Alf the Smuggler

Back in my student days I was fortunate to get a job for my 3^rd year industrial placement at CERN, the particle physics laboratory that sits astride the Franco-Swiss border just a few miles from Geneva. This prestigious facility is a hugely important research centre funded by dozens of European governments, designing and building vast machines for detecting the very smallest particles (as a fellow student there pointed out, this is high energy physics whereas nuclear power is low energy). In this high-tech environment Alf worked in the planned maintenance department writing COBOL* programs generating reports for the maintenance schedules for the site. But, being paid to live in Switzerland, it was quite easy to swallow my pride.

Whilst I was there I bought a car. Actually, I bought it with fellow sandwich student B on the understanding that as I had the spare cash to buy it up front – all of about £300 – he would pay me half of any loss when we sold it at the end of our placements. In true Alf fashion we had a spectacular fall out a couple of weeks before I was due to leave, compounded by the fact that he had extended his stay for a month and so we had made no efforts to sell the car.

The car was a Simca 1307 (known in the UK as a Chrysler Alpine) and although a rather nice metallic maroon colour was also somewhat rusty. Still, it got us around especially when after Christmas we started skiing in earnest every weekend.

Which was where B managed to crash it. We were a mile from the car park of Morzine (linked to the Avoriaz system) and he was driving too fast as a coach approached. As he moved to the side of the road to give the bus space to pass he ran onto the compacted snow at the edges of an otherwise clear road and the inevitable collision ensued. No-one was hurt but the car slid pretty much the length of the coach – one long scratch on the coach, a bent wing, door and dodgy front driveshaft on the Simca.

A friend at CERN took me out to a local Swiss scrapyard where we found in the pile of wrecks a similar Simca with its driver’s side undamaged. So we acquired a new front wing and door and because the rear door was so corroded picked up a replacement for that as well. All well and good, even though the new body parts were blue.

I should point out at this point I was living just over the border in the small French town of St Genis – the border technically ran through the middle of the site – but crossed into Switzerland each day to work.

For several weeks we had no problems apart from a few strange looks until one evening as I was driving alone back into France for the weekly post-work football and was stopped at the French border post. Now this in itself was an event. On the Swiss side you could drive through, as we did more than once, at 4am in the morning and there was always someone on duty checking traffic, even if it was a cursory look out the window noting the local French licence plate. By contrast, the French post was usually closed by 8pm. But this was cease work time and even the French customs felt duty bound to be present and the one really officious customs officer there decided it was time he took a closer look at my car. I can’t think why he noticed me.

My first mistake was to have left my wallet in my jacket pocket on the front seat. The second was to leave all the receipts for the various car parts (we’d made more than one journey to the scrapyard) which he found. I watched his eyes light up when he noticed the Swiss receipts for the body parts, a clutch cylinder and even my ski boots. This latter caused me further anxiety when I admitted what the receipt was for because his next question was do I have any skis? I wasn’t going to invite yet more trouble – and there was already a sizable list of misdemeanours here – by admitting that a new set of skis and bindings was standing against the wall of my tiny studio apartment. So how do you ski? Somehow, I managed to dig out the French words for “I hire them” before he moved on. He spotted the new radio/cassette which we hadn’t bothered to fit properly and, yet another mistake, the instructions in the glovebox. Resistance was futile by now so, yes, I admitted this was also bought in Geneva where the goods were cheaper.

“How much did you pay for this?” (Pause) “We have a list…”

On that ominous note we decamped to the customs post office where Mr Officious totalled up the missing VAT whilst I did my best to wind up his colleague by insisting that surely I didn’t need to pay tax as I was a foreigner and would be leaving the country soon, all the time pretending my French was significantly worse than it actually was. The tax evaded came to 505 FF, and he fined me a further 500 FF for not declaring it.

And to complete the humiliation they then kept my Swiss identity card whilst I drove through the border back to my apartment to pick up my Eurocheque book, returned to the border, drove into Switzerland to the BP garage just the other side of the post, cashed a Eurocheque, drove back across to the French border post to handover the cash.

I eventually made it back for the start of the second half of the football.

* A business-orientated programming language so rather at odds with the highly scientific purpose of the establishment.