Angry at Motorway madness, I remembered I once was that soldier

Upon reaching Narbonne, it is motorway all the way.

It is an easy run. From the 130kms motorway maximum in France, you drop to 120kms over the border. What surprised me on what was often a totally clear motorway just before Christmas, was that I came across cars without anything in sight ahead of them, clinging to the central lane as if they had bought a ticket for sole usage.

It was even more surprising that the first two I passed, as they clung to that central path, had French registrations and looked amazed as I passed with a blast of the horn.

Further down, towards Gerona, it became busier but there were even more hogging the central path, indifferent to flashing lights and honking horns as drivers queued behind them waiting to overtake, while the inside lane was empty.

These motorway abusers were Spanish and a clear majority were women. Of course, when I passed my driving test at the outset of the 1960s, the MI was about 18 months old. It was a few months later before I was one of two teenage passengers in a Morris Minor, driven by another young lad, as we made our first hesitant visit to the MI. We drove up the MI to the Hemel Hempstead turn-off and returned down to Garston, considerably chastened and never quite overcoming the feeling of being intimidated by the speed of the fellow drivers, which was not something you experienced on normal roads.

It was a milestone and, in the concepts of our suburban teenage world - a Marco Polo moment.

A friend of mine reminded me the other day about Duane Eddy’s bass guitar sound on the record Peter Gunn. There was something sinister about that track. “MI music we called it,” he reminded me, of the days when the motorway was a novel experience.

Once, coming back a year later from our day-release college stint in Luton, I ran out of petrol. I had an empty can in the back and I walked up the hard shoulder about a mile to the Hemel Hempstead turn off, hitched down to a garage, loaded up with petrol, hitched back and then crossed the motorway to the central reservation, walked down for a spell, waited for a gap in the traffic and crossed to rejoin my car.

Education on the do’s and don’t’s of motorway usage was non-existent and you did not need to know the rules in order to pass a driving test. So the concept that the inside lane is the one you travel on and you use the other two for overtaking, was not entrenched from the outset.

I often wonder if they stress the regimen “signal-brake” as the correct use of the road when you are intending to turn off it. You meet so many drivers on the road who start to brake and you have no idea as to why. Then, just before the pull out or turn off, they signal.

Anyway the following Monday, when I got back to the office and mentioned my MI walking experience, one of the elders mentioned in passing that you are certainly not allowed to walk down the central reservation.

I accepted the tip but did point out the absence of signs to this effect. Similarly, you are not supposed to walk to the next turn-off, far less walk back.

“No wonder a policeman looked at me quite surprised as he drove by,” I reflected.

Indeed I had discovered he had pulled up alongside my car and inquired why it was on the hard shoulder. My colleague informed him I had gone off to fetch some petrol. He had nodded and driven off.

The next time I drove on the motorway, I slowed and read the signs, but nothing specified any of my transgressions.

They were innocent days; ignorance was rife and of course it was not long before they started to campaign to put in a central barrier on the MI up near Hemel Hempstead.

Remembering all this, I pigeon-holed my annoyance at those hogging the middle lane en route to Barcelona the other day.

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