Taxi Driver
On another occasion, I picked up a young Russian man from a guest house on Mount Dandenong to take him to the Channel 10 studios in Nunawading. In my memory, his name was Boris but – well, he was Russian! He was quite tall. In those days, the front car seat was a bench seat, which I had pulled a fair way forward, so he had a bit of trouble folding himself into the seat.
The look he gave me indicated he wasn’t all that comfortable, and not just because his knees were touching the dashboard. Whether he was just a nervous passenger or my being a female made him nervous, I don’t really know, but he clung on to the dashboard for the whole trip, and didn’t take his eyes off the road even though we did chat a bit. There’s a couple of particularly panoramic bends on the Mount Dandenong Tourist Road that definitely rattled him as evidenced by him grabbing so hard at the dash that he pulled himself almost up to the windscreen.
There were some concerns from the other taxi drivers – all men, of course – for my safety. I wasn’t particularly concerned but I did know the call code that would let the radio operator know I was in some trouble. The operators were always informed of a driver’s movements, so when I did use the code, there were at least two other taxis near me within minutes. On one of those occasions, my passenger, a young man clearly off his head on some substance, was trying to grab the wheel. I was able to stop the cab safely, and one of the cabs that had responded to the code took the young man into his cab.
The cab itself was a challenge at times. It was customary to always drive the same vehicle. The cab that was waiting for me when I started was an HQ Holden with manual transmission. That was not a problem except that sometimes the gears would get stuck and the car would stall. The first time it happened, one of the other drivers came to my assistance. He obviously had experience with the car. He popped the bonnet and showed me which rod to jiggle until it clicked into place. So every now and then, the car would stall, hopefully where I could make it to the side of the road to deal with it myself.
My tenure as a taxi driver came to an end when I was too pregnant to safely fasten the seat belt.
As you come own the hill to this bend, there is a steep drop and a view of Port Philip Bay
