Sammy tried to turn him over, kicked back with such force that the haulier had to step back smartly.
All that day in the gathering winter gloom the sleighs were loaded. IVECO had a new tail lift which made Renault somewhat jealous, though she tried to hide it with a not too convincing display of indifference.
Baby Dee was given a 30ft sleigh which, insofar as he was capable of animation, roused Dodger to an approximation of indignation. "Why should he have the smallest sleigh? "What are they trying to do"? he muttered underneath his breath, "work me to death?"
Looking at E. R. F. Reindeer Claws realised that he really had taken dieting to extremes. This skeleton could only manage a skeletal trailer, while, to keep him happy, trendsetting Mack was hitched up to his usual reefer. It hadn't escaped Sammy's notice that Mack just couldn't seem to function properly without one.
Buffalo, for ever trying to prove something, was experimenting with a drawbar. He was determined to pull an 18m outfit.
Uncle Armitage had said yes to 44 tonnes, but this was nowhere near enough in Buffalo's opinion. He wouldn't be satisfied contanted overleaf Intil he pulled 52 tonnes hrough the centre of London.
At this point Dennis, for he ;aid it about every 30 minutes, you'd have bleated "shall we ;up a flagon of ale?" but these vere hard times and there vasn't much cash for drinks. So le contented himself with a )lain "And how are we?" a quesion he repeatedly addressed to :he desert air.
As the loading continued, the -raulier personally checked that :he most important items were Dei n g correctly loaded. Whataver happened none of this must go astray as they were destined to be delivered to some Very Important People, and he was especially concerned about the toys.
Transport Minister Norman Fowler was to get a road-building set, model M25. On checking this item, Sammy found that sections were missing but no one seemed to know when they would arrive, if ever.
It was rumoured that, when complete, the set was meant to represent an orbital route round some major city. Some said it was to improve trade links, while others held it was a military manoeuvre so that the city could easily be surrounded by tanks.
Also destined for the same Great Man was an impressive leather-bound volume with gold embossed lettering. Claws wasn't a great one for reading but this title caught his eye:The Privatisation of Heavy Goods Vehicle Testing Stations. Not my idea of Christmas entertainment, thought Sammy, a strange present to give anyone since virtually every critic had given the thing a panning — the plot was thin, they said, and it would never work in practice anyway. Surely, a Minister has a team of responsible advisers? Why should he waste his time with a book like this, it wouldn't win him any friends?
Claws took a keen interest in politics. He knew that Nixon had been framed by the Communists in the Watergate affair and he knew that handsome Mr Reagan — how dare they say his hair is dyed, it was that colour when he bought it — had promised tax cuts and the bomb, but he couldn't remember in what order.
Our haulier was also intelligent enough to see that only wage rises of zero per cent over the next three years would pull Britain out of the clutches of the recession. And that woolly liberal thinking which made you answerable to ridiculous Tribu
nals if you sacked one of your staff, was, he realised, at the root of the nation's decline.
But too much thinking always gave Claws a headache and he turned his attention to the other presents. He noted that a Mr Lester had got a train set complete with a pocket calculator so that he could work out the 19 per cent fares increases every six months.
"Have fun scheduling trains, then cancelling them without notice. Comes complete with scale model commuters in various stages of despair," he read on the lid and he read on the reverse, "Drop your rolling stock onto concrete from a great height to give that battered authentic look."
Last year, Sammy recalled, Mr Lester had been sent a radiocontrolled model juggernaut (terrible word, but that's what it was called) by someone and the first thing the ungrateful man had done was to steer it straight at a concrete wall and deliberately smash it to pieces. "Nowt so queer as folk," philosophised Sammy — he was from the North remember.
He rummaged through the other presents. What have we here? A Monopoly set for the National Freight Company, and a voucher for Rent-a-Crowd for the RHA. There were the more usual presents such as the Arthur Armitage Songbook (which included the immortal "44 tonnes and what do you get"), Tales from the Traffic Courts, Confessions of a Deputy Licensing Authority and / Was a Teenage Weighbridge Attendant.
But where were the beloved cowboy outfits? So great was the run on these this year, and so easy was it to get one, that demand has far exceeded stock.
Sammy noted with interest a new game on the market called Russian Roulette in which everything is either lost or won — a game almost of life and death itself. This dangerous contraption was addressed to be delivered to the headquarters of the TGWU and was a game you could play on your own or with anything up to five million players.
The RTITB was to get a record of the RHA singing that evergreen "Anything you can do, we can do better", and Datafreight was to receive a set of electronic TV games.
But surely LT haven't been forgotten, thought Sammy as he sifted through the gifts. His memory was short. The undertaking was to receive nothing this year as last year all their presents due to arrive over the last five years had suddently all come at once. The fact that they were identical made no dit ference, they would have more than enough fun untangling thal lot.
Claws ended his tour of thE sleighs and shivered. He lookec up at the sky, the moon cast E cold eerie light over his yard and the sleighs stood there likE so many silent ghosts — it war bitterly cold.
Our haulier gathered his re( cloak more tightly about hirr and walked back towards hi: office. Before going in he cast backward glance at the sil houetted sleighs. Maybe it wa because it was so late and hi was very tired — but he wa beginning to have misgivings.
Nevertheless all the reindeer reported in on Christma. morning — all, with the excel tion of Dodger. Though his fi tieth grandmother had not bee claimed by that tireless tyrar death he had an inexplicable n currence of his old back injury.
Several attempts at startin Daffy up bore no fruit, but, aftr an injection of damp start in tfappropriate place, he leaped in1 life and rocketed out of the dep gates.
Dennis reported for wonl "Good morning Sires, and ha are we?" but he didn't get muc in the way of response.
One by one the sleighs pullE out into the still frost-laden a Some thirty minutes after rt others had disappeared Dodg turned up. He managed to sner past Claws' office and quiet hitched himself to his sleigh, b no sooner had he gone a coup of miles outside the depot thr he felt a raging thirst come up( him and pulled into a layby drink from a flask of some pois nous concoction which he r ferred to as tea.
Mack meanwhile was trying outrun everything else on t road. He would pull up besi others at traffic lights and cE sidelong furtive glances at the When the lights changed would screech into action leE• ing a good deal of fur behi him on the highway.
His most brutish and favour trick was to select some defeni less old lady peering throu her steering wheel, loom up close as possible behind h flash his eyelids in her mirr bark in his most intimidati way and as he overtook bell, at the terrified creature "Anoti refugee from Paignton?"
Renault was not the id driver either — she woulc have won any Lorry Driver of • Year award. She often gazec herself in the driving mirror and, as her mind became distracted with worries implanted by those manufacturers of neuroses who write fashion magazines, she began to weave erratically from lane to lane, admiring her bodywork in shop windows.
Buffalo's sheer size cut an imposing figure against the skyline n the fields. No one dared cross us path and animals fled in all directions at the sound of his approaching thundering hooves.
Meanwhile, Dennis was havng trouble at his first delivery. Jespite trying to placate the thimney stack into which he had o reverse to deliver the goods with "Greetings, Sire," he :aught his mirrors on the flue. IVECO was delivering at bunplows with her flat trailer, and E.R.F. Reindeer failed to make a ielivery. The chimney stack vhere he was due to park was )bscured by smoke which didn't xactly agree with his delicate :onstitution.
Baby Dee had been delivering It Fiasco's Hypermarket and had lad to queue all morning behind hree Terriers, a Boxer and an ktopus because of the volume 4 goods and incompetent off3ading arrangements.
Back at the depot, Claws eemed to have quelled his 3ars. His mood mellowed as he iatched the smoke-rings from is Gimlet cigar float lazily tofard the ceiling and poured imself another whisky from a ottle marked Sporron given im by a friendly sleigh hire pmpany.
His musings came to an brupt end. Claws had to hold le phone six inches away from is ear. It was Mack who'd had a low out in Bangor. "It's those amned retread hoofs," cursed laws.
Not a good year for hooves. e would have to call out the 243ur emergency hoof service.
(If you believe that, you'll bewe anything.)
No sooner had he put the -Ione down, the thing rang lain. His Christmas peace was lattered.
This time it was a customer Drfl Neasden Big Game Park. )rthe seventeenth year runng, they'd had no delivery. aws mumbled something )(put the items not being in pck yet.
"What, out of stock for venteen years?" shouted the ite one. "Even British Rail anier queries quicker."
Claws knew it was Dodger 10 had let him down. He auldn't go near the game park fear of permanent captivity. The phone rang again. "My good man," a voice whined over the wires. "One of those things wearing your livery has clipped my Range Rover and given my little Liberace the most terrible shock." Claws assumed that she must be referring to some kind of dog she had in the back.
"I," she went on, "am president of the Hampstead Oxfam Society and you've quite spoilt my day, I was on my way to our branch's medieval banquet but this prang has ruined my appetite."
Crossing his fingers, Claws denied that he had any of his sleighs in that area. Besides, he thought, she can always make up for it with an extra bowl of muesli, or to ease the pain she could start a home for ageing donkeys. "It must have been Twankey," Claws told the voice. It wasn't satisfied. Claws slammed down the receiver. If he killed Buffalo on Christmas Day maybe the judges would be lenient.
As he thought that, the shadow of his intended victim sped past the depot window, blotted out the light for a second, and backed up to the return bay. If it was possible, Claws' heart sank even further. Some of it would have to go out again. "Been picking up more than you've delivered?" he shouted at the massive figure.
But his wrath was nothing to what he felt as he saw Daffy come in with much of his load in pieces, unrecognisable fragments.
E.R.F. Reindeer came in next, reversed onto the offloading bay, and disgorged 20 tons of socks. Claws' Christmas was turning into a nightmare and the full weight of his pent-up fury fell on the unfortunate E.R.F. "Why all these socks?" he screamed, beating the air with his fists. "Who doesn't accept socks, who heard of anyone refusing socks at Christmas time, it's like . ." Claws searched desperately for some kind of simile but his mind was knotted with frustration. "It's like refusing handkerchiefs," he finished lamely.
The terrified E.R.F. Reindeer was galvanised by fear into some kind of reply. "They kept me waiting so long at the offloading bay," he blurted out, "that I thought they should pay some kind of compensation." Claws' eyes were wide with disbelief.
"Like demurrage, sort of thing. He wouldn't pay up so I told him I didn't agree with socks before demurrage."
Sammy could manage no response and one by one the rest of the fleet pulled in and headed straight for the return bay. Claws' anger was gradually replaced by a profound gloom from which he felt he woulc never surface.
The last one in was Dodger. "What have you brought back?" muttered Claws in tones so flat and lifeless you would have thought his depot had suddenly been declared an area of outstanding natural beauty.
"Not a thing" replied Dodger brightly. Could this be possible? Of all his fleet, Claws would have expected Dodger to let him down. He began to regret he'd ever doubted those backaches and those dying grandmothers — at least he determined to give Dodger a few of his cigars and a generous measure of whisky which was the only cheer he had left as the Christmas contract crumbled about his ears. So old Dodger had come through.
"Not a thing," Dodger was saying urbanely. "I had a load of this Christmas fare for the kiddies' Christmas party — jellies, custard and that type of thing, well blow me if the whole lot didn't come loose from its moorings — I can't think how it could have got loose, as you know I always make sure my load is properly secured, that's why take a little longer than the others in getting out of the yard ..."
"What are you trying to tell me," said Claws in a trembling voice. "Well," said Dodger in the same equable tones, "I shed the lot on the M62 and now it's all become a trifle congested. The ropes broke at Spaghetti Junction."
A man can only take so much. Claws gave Dodger a glazed look which was beyond emotion. He staggered back to the office like a drunken man, his Christmas was in ruins.
He sat at his desk with his head in his hands. "I'll sell the reindeer, go into making plastic Father Christmases whose noses light up, or manufacturing those illuminated wall plaques with a snow scene and a reindeer in the foreground (but that would remind him of them), or polystyrene snow for British expatriots in Saudi Arabia, or Santas who sing Jingle Bells in the EEC languages. I could have them all singing in descant ..."