Since I became a motorist I have always made a point of picking up hitch-hikers. It is an oblique way of repaying those who picked me up when I used to hitch-hike. I stop for hitch-hikers no matter how many there are or what they look like. "Don't mention it," I say if they thank me.
Last summer, while driving towards the Glastonbury pop festival with the sun in my eyes, I stopped for a shaven-headed young man wearing army fatigues over a white England football shirt. I was going to pick him up anyway, but I was particularly impressed by the resigned, unassuming angle of his hitching thumb.
His name was Shaun. He, too, was headed for the Glastonbury festival. He told me he had just returned from Lens in France, where he had seen England beat Colombia 2-0 in a World Cup group match. "That's funny," I said, "I've just come from there, too." That very morning I had watched the sun rise over Lens and the Douai Plain, while standing on the steps of the Canadian war memorial at Vimy Ridge.
Shaun knew about Vimy Ridge. Until recently he had been a corporal in the Royal Anglian Regiment. He had done three tours of duty in Northern Ireland, one in Bosnia, and he had served in the Gulf. He came from an army family. His father had boxed for his regiment, his brother had boxed for the army, and Shaun had been army kick-boxing champion for three years in succession.
In Bosnia, his platoon had drawn straws to decide who should marry a friendly local widow who was looking for a British passport. Shaun drew the short one. In the Gulf war he had been involved in hand-to-hand combat, and bayoneted three Iraqi soldiers to death. He was very open about it. I asked him whether any of them had said anything or made a noise as the blade went in. "One of them called out for his mother," said Shaun. After he had bayoneted his first Iraqi soldier, Shaun had "yukked up," but after that he was fine.
Earlier this year, while on manoeuvres in Canada, he had been accidentally blown up. His internal injuries were serious enough for the army to recommend a medical discharge. Shaun decided to take it. When his lump sum came through he was going to open a bar in Thailand. Meanwhile, he told me, he was short of cash. When we got to Glastonbury, he planned to vault the perimeter fence in order to save himself the ?60-odd entrance fee.
It was dark when we arrived. As a tribute to Our Boys I paid for Shaun to go in and issued him with ?50 in cash and a box of duty-free fags. I also told him I would leave the car unlocked so that he could leave his backpack, and if he didn't get any better offers that night, he could crash out on the back seat.
Inside the so-called festival, 80,000 people were camped in an ankle-deep lake of cold, liquid mud. It had been dry in France: I hadn't expected this. Emerging from the carpark, Shaun and I came upon a dense crowd of mud-caked, arc-lit people picking their way along half-submerged duckboard walkways. Everyone was moving very slowly and deliberately. No one was laughing. Few spoke. It was a nightmare. Cannabis smokers, subject to the usual schizoid dilemma about whether to participate in reality or remain separate from it, must have been even more undecided than usual.
Shaun and I splashed our way past an open-sided circus tent. Looking in, I saw a sludge-gulper lorry nosing its way through a vast, maniacal crowd of trance-dancers. The lorry was illuminated by roving, psychedelic-coloured strobe lights; it was driven by an elderly man wearing a cloth cap.
Beyond the circus tent there was a beer tent. Inside, the mud was exactly the same depth, temperature and consistency. On the way to the bar we had to step carefully over those customers who, in the absence of furniture, were simply lying in the slime.
"Perhaps we ought to try the saloon bar," suggested Shaun.
We stood at the bar and drank warm pints of weak lager from flexible plastic glasses while standing up to our ankles in liquid mud.
The man beside me at the bar was so entirely caked with mud that it was hard to tell whether or not he was wearing clothes. He was lounging against the bar and telling his friend about his marital problems.
After a couple of lagers in the beer tent, Shaun announced that he was going off to look for a friend of his. "Might see you later," he said, splashing away into the darkness.
After Shaun went I got drunk, then I got completely lost, then I unwittingly stepped in a hole and sank up to my armpits in mud. After that I can remember spending some time in a tent with some men from east Glasgow, and one of them saying to me that he thought it was about time I left because I was making him feel uneasy. (Perhaps it was the suit: I forgot to mention I was wearing a pin-striped suit.) He spoke in a very sinister and pointed manner, and his friends gave me the hard stare and nodded gravely. I didn't leave immediately because I thought they must have been joking.
I don't know how I found my way back to the car, but the next morning I woke up on the back seat, in the foetal position, still wearing my suit, caked in mud, and the windows were all steamed up. Shaun was fiddling around in the boot. I opened the door and let my head fall out. He was upside-down and wearing my jacket.
"I'm off now," he said. "Thanks for everything."
"Don't mention it," I said.
Later, when I looked in the boot, I realised that Shaun had rooted through my bags and taken everything of any value with him.
