Knowledge, and the lack thereof

“TAXI !!”

How often have you shouted that word, or even silently raised your arm on a busy street, secure in the belief that once ensconced in that vehicle you need have no further worries and will be able to switch off for a short while, as you are conveyed efficiently to your destination? You won’t get lost. You won’t be asked any difficult questions regarding the location of or route to wherever you’re going. After all, taxi drivers know everything, right?

Edinburgh taxi drivers do. In fifteen years there I was only ever taken to the wrong place once, and that was forgivable as a lot of the streets do have very similar names. Minicab drivers in York and Southampton seem to have a pretty good grasp of things too, despite having those cities’ tortuous one-way systems to contend with. And in London, of course, all cabbies have The Knowledge.

For my non-British readers, this is a test - allegedly requiring years of study - which anyone wishing to become a black-cab driver in London must pass, and which basically involves learning the name and location of every street and landmark in the UK capital. It’s a BIG place, so the taxi drivers rightly pride themselves on this achievement – particularly as I imagine they must have to keep their ‘Knowledge’ continually updated to keep pace with changes, which is no mean feat these days.

If you’ll permit me an indulgent aside for a moment, anyone who doubts that such an encyclopedic knowledge of a giant mega-city is possible should have met my late father. He wasn’t a cab driver, but I’m sure The Knowledge would have been a breeze for him. He was born and raised in south-east London, and later worked for one of the major publishing houses as their Central London rep for many years between the 1950s and 1970s. He was extremely good at it, and as a result was on first name terms with every bookshop owner, manager or chief buyer in London, which was a great many.

A bi-product of this was that he knew the place like the proverbial back of his hand. When my friends and I started going up to London on our own as teenagers, if any of us wanted to find a specific address, no matter what the area, I had only to ask my Dad and after a minute or two’s consideration he would not only able to advise the traveller as to the quickest route by Tube, but would also draw – freehand and without recourse to reference books – a detailed and amazingly accurate pictorial map of the route on foot from station to destination, showing every turning and landmark - sometimes down to the last tree or lamp-post - with estimated distances or walking times between each.

As a result I was able to travel freely alone around London from the age of about 14 with no fear of getting lost. I’d never heard of an A to Z – my Dad’s maps were all I ever needed. I wish I’d kept some of them as they were works of art, of which he was justly proud. On one’s return home he would enquire with just a hint of a smug smile, ‘So did you find it all right?’, to which one was required to respond with glory heaped upon The Map.

The only time they were ever wrong was when some new development had occurred without his knowledge - something which, it has to be said, he always took very badly. He seemed to expect to be kept informed of all changes, however minor, to the London landscape; indeed, it’s quite possible he half expected them to be run past him first. Any alteration to his beloved native city was truly a monstrous carbuncle. During my student years he occasionally came to collect me by car from King’s Cross when I came home for the holidays, and the installation of any new roundabout or one-way system not only confused and perturbed him but also, you could tell, wounded him deeply. If I or my mother had gone to London armed with one of his maps and dared to remark casually on our return, ‘Yes, thanks, I found the place no problem, the map was great, but incidentally did you know that place you said was a bank is actually now a McDonald’s? And where you said there’d be a big tree on the corner it looked as though they’d chopped it down recently,’ all hell would break loose.

First would come a detailed interrogation to make sure that we weren’t mistaken, or making it up just to annoy him, and that we really had followed his instructions to the letter and hadn’t accidentally – or perhaps wilfully – taken a wrong turning. When at length he was satisfied that we were not either lying or congenitally stupid, the grieving process would begin.

‘McDonald’s?!’ he’d cry, in anguish. ‘What is the world coming to? Been there for years, that bank had. McDonald’s? Christ Almighty,’ and so on in this vein for some time. Or, ‘What, that lovely old tree? Gone? I can’t believe it. Lovely, it was, that tree. Chopped it down? Dear oh dear oh dear. Christ Almighty,’ and at this point would become too choked to continue and wouldn’t speak for the rest of the evening. In the end I gave up telling him. It was less painful for everyone that way.

Knowledge, you see. A powerful tool. Unless, that is, you’re a Chinese taxi driver.

Boss was heard to remark the other week that the only qualification for becoming a cab driver in Shanghai seems to be the ability to drive. To be frank, I would question even that one, but one criterion that certainly isn’t deemed necessary is knowing where anything is.

None of the taxi drivers speak English, so if you don’t speak Chinese the only way to get anywhere is to have your destination written down in Chinese characters and show this to the driver on entering the vehicle. The drill is always the same. They take your piece of paper, peer at it, slowly turn it over and read whatever’s on the back (whether this is the same thing, a different address entirely, or simply your shopping list in English), then with some encouragement from you turn it back to the correct side and read it carefully again, generally while shaking their head and muttering. They may turn to you and ask you a question. When you respond with a shrug, or a wave in the general direction in which you need to go, they mutter some more, throw your piece of paper onto the dashboard and set off, still muttering, which is disconcerting when you can recognise the word for ‘where?’ cropping up repeatedly.

One driver this week did the whole pantomime with my little address note and then turned to me and asked in Chinese which I understood perfectly, ‘Where’s that then?’. And this wasn’t some obscure side-street; our new apartment’s address is on one of Shanghai’s major thoroughfares. It’s like a London cabbie asking you where, say, Charing Cross Road is, or an Edinburgh one struggling to find Leith Walk. What did he want me to say – ‘It’s in Shanghai’, perhaps?

Once mobile, they may start off by going in completely the opposite direction, or take a wildly wrong turning anywhere en route, so you need to have your wits about you and be prepared to shout ‘No, no!’ and gesture frantically – assuming, of course, you know where the place is yourself, because if you don’t, you’re frankly buggered. The only recourse in that instance is to phone someone at your destination, explain your plight, hand the phone to the driver and get them to dictate directions in Chinese. Thank goodness for modern technology.

When they eventually get near – or what they think might be near – to where you want to go, they will slow down and proceed in a very irritating stop-start manner for a mile or so while consulting your paper every few yards. They do this even if you know you’re not there yet and keep shouting at them to go on. Just as they approach the correct place, they will put their foot down and you have to scream at them again to stop, which they will then do, even if this means screeching to a halt in the middle of a dual carriageway and doing a U-turn across several lanes of oncoming traffic.

It’s not just in Shanghai that this goes on. In Harbin, our taxi usage is mostly confined to bringing the shopping home from the supermarket, which is less than a mile away. We have our address, in Chinese, in a text message which we show to the drivers. But not one of them knows where the street is, so Peter always has to sit in the passenger seat and point left and right. In Beijing the other week, Peter was on his way to a meeting and had his cabbie actually lean out of the window while driving along and shout across to a fellow taxi driver driving alongside for directions. Ever heard of sat-nav, guys??

Maybe the trouble is that finding out where places are would involve getting a straight answer out of people, something which you’ll have gathered by now is next to impossible here. The lost taxi-driver in Beijing was only part of Peter’s woes in his attempts to get to this meeting. First of all he had tried to get the hotel reception to give him a phone number for a taxi company so that he could call a taxi to get back after the meeting, as it was out of town. The girl he asked looked a bit perplexed and went into the back office to consult with her colleagues. After a while she reappeared.

‘We will call you taxi,’ she said.

Peter explained that yes, that was fine for getting there, but how would he get back? After several repetitions of this cycle, the duty manager got on the case and offered to find a driver and negotiate with him to wait while Peter had his meeting. Clearly the concept of phoning in advance for a taxi was unheard of – indeed, as the taxis have no radios it’s hard to see how this could work. They sent a lad from the hotel into the street to flag down a taxi. Two stopped at once, only avoiding crashing into each other by one of them knocking down a cyclist, who got up and started shouting at the driver and kicking his bumper, thereby allowing the other driver to win Peter’s fare.

It was this man - who apparently resembled a hippopotamus with exceptionally large, hairy, warty ears - who had to ask other drivers for assistance en route, until Peter eventually phoned the person he was going to meet and did the hand-the-phone-to-driver thing – which in view of the warty ears was pretty brave.

On arrival at his destination, Peter disembarked and retrieving (and wiping) his phone, said to his associate, ‘Right, I’m here now. I’m at the main entrance. Where’s your office?’

‘Ah’, says associate. ‘Go out of the main door and we are round the back.’

‘Left or right?’ asks Peter.

‘We are in a building that is not yellow.’

‘Yes but do I go left or right?’

‘It is a low building.’

Giving up, he picked a direction at random, walked for a little while and then phoned again. ‘Ok, I’m standing looking at a big tower thing.’

‘Ah, you have gone too far. Go back.’

He returns to the main entrance. ‘Now I’ve gone back to where I was before.’

‘I did not see you! Look for the building that is not yellow.’

And so, having asked the guy please to come out and find him, he tried again, and on the second attempt discovered that in actual fact when he got to the tower he hadn’t gone far enough.

People say the Chinese will one day rule the world. If knowledge really is power, I don’t think we’ve got too much to worry about. Rule the world? They’d have to find it first.