E’volvo’lution Chapter 16

It was late in the evening when we landed and found that Q had arranged transport to take the other girls home. He drove me himself in a rental car and asked me if I had any questions.

“The other military guys in Austria were British Army, weren’t they?”

He agreed they were, “They were very impressed with the show, one of them managed to get a signed poster with all of you there to take home to his teenage daughter.”

“Are we a certainty to get a contract if we can come up with a suitable base, then?”

He told me that I was probably correct.

Back home I found that my folks had gone home to see what they would keep and what they would dispose of. Anders had given them a container that they could park and fill up.

Berget and I went off to bed and cuddled up while I told her of the things I had driven and showed her the patches which were now on the side cupboard by my side of the bed.

She laughed when she saw the man on the tank climbing the wall and I told her that it was very close to our final session. She told me that they had seen a house my mother liked which had a shed, rather than a carport, but the house was the biggest part of the property.

I was just getting amorous when Melody decided she needed attention and I was volunteered to look after her, being told “I’ve been doing this all week and I deserve a rest.”

We had a quiet weekend talking about the next week and just trying to find the odd half hour where we could share our love between feeds and nappies. By the time we got up on Monday morning we were settled with what we were about to start.

As I’ve said before, the baby was front and centre which allowed me to settle into my new office and make a start at my quest. I started with logging on to ‘Businesses for Sale’ looking for transport companies.

There weren’t many listed and what I saw wasn’t helpful. I wasn’t unhappy because I knew it wouldn’t be a quick result. I then looked up the industry listings of transport companies and made notes of those I could see were about the right size.

I had immediately decided that there was to be no link with Lundins so that also ruled out using Volvo exclusively. I then thought along those lines to see if there were trucks made in the UK that were not just bodies built onto supplied chassis frames.

There were, from first look, only two; Dennis and Scammell. Both, I knew, had been around a long time and both had built huge trucks, Scammell, in particular, supplying tank transporters in the war.

I was faced with a dilemma. I needed to get more information but I couldn’t do it from my office, even with false names on emails. What I needed was a base in England so that any search into a future company would come back to there.

I had a quick meeting with Anders and then called Elizabeth on her phone, asking her to come into my office when she had finished the delivery she was on. I spent my time looking up various sites and saw that I had to rule Dennis out as the company, one of the biggest suppliers of fire engines and rubbish trucks; after a lot of moves and name changes, was no more.

Further investigation revealed that Scammell, the builder of the most brutal looking trucks ever, had also disappeared. One brand that stood out with a tenuous British history was DAF.

The company that owned them had acquired Foden and Leyland trucks in the recent past and were quite well-known on British roads. The cab was a front control with sleeper; very similar to our Volvo Globetrotter and they did a 6x4 and 8x4.

Now all we had to do was find an ailing company that used them or else start a new one. I looked at the on-line specification sheets and the CF480 or CF530 took my fancy for the heavy work. At thirteen litres, it’s similar to the Volvo. The general usage truck could be the CF370, only eleven litres.

When Elizabeth came in I asked her if there were any other English speakers among our girls. She told me that Laura, one of our earlier civilian employees, and Emma, one of the later ones from the army, were both good speakers, having spent some time in the UK as children. I thanked her for the information and then went to see Anders again.

In his office I laid out what I had discovered on my first day and told him that I thought that the only way we could separate Lundin from the new business is to open up a new office in England with English speaking principals.

I suggested that Elizabeth could lead the group and she could register a business name with her, Emma and Laura as partners. If it didn’t pan out they could come back. Before I went home we arranged a meeting with the three girls and Bjorn for the next afternoon. I dropped in to Bergets office and took Melody with me as Berget was deep into organising the next truck shows to round out the season.

The following day Anders, Bjorn and me sat and worked out a budget based on what we could afford if we didn’t get the contract and I found that we had quite a bit that I could spend.

That afternoon the six of us sat in the board-room and the three girls were asked if they would like to start a new company, in England, as a holding company. They had to look for a transport business we could buy.

They were amazed but enthusiastic. It was decided that they would have be ex- Lundin employees, supposedly living off their holiday and retirement pay while they were there, until they were making enough money to be independent. They were instructed to open a bank account into which we would deposit enough funds to keep them going. This would be from my own I had set up in Uppsala as a young lad – Anton Berg not being an employee of Lundin.

Over the following week they said their farewells to their families and friends, saying that they had clubbed together to go to the UK. We were to keep in touch with Elizabeth emailing my own laptop which stayed at the apartment so that it was not linked to the Lundin Wi-Fi server.

In the week after, they had opened an account and registered a business name. ‘TEG - Trucking Essex Girls (Holdings)’ was formed. They rented a house in Romford and we took their belongings over with a load in one of our deliveries for NATO.

The location was perfect, being close to London and the Tilbury docks, as well as also very close to Dagenham and Ilford, both having a big industrial base.

Elizabeth kept me abreast of their activities as they looked for failing businesses as well as good locations for starting one up from scratch. In the meantime I spent three solid weeks in the language school again, this time learning enough English to get by.

In the end they found an example of both requirements. The site was quite near them in a village called White Notley, just south of the Braintree Ring Road. It was a cluster of five big sheds alongside the Witham Road, a pretty good carriageway for that part of the country. It was in very close proximity to the big army camp at Colchester.

The other was a Welsh trucking firm called Red Dragon Trucking which had operated out of the Bromfield Industrial Estate in a lovely little place called Mold. It was close to a lot of good roads into the Midlands and also very close to Liverpool.

The owners had concentrated on taking goods from Spain and Italy to the UK and delivering to big stores from Manchester to Birmingham. The advent of Brexit and Covid, and the difficulty with getting over to Europe and back with big trucks had almost destroyed them. They had six DAF trucks and trailers sitting in a yard covered in tarpaulins and it was a bargain when we bought the company and the yard with contents.

With the infrastructure in place we signed the contract with the Ministry of Defence, once again everything being deliberately vague. Over the rest of the year we took on ten drivers supplied by the British Army and another ten civilians.

The civilians worked out of Wales and consisted of six drivers and four mechanics with Laura moving into a house in Mold to take charge. The army girls worked out of Essex with six new DAF trucks and trailers.

We also put on four mechanics there and Emma was in charge, having been in our army driver group. We didn’t operate doubles as most of the roads, other than the motorways, were not too friendly for these.

The Welsh trucks were freshly painted in green with a Red Dragon on the sides of the cabs, while the Essex ones had a much different look. They were a pinkish, lilac colour with ‘Essex Girls’ over the front of the cab with an extremely well-endowed lady on either side.

We built a lighter trailer in our workshop and painted it up as a show exhibit with Greger unleashing his inner perv on the picture on the side. It was ordered and paid for as a straight business transaction by TEG.

Bjorn took it to the UK with a load of new computer tracking equipment that matched our system in Tallinn, and was destined to be set up in Essex to handle the management of both businesses.

Elizabeth had found a large house with several sheds near Royston and had set up a room in the house as a control room and the army supplied three logistics officers who worked three shifts. The British were being very much more ‘hands-on’ with this operation.

We also built and painted a ‘Red Dragon’ show trailer with a full light show that had the scales of the dragon changing colour over a period of time and then the eyes starting to glow. The cycle ended with the eyes flaring red and a blast of flame coming from a vent in the roof that was in line with the upturned head.

This was repeated on the other side as well. Again, it was on an order and paid for by TEG which now, due to the big contract, was doing very nicely. The two trailers were destined to be shown at the UK shows only, during the summer season.

After Tallinn we had appeared at a show in Croatia with ‘Maidens’ as well as two on the Volvo stands in Hannover and the final one of the year in Berne, Switzerland.

By now, Helena was very involved with our management and resigned from the Estonian army in December to be our second-in-command in the Maidens operation. At the same time we lost Anna and Karmen. Both offered an officer commission if they went back to the Transport Division as instructors, something they couldn’t refuse.

On top of that, being an all-girl operation, we started to get other drivers having babies so converted one of the rooms in the complex into a crèche and employed a full-time nurse to look after it.

These additions, and our live-in units on site, were marking us out as leaders in the transport world when it came to employing women. The published figures showed that a happy band of women were far more cost-effective, even with the added outlays.

When we came to the first anniversary of the opening of the new yard we had taken delivery of another six big trucks and employed another ten civilian drivers. There were applications coming in from all over the country and, we noted, a lot were from the daughters of trucking families.

By my second anniversary of being in Tallinn I was very busy with my work with Elizabeth. I still had a small part in our show trucks. We were not part of the Volvo commercial shows this year as they thought that they had made their mark there so just concentrated on the Artistic ones.

We had been asked by the organisers of the Peterborough Truckfest if we could take a ‘Maidens’ light-show rig but have a rear trailer set up as a stage so we built one similar to the one Berget and I had hauled.

As that show coincided with Tallinn this year we had Helena in charge here while Berget, Melody and I took the other rig to the UK, this one having the full show capability.

When we arrived at the showground on the Wednesday I was shown where to park and set up the lighting. This show was a bit different to our previous ones because the person playing Thor was the guitarist in the band for the evening performance. The difference was that, instead of disappearing with the light flare, when the audience got their vision back he would be holding a guitar shaped like the Thor hammer and would start with the riff of one of their hits.

Elizabeth turned up with both of their show trucks and she took us all back to the hotel we were all staying at, driving an ‘Essex Girls’ people mover which was certainly an eye-opener on the road.

Emma and Laura joined us and, after the two other drivers had gone to bed, we had a chat about how things had gone. All three girls were grateful for the opportunity and backing and now had a solid future as directors of a successful concern. Elizabeth told me that they were planning another three trucks for each part of the company.

She also said that they would repay the loans from Lundin over the following year or so. It wasn’t all that much of a separation of the two companies because we were taking trailers to them in England to deliver with their trucks and bringing back loads for Europe that they had picked up. It certainly kept their logistics guys busy keeping track.

I was supposed to be one of the ‘showgirls’ and Thursday we flew another five in for the duration, Elizabeth doing the pick-up honours as we couldn’t bring our own vehicle.

Thursday I also met with the guitarist and showed him what we had for him to work with. His band set up their equipment on our stage trailer and there was also extra speaker stacks at each end of the rig.

Friday was show day and Berget had the store open with our posters and tunics. The five other girls and I rotated with our tunics on, answering questions and posing for selfies. The other two trucks also had good crowds, the Red Dragon spewing fire on the hour and the Essex Girls truck had three very comely girls who were getting a lot of attention.

In the evening we did our introduction to the band with our usual sound and light show, the guitarist making a pretty good job of being Thor.

The flare happened and we girls did the disappearing act with his hammer being replaced with his guitar. We were heading for the steps of the front trailer as his opening riff rang out. We all changed into normal clothes, shut down the lighting, locked the truck and trailer and left in the people mover with Elizabeth.

She had already taken her crew to the hotel. The band could close up the stage when they finished playing. It had, I thought, been an interesting and different use of ‘Maidens’. Just two more shows to go.

On the Saturday I saw Q in the crowd, walking with Felix and a few other military looking types. Sunday he came up to me and told me that everyone was very happy and he had even been promoted, not telling me his rank, though.

I spent my second anniversary of being Antonia by letting the others run the show while I had a nice lunch with Berget and Melody. That evening the sound and light show was again the hit of the event and the band turned up the volume to close the night.

We stayed until the early hours while the band took down their equipment and loaded it into their own truck. The guitarist gave me the Fender Hammer guitar as a keepsake and we locked everything away, ready to leave the next day. We left the stage trailer with Elizabeth to hire out to other shows.

For the rest of the year I kept in touch with Elizabeth, helped Berget and Helena with the shows and just made sure everything ran smoothly.

I spent a lot of time with Halina, now the proud mother of young Greger, sometimes taking Melody with me so she could play with him. The older he got, the more he looked like Melody, his mother, his aunt and his grandmother.

The lad was destined to be the butt of jokes but he would have me and a loving father to show him just what can be achieved.

In Tallinn we approached Christmas with a feeling that we couldn’t do much more. Our own operation was running smoothly and there were only connections with the military when it was needed and then at a much higher level than the British.

My parents were truly settled in and my mother was in heaven with three grandchildren to cuddle. Actually, it was soon to be four as Berget was pregnant again. I was approaching thirty and it seemed that my puberty was finally happening. My doctor, though, informed me it was just the aging process.

As the months passed I had become less Antonia and more like the old Anton. My fourth anniversary in Tallinn was the turning point. Berget and I made a decision that I should go back to being Anton, full-time.

Antonia had not appeared at a show for a couple of years so she was being slowly consigned to history. I had never taken hormones or had any permanent changes made so it was a matter of taking a long holiday, cutting my hair and buying a new wardrobe of male clothes that, I must admit, were a bit more ‘metrosexual’. The main thing I missed was the jewellery and the softer clothing but certainly didn’t miss the long times getting dressed and the need to wear heels.

After the holiday I spent most of my time flying around Europe, sorting out supply lines, talking to suppliers, fuel companies, hotel chains, and all the other little things we needed to do to keep the operation going. As far as Tallinn was concerned, Antonia had left the company.

The UK operation came to an end, of sorts, around that time. There were a number of small leaks and a few of the ‘Essex Girls’ trucks had been stopped at the gates of army bases.

This only affected the ‘Essex Girls’ operation and there was enough general work that the ‘Girls’ carried on as a general carrier and some customers approved of what they had been doing.

The contract, however, was with TEG (Holdings) so we were still committed to our supply of special transport. ‘Essex Girls’ delivered non-military supplies for a while but the drivers all resigned from the army to keep working as civilians.

Elizabeth just went out and ordered eight Isuzu trucks and trailers, had them painted black and the ‘sensitive’ business carried on with ‘Tik-Tok Transport’ taking over the loads, now using back gates and operating at night using her pool of now-civilian drivers.

The motto was ‘Regular as Clockwork, any Hour - any Place’ and the vehicles looked so overtly covert that no-one took them seriously. Now they operated out of the sheds in Royston and the contract stayed with her.

The ex-army drivers took turns operating the computer system and managing the logistics. The Essex Girls trucks and trailers were systematically repainted as Red Dragon units and so life there carried on.

Berget and I finally married and Anders appointed me as the person in charge of a whole new yard, this time in the Balkans. I was to set it up from scratch to handle the massive amount of work we were doing in the eastern side of Europe, especially along the edge of the Russian holdings.

It took a month in the language school before I could understand even half of a conversation in Bulgarian but I had full backing to employ interpreters as well as drivers, mechanics and other office staff.

We found a site for our yard near Sofia and bought a house big enough for the four of us and any visiting family or friends. It took nearly two years to build our new complex and get up to speed with a new fleet and new staff but we achieved it in the end.

We followed the lead of other transport companies in the area and equipped our fleet with Iveco units. Of course, our general contract with NATO gave us enough work from the get-go. By the time we had spent another eight years there, Melody had grown up, able to speak Bulgarian like a native as well as the Estonian and Swedish we spoke at home.

Little Halina was just about to finish primary school and was also partially bi-lingual. We hadn’t missed our family and friends, many visiting several times to take advantage of the warmer climate, especially in the spring and autumn.

We had also been to the UK, Tallinn and other European cities often to put supply chains into place.

The one thing I didn’t expect, was to be recalled to Tallinn and told that Greger and Bjorn had decided that they wanted me to take over the company. Anders was well beyond his retirement age now and wanted to go off and spend his time travelling.

I went back to Sofia and talked it over with my family. Berget was happy with it and it wouldn’t worry Halina very much but Melody was upset that she would leave her friends.

It took a lot of discussion and the promise that she could attend a prestigious University that decided her. She was a very bright child and would go far in the world; perhaps further than her father.

After that it was just a matter of promoting our best person to carry on and then we sold the house and packed up to head north again. Our belongings were put into a trailer and shuttled through various yards to Tallinn

Both sets of parents were happy to see us come back and we bought a very nice house in an up-market area. Berget was now a full-time house-wife and was committed to giving our two the best upbringing she could.

My father had retired and was now only working with the company as a consultant. Both of my parents were happy, even happier once we had brought back two of their grand-children. My sister had given birth to a set of twins who were now seven; young Greger was about to finish high school and Agnis was at University. Surrounded by them all I felt old.

I felt even older the day I sat in the big office for the first time. There, on the walls, were signs of my past.

The signed posters of ‘Antonia’s Answer’ and ‘Thor’s Maidens’ were flanked with the broken fibreglass hammer and the hammer guitar. There were also posters of ‘Essex Girls’ and ‘Red Dragon’ as well as an enlarged photo of one of the ‘Tik-Tok’ fleet and a line-up of fifty Iveco’s that were in Sofia.

Along a shelf was an impressing array of show awards, with the one for “Truck of the Show’ that ‘Answer’ had won in front and centre. That day was the starting point of a massive business.

Greger was now a respected teacher of art in the local University and Halina was very much a ‘society leader.’ Bjorn had gone into politics with Erik’s help and was likely to become a minister at the next election. Helena ran the every-day trucking business with such expertise it made it easier for me. Strangely, many of our initial twenty odd drivers were still with us but now in senior positions. Most of the others that had appeared in the original group photo were retired or had moved on.

Alongside the main building were the show trailers for ‘Maidens.’ They had been stripped of their wheels and sat on the ground. Sitting beside them was the lightweight container from the back of ‘Answer’ with the painting still as vivid as the day I first saw it.

They were under a big roof. The ‘Maidens’ trailers were used for office storage and spare parts. The container was next to the side door and connected to the power supply. It was our overflow cloakroom which was very handy in winter.

The original yard had been almost completely rebuilt with modern facilities to match the headquarters and most of the fleet had been replaced over the intervening years.

I made waves no longer but now became the sea wall that other waves crashed into and slowly came to understand just how good Anders had been at his job.

I just hoped that whoever took over from me would think that I had done well enough.

We didn’t go into truck shows any more as we were all far too busy making money for the company. One of the first things I did as the overall boss was to go to the UK and meet with Elizabeth to negotiate her total independence from the Lundin group.

She was, by now, running fifty or so trucks and was in a good position. She, and her husband, took me out for dinner and I had a lovely time.

Even though her husband had never met Antonia he asked me if I knew her and I said that I did, very well, but that she had left the business to take up event organising.

Elizabeth could hardly keep a straight face. Even she had been surprised some years before when I turned up in a suit and tie instead of a dress and it had taken a little bit of explaining before she was comfortable with the whole thing.

On the day of my twentieth anniversary of becoming Antonia I took my family to the Tallinn Truck show to gaze at the artistic details and take in the atmosphere. Berget, Halina and her boyfriend stayed close but Melody dashed off to meet up with her steady guy who worked in the security business and was on duty today.

Several heads of other companies greeted me during the day and we were enchanted by the light shows as the darkness fell, now following the trends that we had set all of those years ago.

Of course, a lot had changed in the past years and most of the newer exhibits were hydrogen powered or electrics with solar panels. Greger had looked into the future when he had painted the original Pony Express rider. We now had staging yards with big charging stations between three and five hundred kilometres apart. We worked goods across Europe in Pony Express style, a truck only going back and forth between two posts while the trailer was taken further on.

I stood at the spot where I first saw ‘Antonia’s Answer’ and there was a rig that was all pop-art and strange pictures, a bit like a Picasso. The lights on it were almost hypnotic as they swirled and danced.

The name on the side of the cab was - ‘Akki?’ - ‘Maybe?’

Marianne Gregory © 2022