AS I WAS being bounced around in the back seat of a people carrier in the dead of night on a winding country road in County Monaghan earlier this week, I had occasion to reflect on the circular nature of life.
My first job as a professional actor was with a theatre-in-education company in Western Australia over 40 years ago. Back then, our people carrier was a three-ton panel van, into the back of which the stage flats, the props and the costumes were jammed, along with all but two of the cast.
One of them drove the van while we took it in turn to sit in the luxury of the passenger seat. The rest of the cast had to sit on the floor of the vehicle, the interior of which often reached temperatures well above 100F. Added to the discomfort was the knowledge that the actor who was charged with doing the driving suffered from some form of narcolepsy and would quite often fall asleep at the wheel.
On one morning as I sat beside him, only a few minutes into our journey, the van suddenly plunged off the road and was heading straight for an ironbark tree. Ironbark trees are appropriately named. You hit one of those at your peril.
I looked over at the driver, only to find that he was fast asleep, his chin resting on his chest. I managed to grab the wheel and wrestle the van back on to the highway a split second before disaster struck, screaming at him all the while to wake up.
Incidentally, the driver in question was one Rhody Thomas, whose father established Thomas National Transport, or TNT, the company that went on to become one of the three largest transport companies in the world. Given Rhody’s propensity for falling asleep at the wheel, it’s perhaps not surprising that he didn’t follow his father into the truck-driving business.
While the trip back to Belfast on Wednesday was not quite as hair-raising as sitting beside Rhody as he catnapped his way across the Australian continent, it was not without its dangers.
On this tour, the driving is in the hands, or rather hand, of the 65-year-old actress who runs the company. I say hand because I have never seen her with both hands on the steering wheel.
Being of a highly theatrical disposition, she needs her left hand to express herself as she carries out a non-stop conversation with whoever happens to be sitting in the front passenger seat.
More worryingly, she insists on making eye contact with anyone she is talking to, with the result that the vehicle lurches alarmingly into the wrong side of the road every few seconds.
It’s even worse when she decides to include someone in the back seat in her anecdotes. Several times when this has happened, we have ended up on two wheels as she has veered off the road altogether and mounted the pavement.
While I sit with clenched teeth, the rest of the cast seem to be totally oblivious to the threat posed to their lives and limbs by this erratic driving, but then most of them lived through the entire span of the Troubles and so they have probably developed a much more fatalistic attitude to life and death than the rest of us.
One old chap even managed to fall asleep, but then he is well into his 80s and is possibly past caring about the nature and timing of his inevitable demise. Although, as a non-smoking, non-drinking vegetarian who prays a lot, he’ll probably be around long after I’ve popped my clogs.
The wonder is that anyone his age would want to be bothered battering around the countryside for little more than the minimum wage, playing to audiences that rarely get into double figures. But that’s what happens when you get bitten by the acting bug, I suppose.
One much younger actor in the cast told me that this is the first work he has had in two-and-a-half years and yet he is recognised everywhere we go after appearing in a BBC Northern Ireland comedy series that never made it on to the UK network but which was extremely popular with northern Irish viewers.
It was called Pulling Moves and focused on a bunch of conmen and hucksters who were adept at carrying out very lucrative scams that included insurance fraud and fake criminal injuries claims. It was inspired by the methods that paramilitaries used during the course of the Troubles to milk the system for every pound they could squeeze out of it.
So many people in west Belfast collected compensation for tripping in the street that one councillor commented that the streets of west Belfast were paved with gold.
Another favoured ruse involved getting someone, for a small financial consideration, to run his car into the back of the fraudster. The fraudster would call the police and an ambulance so that there was a record of the incident and then he would develop a crippling whiplash condition, giving him a lump sum from the insurance company and several years claiming sickness benefit.
One enterprising paramilitary gang decided to work this scam on an industrial level. They paid a bus driver a few hundred pounds to crash his bus and loaded the bus with about 40 people who were in on the hustle. However, when the case went to court, the bus driver lost his nerve and under interrogation from the insurance company’s lawyer and in front of a very suspicious judge he confessed that he had been going much too slowly at the time of the “accident” to have caused any damage to his passengers.
The 40 disgruntled passengers, who had limped into court, ran like greyhounds round to the bus driver’s house and put his windows in.
Another actor I met told me of the time he got drunk and fell down the stairs, splitting his chin open. He called the police and told them he had been the victim of a sectarian attack and then reported to the nearest hospital’s casualty department.
He got £1,500 compensation. It seems that the Troubles were less troubling for some than for others.