Archive/The Collection/Ray Attwood
Record PS–147 · Long-haul HGV driver · Immingham – Dover
Ray Attwood
Twenty-two years on the same overnight run, and the bridge he still looks for.
- Subject
- Ray Attwood
- Occupation
- Long-haul HGV driver
- Route or region
- Immingham – Dover
- Recorded
- 12 March 2025
- Duration
- 2 h 14 min
- Reference
- PS–147
Introduction
Ray Attwood has driven the same overnight freight route for twenty-two years: out of Immingham docks a little before four in the morning, down through Lincolnshire and the East Midlands, onto the M25 and along the coast to Dover. He has done it in three different cabs for two different firms and, by his own estimate, something over four thousand times.
He agreed to be recorded on the condition that we did it at his kitchen table and not in the cab, which he described as “work, that”. The recording was made on a Wednesday afternoon between a night shift and a night shift. His wife Pauline came in twice to top up the teapot and once to correct a date.
What comes across most strongly is not hardship. Ray is well paid by the standards of the industry, he likes the firm he works for, and he is emphatic that nobody made him do this. What comes across is a very particular relationship with a single strip of road — a kind of expertise that has no name and no use anywhere else.
The full recording runs to two hours and fourteen minutes. These four excerpts have been selected for what they say about repetition; the timecodes refer to the master file, which is available on request.
Recording location
Recorded at his home, Barton-upon-Humber
Excerpts published
4 of the master recording. Timecodes refer to the unedited master file.
Access
Full audio and transcript are available to researchers on written request to the archive.
Transcript excerpts
Master duration 2 h 14 minStarting out
Interviewer
Can you take me through the start of a shift?
RA
Well it's not a start really, is it, it's — I'm up at half two, three. And the house is, everyone's asleep, so I don't put the big light on. I've done it that long I can make a flask in the dark. Two sugars. And it's twenty minutes to the yard, and by the time I'm on the A180 I've not spoken to anybody.
Interviewer
Does that bother you?
RA
No. No. Other way round if I'm honest with you. The talking's the tiring bit.
The bridge outside Newark
RA
You'd think you'd stop seeing it. Twenty-two year on more or less the same run, you'd think it'd all go grey on you. It doesn't. There's a bridge the far side of Newark, I don't know the name of it, never looked it up — and the way the lights sit under it, when it's wet, there's a sort of orange in the water on the road. And I look for it. Every time. That's a daft thing to be telling somebody.
Interviewer
Why daft?
RA
Because it's a bridge. [laughs] It's nothing, is it. It's a bridge.
What people think it is
RA
People say to me, oh, you must see the country. I don't see the country. I see the inside of a lane. You get the same forty foot of tarmac for eleven hours and it just keeps arriving.
RA
What you do see is weather. You see weather coming at you from a long way off, which is — no, I like that. And you see other blokes. I know a lot of drivers by the back of their truck. Never met them, wouldn't know their face in a shop. But I know the truck, and I know roughly where they'll be at half four, and if they're not there you notice.
The last hour
RA
The hardest hour is the last one. Not tiredness. You're past tiredness by then, you're on the other side of it. It's that you've got to turn back into somebody.
Interviewer
How do you mean?
RA
Well you come off the motorway and you've been on your own since three in the morning, and then you've got to walk in the house and be — normal. Have an opinion about the kitchen. [laughs] Pauline'll ask me something perfectly reasonable and I'm stood there like I've been asked to do long division. That's the hard bit. Nobody warns you about that bit.
Timecodes refer to the unedited master file. Hesitations, repetitions and dialect are retained as spoken.
Closing note
Ray asked us to note that the firm he works for has never pressured him to run over his hours, “and you can put that in, because they get a bad press”. He has three years to retirement and expects to take it. Asked whether he would drive the route again for pleasure, he said: “God, no. Why would you.”
Elsewhere in the collection
Full index
PS–132 · 2024-11-19 · North London
Marcus Bello
Nine years on the night network, and the four o'clock hour when the road belongs to him.
PS–141 · 2025-01-28 · Merseyside
Dee Kavanagh
Twelve years of working in a moving room, and a map of the city she can no longer drive through normally.
PS–152 · 2025-06-04 · Caithness
Sheila Kerr
Ninety miles, forty-odd houses, and the customers she is deliberately late for.
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