Part two of Scene Scania's Interview with Bev Turner.
Her own sporting activities are confined to ten-pin bowling every weekend, but she is a lot more careful after straining her back during a club competition. “It kept me out of the truck for ten days,” she recalls.
Most of Jayne’s holidays are now saved up for truck shows. She describes the families arriving with trailers packed with tents, barbecues, garden furniture and crates of beer and it all sounds like great fun. Jayne has been going to them for the last ten years, including those at Yorkshire, Scotland and, of course, Peterborough.
At this year’s Truckfest Southwest she joined the 500 or so other trucks and became the first woman to make it onto the podium with second place in the ‘Best New Truck’ category. Trucking magazine carried a picture showing her grinning at her achievement. “It’s OK,” she ponders. “But there’s no picture of my truck.”
Jayne’s parents are proud of their trail-blazing daughter and her mum helped furnish the luxury cab with feather quilts and dark blue curtain tie-backs. Jayne regularly pulls up outside her mother’s house for a cup of tea and a chat. And after Sunday lunch, mum plates up an extra meal for Jayne to heat up in the truck’s microwave the next day.
I ask if she thinks of her Scania as a male or a female. “It’s got to be a woman,” she retorts quickly, “because it doesn’t play up. If it was a man it would be stopping every few minutes for a break!” With this she took out a clean paintbrush and started dusting in between the buttons on the steering wheel. “The only way to keep them really clean,” she explains and then demonstrates how she can now control her radio system with a mere flick of her thumbs.
Jayne drives about 2,000 miles per week. She had her last truck for four years and clocked up over 500,000 miles in it. By the end she says she was “losing a bit of heart in it – no matter how much I cleaned it, it still looked a bit tired.” The arrival of the new one made the parting that much sweeter.
This is a woman who loves her job – but not as much as she loves her truck. Over the festive period she will take Christmas Day off, but will probably be back on the road by the evening of Boxing Day.
On the drive back to the train station the final revelation comes when Jayne tells me she has the Scania logo tattooed on her back. For me, it’s the final confirmation of my suspicion that only her Scania is worthy of her loving touch.
Jayne’s is a life lived on the road. It may not be that of a typical – or stereotypical woman – and there’s no doubting she is very much a woman in a man’s world.
But, I suspect, that’s fine by Jayne. If fact, I can’t image she would have it any other way…
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