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M5 – which went north to south. It was known throughout the estate as ‘the gift shop’, for reasons which will become clear.
    When I was nine or ten, I would sit for hours at night staring out across the blackness of the field at the sprawling chemical works, which was lit up like a giant fallen Christmas tree. I would pick out cars’ tiny headlights travelling along the motorway and follow them, trying to predict which way they might go. I was able to tell whether they were going north or south by the fact that their lights either turned red or remained white – hey, there wasn’t much on the TV back then! But I’d also invent the people who might be in the cars, where they were going and for what reason. I would even act out the conversations that might be going on inside the car while sitting on the windowsill of my bedroom.
    One whiff of snow would always cause a large crop of road accidents – I never understood why no one ever did anything about that treacherous junction. Every year, without fail, I would watch from our bedroom window the distant blue flashing lights of the police, fire brigade and ambulances. Clustered around a smoking heavy goods vehicle, they would be cutting some poor bugger out of the cab, always at the exact same black spot, the lethal Avonmouth turn-off. That was the junction the heavy goods lorries took to get them down to the docks, either to drop off their loads or pick something up from the foreign container ships.
    There was never a long gap between the accident actually happening and the alarm being raised. Someone had a constant eye on the motorway in the winter months, particularly when black ice was on the road. For the usual suspects prowling around the estate, this made conditions ripe for potential booty.
    There was no siren or alarm bell – somehow we just knew, we felt the buzz across the estate. It was like a gold rush: grown men still in their slippers, young boys trying to get there before anybody else, a few women with hair still in rollers, a horde of residents all shapes and sizes running full pelt across the back field, jumping over the tall scrub grass towards the motorway, desperate to see who would grab the first pickings from the over-turned load scattered across the carriageway.
    To be honest, I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the stuff that came off those trucks. The most I ever got was a big box of over-sized men’s Y-fronts that Mum used to clean the flat with for more than a year. So my full-speedrunning was more of a ‘let’s take a wander over and see what there is’. By the time I got there, anyway, it was usually too late. Like a bunch of hyenas, the locals had by then well and truly stripped the carcass of any real meat.
    As you approached the scene, you would pass a line of men, women and kids, all walking back across the field, each one enthusiastically clutching their bounty. A young boy would be struggling towards us fighting to hold on to an industrial-sized tin of something with no label on. ‘Pineapple chunks!’ he would shout as he passed, face all flushed with excitement.
    ‘What are you going to do with that? It’s massive!’ I’d say.
    ‘I don’t know yet, but I’ll find something. Perhaps pineapple pie,’ he’d reply as he staggered back to the estate.
    Now more curious to see what the truck was actually carrying, I walked to the edge of the field. From a sloping embankment there, you could look across at the full extent of the accident on the motorway. A lorry would be lying on its side like a dead whale. It had obviously come around the turn-off too fast, hit some black ice and kept on going till it hit the barrier, turned over and strewn its load. Its now-empty boxes were sprawled across both sides of the motorway and the driver’s cab was surrounded by the blue flashing lights of the emergency services trying to free the poor truck driver. They were all far too preoccupied to bother with the scavengers foraging around