Thereze’s decade in the European fast lane

For Thereze Benson’s parents, the trouble started every time their daughter peered through the window of the family pub on the Killaloe side of the town bridge.

It seemed that lorries were always whizzing by on their way to or from the Finsa factory in Scariff. It didn’t take Thereze long to decide that she wanted to drive lorries for a living.
“From about 10, I wanted to be a truck driver. I was just obsessed with the size of them and what they carried,” Thereze, now a retired continental driver, who, along with her partner Terry McHugh, manages the Anchor Inn, Killaloe, explained.
Sensing that their daughter needed a bit of space, her parents (Jim and Ann) sent her to boarding school in Connemara for five years. Nothing worked. Neither did a year at agricultural college in Cirencester, Gloucestershire. At 19, Thereze was still adamant she wanted to get behind the wheel and head for the open road.
“I just said to myself ‘I’m going to settle at nothing until I get this driving craic out of my head’. So I said it to my parents when I came back from college and we had a huge row, obviously. My mother was more supportive than my father, who was just like ‘no way”, she laughed. It was 2000 and within a few weeks Thereze had acquired a Rigid Truck Licence but what she really wanted was an arctic equivalent. It cost €1,000 to sit the test, which she passed with the benefit of just two lessons.
“It was a Tuesday and I remember passing it and on the Friday I took a load to England, which was a challenge because all I had done was driven around Limerick,” Thereze remembers. Geography wasn’t her strong point and she didn’t know how to leave the country, let alone where to go if she managed that.
“I didn’t even know where Dublin was, let alone England. I was green out completely but I was told to go to Dublin Port and get on a boat and go and deliver a load to England.”
Her first adventure ruined her birthday but vastly improved her grasp of where a number of countries were situated. Assured that a trip to Scotland would have her back in Killaloe in time for her birthday, Thereze headed off.
“They had to offload and reload me. So I pulled off the loading bay and I said ‘where’s my paperwork?’ They said it was gone to the ferry already. I said ‘which one will I be going from? Stranraer or Cairnryan?’ They turned around and said ‘you’re going from Rosyth’. said ‘where’s Rosyth’ and they said ‘over by Edinburgh’. I was like ‘why would I be going that way when I’m going home?’ They said ‘you’re going to Germany. You’re not going home’. I was there, ‘what! I don’t know where Germany is. I’ve only started this job!’”
Although rattled, Thereze had no choice. She had to somehow find her way to Essen in Germany. She asked around. A few drivers on the boat helped out.
“They knew the place I was going to so they gave me directions and told me what to do. So I got to the place no problem and got tipped. Then I rang the company and they said ‘would you believe there’s a load coming out of there for Ireland’. I was like ‘lovely, thank God’.”
Everything was rosy until Thereze realised she didn’t know her way back to Ireland.
“No one drew me directions out of Germany or out of anywhere. They just told me to head to Calais, which was in France, but I only found out then,” she recalled.
Thereze hit the road but it wasn’t until she spotted an Irish lorry driver going the opposite way that she got a few badly needed directions to France.
“I could have been heading for Denmark for all I knew but all of a sudden I saw an Irish lorry on the other side of the road. So I called him on the CB radio (short distance band) and I was trying to act cool. I asked ‘where are you for?’ He said he had six drops around Germany and asked where I was going.”
“Dunno,” Thereze replied. “Somewhere called Calais.”
“He started laughing on the CB. I said ‘you can’t be laughing, I don’t know where I’m going’. He goes ‘well, you’re on the right road. Keep looking for the signs for Antwerp and so on. So I took them all down while driving and I was like ‘thanks a million man, we’ll talk again’. But to this day I have never met that driver and I owe my life to him, practically. Because I would have never got home.”
With mention of home, there was still some tension in Killaloe. Jim Benson still didn’t think that having a truck-driving daughter was much to boast about. When people asked what Thereze was at, Jim had a stock answer.
“If we met friends of the family that I hadn’t seen in ages, straight away he’d be saying ‘she’s between jobs’. And at this stage I’d have driven across half of Europe,” she said.
Jim even suggested that the 320-horse power lorry she was driving wasn’t that big. That soon changed.
“Within four weeks I had 530-horse power underneath me and I was heading for Poland. So he couldn’t say anything more to me! It was the biggest machine you could get at the time.”
Thereze rarely met female drivers, either in Ireland or Europe. Hers was a man’s world and she had no option but to become one of the boys. A conversation with a friend underlined how her male colleagues viewed her.
“He said, ‘I couldn’t go out with you Thereze, you’re one of the boys’. They all saw me as a boy,” she said. A function in Cavan for continental drivers left the men confused and befuddled.
“I called Mammy and she helped me get a dress. Off I went. I walked into the place and not one of them recognised me. These were lads I was on the road with night and day. I was like ‘thanks’,” she laughed.
Early in her 10-year driving career, Thereze came across a driver who did everything he could to persuade her to park the arctic and stay at home. On her way to Dublin, he overtook when overtaking wasn’t an option. Thereze was driving behind him and had no choice but to head for the hard shoulder to avoid an oncoming car with six people in it.
“I avoided the car, went into the hard shoulder and put on the air brakes. But she skidded in gravel and jack-knifed on me. I was caught between the steering wheel and the seat. I was fairly shook-up and I had glass all over me. I had realised what had happened. I knew he did it on purpose and I was so cross with myself for letting it happen,” Thereze remembered.
Regularly, her driver colleagues reported that they were in trouble with their wives at home in Ireland. The wives couldn’t understand what was keeping their husbands on the continent.
“I don’t know how they think we get to the likes of Spain and Italy. Do they think we fly there and it’s a party all the way? Because they have that attitude. I see it with the men when the wife would get off the phone. Now I’m not blackening the women here at home but it’s a hard thing to understand. The lads would be driving down the road exhausted and the wife would be on the phone going ‘I know you’re in a pub’. If only we could find one we’d be in it! It’s just hard for them to understand it and it’s hard for men to explain it because men aren’t good talkers.” Thereze said.
Life on the road is addictive. If it’s for you, Thereze maintains that there is no way out other than to keep driving until you hit the wall.
“It’s a disease. If you are drawn to the continent it’s near impossible to get it out of your blood until you’re totally, totally burned out. That’s the only way you can give it up. It’s the only thing you know, eventually. Night and day you live in the truck. In the newer lorries now you’ve got a fridge and freezer and I’m mad into reading so I read a lot. You also have a TV, DVDs, PlayStations and a boom box for the music,” is how Thereze describes the life of a long-distance driver.
Thereze met Terry while on the road. These days they live and work together in Killaloe, far removed from the motorways of Europe. So who drives when they are heading somewhere in a mere car these days?
“When we’re going slow Joe, Terry’s driving. But yeah, we do fight in the car. Terry would be slower to pass out. I don’t know what he’d be waiting for!” Thereze added.
“When we’re in a rush, I drive,” she noted, although the pace of heading for the ports of Europe has been supplanted by the more sedate tempo of pint pulling beside the Killaloe-Ballina bridge.