Hitching..

Glasgow to Glastonbury & onwards

In 1993, as a young broke student, my boyfriend introduced me to hitch-hiking. It was summer and Glastonbury festival was coming up. He had been several times and wanted to share the experience with me. College had finished for the holidays and although I had about tuppence to my name, I felt the allure of a new adventure. We began our journey on a bus from Glasgow to a town which lay beyond it’s outskirts. From there we walked to the local services.

Tam and I were an amalgamation of the era’s we’d lived in, post-punk, indie, rave, grunge. He had been sleeping in a disused railway carriage before we met, barely surviving by DJ-ing and arranging gigs for local bands. Our cardboard sign had SOUTH penned in big letters. With thumbs out and hopeful smiles, we were a charity shop advert. Tam was in army trousers, old baggy jumper with an over-stuffed kit-bag at his side. I wore stripey leggings, short mirrored skirt and colourful woven top. Daisy covered elastics secured my ginger hair in bunches. We understood that to some we appeared sweet and unthreatening, to others we were scruffy urchins. Our first lift was a friendly lady in a car. She had kids like us whom she had recently dropped off at a festival. She had just been shopping and fed us fruit all the way to Lockerbie. Apart from that, I can only remember two of the innumerable lifts which moved us closer to Glastonbury.

There was a truck driven by a kindly man whose life-story filled the journey to the edge Derbyshire. He was a family man with kids older than us who was conducting an affair with a woman in a village near the borders. He parked out of sight of her house and left us in the truck for an hour while he popped in to see her. Later he treated us to a meal at a truckers caff and said he admired us for hitching. He wouldn’t have liked his kids to have done it though. When he dropped us off, he shoved a tenner into Tam’s pocket and told him to look after me.

After a lot of short journeys, we eventually made it to the last services on the M5 before Glastonbury. Michaelwood was packed out with an extraordinary collection of vehicles painted with flowers, rainbows and celtic symbols. There was everything from packed- to- the- roof cars, classic VW campers, converted ambulances and huge horseboxes. Amongst these, mingled a kaleidoscope of colourful beings all heading for the same place as us. There were so many people with hitching signs I wondered if we’d stand a chance of a lift. Time passed, we moved further away from the crowd nearer to the exit and just as Tam sat down to roll a cigarette, a well polished Mercedes stopped. A man in a smart business suit waved us over and offered us a lift. Once on the road, he told us he’d been at one of the Glastonbury festivals back in the early days, way before he acquired a wife and a directorship. We reminded him of his youth and a time of freedom and hope. He’d been really into the music of that era and used to play guitar but it was all forsaken once he married and his kids were born.

The Mercedes had one of the first car-phones Id ever seen, on which his wife kept calling him. We heard her shriek in disbelief that he was going completely out of his way for a pair of hitchers - was he mad? Once he learned that I had never been to Somerset, he took us through Cheddar Gorge. It had turned into a most stunning evening and a beautiful introduction to the West Country for me. I felt strangely at home in its winding lanes and fields gently rolling into the distance.

As evening turned to dusk, he dropped us at Shepton Mallet. Here was teeming with people, vans and music, like a small festival of its own. As he wished us luck in getting in to the festival, he struck me as a man who perhaps secretly yearned for a path not followed. Since then, passing through Shepton always reminds me of that journey, of his kindness and enthusiasm and I wonder if he ever had the opportunity to pick up his guitar again.

We got in easily. A dodgy wristband cost a fiver. We chucked our bags over the fence so when we entered we looked as if we’d already been in. The gate staff barely looked at our wrists. We found our bags and headed for the NME stage to find Tam’s friends who were camped nearby. Dusk had almost turned to night and my first ever Glastonbury looked magical and wild in its misty coat with fires burning and its pathways full of twinkling lights. Frankincense, nag champa and djembe drumming filled the air, footsteps swished through grass and everyone seemed to be wearing tiny bells on their ankles, such was the gentle tinkling as a constant stream of colourful people passed by.

Once the main stages opened the next day, the weekend flew by in a blur. We barely left the NME area as the line-up was excellent if you were a ravey, ambient indi kid. For me, the NME highlight was the Orb. I got separated from Tam and spent saturday night lost and cold. I didn’t know that the countryside adhered to desert temperatures, scorching by day, freezing at night so I wasn’t suitably attired. I ended up in the Tiny Tea Tent which was literally a gap between two shops, nothing like the large space it has grown in to now. In this minimal space were a wonderful group of musicians who all looked like Kevin Rowland of Dexy’s and they enthralled me with their fiddle playing all night long. They likely saved me from hypothermia with a warm blanket and lots of hot tea from an enormous pot on a makeshift stove.

By day, Tam and I walked in the heat to the village shop in Pilton to stock up on beer to sell - nearly everyone seemed to be selling something at the festival from vodka jellies to jewellery from around the world, spread out on blankets on the ground. From a swap-shop I came away with a Peruvian top and a pair of kids hedgehog slippers. I thought they’d look cute outside our tent - and they did. We had nothing to swap so Tam gave a few pounds to the young boy minding the stall. I still have both of those purchases.

When we left Worthy Farm we carried on hitching. We had made a bit of money from selling cheap cans of lager for twice the price and had gone to the Hare Krishnas for free and filling food. It was Tuesday when we left. We waited by one of the exits for hours in the heat as most of the outgoing vehicles were packed full with equipment and crew. Eventually a van stopped that was going to Radstock near Bath. The driver and his mate had a marquee that they hired out for festivals and events and had just finished taking it down. They took us back to a house high on a hill with a fabulous garden and a spectacular view of the Mendips. They fed us and insisted we stay the night. The next day a friend of theirs was driving to Bath and took us along with him. Tam knew the town so we had a look around and saw some of the roman baths. I remember it all being very elegant but my enduring memory is of a particular block of public toilets on the outskirts.

We were camped on a new age travellers site It had taken quite a bit of negotiating by Tam because they were suspicious of us but somehow he secured us three nights. It was a good walk along the canal to the edge of town where we washed each day in some sparkling new public conveniences. All the metal fittings were pristine and it had an all-in-one handwashing and drying unit fitted into the wall. It was the first time I had seen one of these and it’s warm air was perfect for drying wet hair or damp clothes. The toilets always had loo roll and we never saw anyone else in there. This was our stop at the beginning and end of each day, sometimes in the middle if we were nearby. I loved the canal walk, sometimes we’d find a spot to lie in the sun on our way but I was glad to leave the site we were on. Apart from one or two, our hosts were a hostile lot and some of the kids were vitriolic about our presence there. The dogs didn’t like us either.

I have no memory of who picked us up or in which type of vehicle but we ended up in Brecon. I recall vaguely that our final lift dropped us on a lush green roundabout and pointed us in the direction of a campsite. Here, we lived on chips and curry sauce for a few days which was a half hour walk away in town and we visited a pub, wild with rugby players who had won a game that day. Back on the campsite on our last night, deep snoring came from the smallest, flattest tent I had ever seen. Tam explained that it was a cyclists tent while I tried controlling my laughter. We got up early and the cyclist had gone. We left too while the office was shut and everyone asleep.

Money had almost run out and I remember us being dropped off in Leominster, a place we would pass through several times during our hitching years. I am not sure of the sequence of events which took us back to Glasgow but soon afterwards we resumed hitching for the rest of the summer and a few more to follow.

Our adventures took us to the first Phoenix festival in Warwickshire - billed as the sister festival to Glastonbury. It ran into trouble when they stopped a convoy of travellers getting in, who blocked the gates with their vehicles in retaliation. We landed in Hay-on-Wye where we slept in the doorway of a school during torrential rain while many others slept on a nearby hill. Perhaps they were all heading for Hay Bluff like us, where travellers had gathered to hold a festival which was doomed by the constant rain. We hitched from Glasgow to Dover, got the boat to Ostend and thumbed lifts through Belgium into Holland. From Glasgow we hitched to numerous locations in Scotland.

It wasn’t all smooth and we crossed paths with some dubious characters, got dropped at unhelpful places, and I felt wholly uncomfortable more than a few times. We got stuck at a desolate services in Yorkshire where rain poured for two days. The manager took pity on us and let us sleep indoors on the floor. In the end the local police drove us to a busier spot. In Holland, at the entrance to a motorway one evening, a thick rolling mist came down and we slept inside a huge concrete cylinder until dawn.

It all came to an end when Tam finally had enough money to buy an old ambulance. That brought different adventures - and pitfalls. When our relationship ended and I moved to London for university I met a new boyfriend who also had an ambulance. For me, hitching was never re-kindled.

Thirty years later, speaking to my daughter about hitch-hiking, she said she would never consider it. Today there is so much low-cost travel available so why would she risk her safety in strangers cars - although it has been pointed out that to an extent, people do that every time they step into a taxi. She and her brother have known about my hitch-hiking adventures for years. When they were teens they were quite horrified at the idea but as they’ve matured into their twenties they have conceded that the era and circumstances were quite different from theirs, and that atleast I never hitched alone.

I’ve travelled by road a great deal over the last two decades and have noticed an absence of hitchers. I thought it had died out but almost to my surprise, I believe that the practise is still in use. It has suffered from years of bad press and concerns over safety but hitch-hikers like Nico Lethbridge who writes Britain By Thumb and those developing the app Hitchr are hoping to dispel negative myths and create a supportive hitch-hiking community. I imagine the app will make hitching a more organised affair, eliminating the uncertainty and offering a sense of safety. (How I would have embraced this thirty years ago!) Perhaps this will lead more people to experience those unexpected adventures and interesting human interactions which can happen when thumbing a lift - with a transaction of trust on both sides.

Photo by Kevin Ianeselli on Unsplash