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===Chapter 4: WHY DO PEOPLE GIVE LIFTS?===
This was one of the questions put to the 186 hitch-hikers picked up and grilled in my Bedford van in August and September 1968 (see Appendix 2). As one might expect the most obvious answer came up most often: 'for company'. This idea was expressed under a variety of guises by 138 people out of 186. Many people gave more than one reason. The detailed break-down looked like this:
The majority verdict of the 186 that the general run of drivers give lifts because they want company is borne out in practice in the experience of every thumber. By far the most likely vehicle to stop is the one with a single man in it. The least likely vehicle to pull up is one with a couple or a family. (This is not just a matter of space, though clearly a four seater saloon with five kids piled in the back can't stop for physical reasons.) It is also noticeable that single men stop more readily when driving on business from Monday to Friday than in a fully private capacity at the weekend or on holiday. It would seem that the driver stops most readily when he needs to humanize his situation; at the weekend he is on the road for personal and recreational reasons, and his own thoughts are sufficiently absorbing to fill his mind and make picking someone up not seem necessary. When driving with a friend, a woman, or his family he is bound in a matrix of human ties and the idea of a hitch-hiker suddenly installing himself appears irrelevant or even unwelcome.
Another interesting thing is that two male hitchers find it more difficult to get a lift than one. This may be a question of space but very often it is because the idea of picking up two men is less satisfactory in the mind of the man driving alone than the prospect of picking up one person. On dark nights or lonely roads an element of fear on the driver's part evidently comes into this. But the willingness to pick up one male hitch-hiker but not two is a pretty constant feature of driver reaction on main roads in broad daylight. This is how a young Liverpool scooter shop owner put it:
The man driving alone over a long distance often wants to fill his human void, but he does not want to become part of an initially alien group. If he picks up 2 hitchers he is inviting an already formed grouplet into his car. If he picks up a single person the resultant 'group' will be a result of give and take between the two of them.
By reacting positively to the hitcher's signal or look and by applying his brakes the driver is creating for himself an initially receptive and aimiably disposed companion. He is singling himself out from the mostly anonymous stream of vehicles that have flowed past the thumber in the course of the previous 5 minutes, 25 minutes, 2 hours. A few of the cars in the stream will have appeared friendly to the thumber. The drivers will have indicated that they are turning off further up the road and that there is no point in stopping. The vast majority of vehicles will have seemed neutral, but neutral with a negative tinge in that they have failed to stop. In a small number of cases the person by the roadside will have sensed hostility on the part of passing drivers, either in the form of stony indifference, a look or a gesture. In Britain the expression of hostility to the hitcher is usually mild and covert -- not so in the USA, according to a Cambridge woman student:
Apart from singling himself out as a human being from a blur of steel and glass, the driver is also offering the hitcher shelter from the weather and an escape from the hugeness of the roadside into the cosy, enclosed area of the vehicle. Naturally, too, he is furthering the thumber's basic practical aim of getting to his destination. All this tends to put the companion of the next few minutes or hours into a receptive mood.
Whether he is giving a lift to one person or more, the driver holds the psychologically and socially dominant position in the ensuing dialogue, at least he does at first. The balance may be changed as the miles roll by if the hitch-hiker asserts himself. At the start of the lift, however, the driver usually has a sub- or semi-conscious perception of himself as the one with the upper hand. His has been the active role in stopping for the hitch-hiker. His is the power to terminate the lift. He manifestly possesses the car, or even if it is not his, possesses the mobility it affords. By contrast the hitcher is bereft of auto-mobility. The driver is frequently older than the thumber -- he may see the other in a paternal or elder-brotherly sort of way. He perceives his action as a generous one. The driver, if he gets on reasonably well with the hitcher sometimes extends his generosity well beyond the scope of the bare lift. He pays for refreshments for both when they stop, he goes out of his way to put the thumber down where he wants to be, he looks after his temporary guest. Talking of a pair of Italian lorry drivers a Cambridge student said:
The word generous needs defining. It comes from 'genus', meaning 'stock' or 'race', and in its primary but now archaic sense means 'of good descent' or 'high born'. From there it comes to mean magnanimous, munificent, freely giving The very etymology of the word shows the link in people's minds between the act of freely giving and the resultant enhancing of self-esteem on the part of the giver. A generous action, though involving giving to another is at the same time a self-boosting, ultimately a self-ish action.
Generosity of the type ascribed to the Italian lorry men by the Cambridge student is one form of expression of the social and psychological dominance by the driver over the thumber, a dominance which to some extent exists in the ordinary host-guest relationship among friends. Some drivers express their perception of the relationship with the thumber by preening. According to an 18 year old male student from Liverpool:
The same sort of point was made by the car-driving scooter shop owner quoted earlier:
At times sadism can enter into the driver's exploitation of his dominant position. Such feelings are much to the fore in this young teacher's account of a lift he gave in Greece in his sports car:
While the driver finds himself in the superior position, the thumber often sees himself cast, at least initially, in the complementary inferior role. He has got to fit into his host's mood, talk along the lines of the lift giver appears to want to follow. According to a Cambridge undergraduate:
Occasionally one hears of hitch-hikers who, as the lift situation develops, find it impossible to go along with their hosts' attitudes. There was the case of a fiery, red-bearded Welsh student, hitching with a CND badge in his lapel. The man who picked him up violently disagreed with the Ban the Bomb movement and after a few miles threw the student out of the car. The latter had angrily sustained his point of view and in so doing had stepped out of the acceptant role the driver assumed he would conform to.
A middle class Jewish student faced with an anti-semitic working class drive' decided to take the latter's opinions lying down:
The acceptant, passive attitude of the lift recipient is often based on a feeling of indebtedness. A girl was given a lift back to her home town by a young man who took the opportunity to make a date with her. On the date:
In explaining why she had accepted to see him again she said:
The hitch-hiker feels he's being given something, he's beholden to the driver who stops for him. This may make him vulnerable psychologically, somehow in the driver's hands, in his power -- so a Cambridge student:
Interestingly this student went on to suggest a solution to such driver domination:
For him the idea of paying for a lift somehow redresses the social and psychological balance. More of this in the next chapter.
To the very class conscious, insecure middle class hitcher the relationship with the lift giver, especially if he sees the latter as a social inferior, can appear as an embarrassing reversal of roles. Normally he contentedly looks down on his 'social inferiors', but in accepting a lift from one of them he finds himself in an oddly up-side-down position. This feeling was graphically expressed by the son of a North Country company cashier studying at Cambridge:
Normally this student sees himself as socially superior to a lorry driver but in the waggon cab he suddenly finds himself in a psychologically inferior position and revealingly he describes this as degrading, like accepting lower class tips at Butlins.
How does a man regard his car? In order to get an idea of the unconscious relationship of people to their cars, Dr Stephen Black in Man and Motor Cars used hypnosis on a group of 25 subjects, nineteen of them in their late teens or early twenties. One point made by nearly all the subjects under hypnosis was that they saw their cars as an escape. One of the men put it like this:
The car was seen as a kind of shield, a protective wall against the outside world. A medical student said:
Again under hypnosis an electrician said:
Black's conclusion from his long investigation of these 25 people's subconscious feelings towards their cars is that the car is:
If Black's findings are correct how is it that any driver ever stops for a waving thumb? In other words if a car is such an intimate place, a kind of extension of the home, taking in a hitch-hiker must appear hazardous and unnatural. This is gone into by one of the Cambridge interviewees:
Another Cambridge undergraduate felt even more strongly about the hitch-hiker invading the intimacy of the car:
The intimacy of their relationship to their vehicle and their desire to be alone with their own thoughts, must in some cases stop people giving lifts. A young publisher interviewee expressed precisely such a feeling:
Even when he does give a lift the driver is able to preserve much of his apartness. The people involved have no previous knowledge of each other and they are pretty sure they will not meet again. The situation offers no easy means of identification of one by the other, unless the hitcher is moved to take down the car's number. Often after three hours together the driver and the hitcher don't even know each other's names, and if they do they are likely to be first names not surnames. In other words it is a situation that offers remarkable anonymity. It is usually a once and for all meeting with no follow-up. The vehicle offers absolute privacy, unlike most other meeting places for mutual strangers, such as train compartments, buses, pubs, queues, waiting rooms, dance halls etc. The initial problem most Englishmen, at least middle class ones, face in meeting a stranger is how to make the first contact without risk of rebuff or cold response. Within the convention of lift giving this awesome psychological barrier does not exist. The initial contact is made by the opening of the vehicle door and the exchange of information on mutual destinations.
It seems to be a fairly common hitch-hiking experience that some people do pick you up to unburden themselves of their secret troubles, worries and fantasies, hiding securely behind the namelessness granted by the lift giving convention. So, according to a Liverpool student:
A driver will sometimes stop and pick someone up because he is boiling over with rage and needs to give vent to it. Once on the road from Paris to Calais a man stopped for me and as he opened the door I saw a pool of bluish-red vomit swilling round on the floor below the passenger seat -- it was without body, entirely liquid. He spent the next 15 kilometres telling me he'd picked up a drunk further back down the road and how the man had spewed up. He told the simple tale three or four times, indignantly demanding to know if I approved of a hitch-hiker behaving that way. Acceptantly I agreed that his indignation was justified and loyally I served the purpose for which he had picked me up -- to earth his anger.
The hitch-hiking situation offers a man possessed by feelings of guilt a unique confessional. With a priest or psychiatrist he would find himself in the psychologically inferior position -- vis a vis the thumber his is the 'generous dominant role. For the priest or psychiatrist he is an identified or often identifiable individual. To the hitch-hiker he is merely an unplaceable man in a car. Rodger (Hitch in Time) describes the situation neatly:
Along with Rodger I can say no one has ever confessed a murder to me, but one driver did announce that he had just stolen the car we were driving in. He picked me up going North along the A.1 and after about 10 minutes' small talk said:
The rest of his life story came tumbling out, a pathetic alternation of petty thefts and inane imprisonments; his response to society seemed almost as inadequate as society's to him. He confessed his theft simply because he had to share knowledge of it with another human being, dangerous though the telling might have proved for him. I got out when he stopped for petrol and respected his confidence, despite an awareness of conflicting loyalties.
Sometimes the driver may find himself propelled into intimacy by the violence of his own desires. A psychologist in the North of England was picked up by a man who made determined and repeated homosexual advances to him. The hitcher successfully repulsed him and the man calmed down. He spent the rest of the journey telling his life story and talking about his homosexuality. Having been forced by his passion to reveal his leanings here was a person who could be talked to openly, without further fear of exposure -- his actions had already exposed him. The lift situation provided the intimate setting necessary for a confession of his problems and also gave him the security of anonymity.
It seems the more confident he is of his superior position vis a vis the hitch-hiker, the more the driver will drop his reserve and be willing to reveal the lower reaches of his consciousness. In the late fifties the white writer John H. Griffin blackened his skin enough to pass for a negro and bummed around the American South. At one point he tried hitch-hiking:
The white driver picking up the negro hitcher feels himself to be in a doubly dominant position, as white to black and as lift giver to lift solicitor. Griffin was picked up by a comparatively sophisticated white boy who nevertheless plied him with questions about the size of negro genitals and details of black sex life:
Within the cocoon of the lift situation, and within his feeling of almost species superiority to the negro it was possible for the young white to ask a thing he would never get a chance of asking outside the intimacy of the car and never dare to ask one of his own colour. Griffin describes him as an otherwise decent, friendly, well-disposed person.
A startling thing to emerge from the semi-non-directive interviews with students has been the extent to which they see themselves as the hitchers in the country par excellence. Several went so far as to say that, as drivers, they would only pick up hitchers with college scarves. So a girl at Liverpool:
A Cambridge male undergraduate felt broadly the same:
Another man from Cambridge perhaps got nearer the kernel of the thing when he said:
The drivers' conception of the group to which they tend to give lifts may be extremely narrow. A student at East Anglia said that his parents, Cambridge dons, only gave lifts to people in Cambridge college scarves. Such can be the importance for the driver of feeling that he is picking up a member of his own group, or even his own section of his group. With this sort of psychology the thumber's uniform, in this case a coloured scarf, becomes a vital recognition sign.
The idea of not giving or accepting lifts from alien groups comes out strongly in a discussion among skinheads in a North East London school. These big-booted third formers with red braces and almost Yul Brynner hair cuts had two particular hates: 'Hippos' (hippies) and 'greasers' (motorbike gangs). Here are two revealing snatches of a skinhead discussion on hitch-hiking:
There has to be basic mutual trust for the hitch-hiking situation to be thinkable. Given his hostility to 'hippos' and 'greasers' the skinhead is not going to risk giving them lifts or taking lifts from them. On a much graver level the American negro is not a willing lift giver or seeker. Steinbeck in Travels with Charley tells how he stopped
Steinbeck tried to talk to him but he got scared of being questioned and asked to be dropped off. The other face of the coin is that negroes don't give non-blacks lifts easily. A Mexican Indian girl told me:
The people who find it most difficult to get a lift in Britain are the ones who don't fit into any well-known, visually recognisable category of thumbers, for example, shabbily dressed, middle aged men without car delivery plates. They have no 'uniform', they do not belong to a placeable hitching group -- it is them that tend to wait the longest by the roadside.
To return to the verdict of the 186 respondents on why people give lifts:
When you take the responses as a whole (a few single ones have been omitted) it is striking how few hitchers regard the drivers who stop for them as altruistically motivated. Even in the'goodheartedness' category several people use expressions that bring out the self-directedness of the drivers' actions: 'out of charity', 'to do a bloke a favour' ....