Like most families we have car memories.
Ours date back into motoring history, my grandfather possessing a car with one of the most wonderful things in the world (or so I thought as a child): trafficators. Instead of indicator lights little bakelite arrows would pop out from a recess above the head of the driver (or passenger if turning left).
A family friend had the iconic Ford Anglia which has to be one of the most wonderful cars ever made, American in shape and styling but shrunk down in size for the British Market. Curiously a contemporary of mine told me a story of how her father had one but could not afford to dispose of it, but having access to a JCB decided to bury it in his spacious back garden. I often wonder if it is still there. Must have been a very big hole.
My brother in law was, in his youth, someone who wanted to stand out, and as he started to make a little money in his chosen line of business bought an imported Oldsmobile with huge bench seats and a cocktail cabinet in the back. It was a monster of a car but fascinating to ten year old me. But it was my own brother who tended to have the most interesting experiences with cars. In fact to my mind he was slightly cursed.
Two weeks after passing his test in 1965 he had borrowed an Austin A35 from a friend. The tyres were totally bald (tyre tread laws were not introduced until 1968 so they were arguably legal). Driving through South London he braked behind a bubble car that was turning right and instead of stopping the Austin slid gracefully and smoothly along the road like an ice skater. The impact speed was only about 5mph but rather like watching an agonisingly slow snooker ball gliding along the baize, it was obvious that this was still going to be enough to have (quite literally) a knock on effect.
The bubble car rocked back and forth in slow motion, inviting speculation as to whether it would right itself or tip over. It wobbled a little more, and then the camber of the road came into play, dragging the centre of gravity beyond the point of no return. It rolled over and then began to make its way down the hill which it had just moments before planned on navigating safely. Down the road it rolled, the people inside turning over and over like clothes in a tumble dryer, with passers by gawping at them through the glass front window.
When it came to a stop the door was flung open and the passengers emerged miraculously unharmed (for the most part) but probably mentally scarred. The bubble car was a wreck, dented and caved in like a crumpled drinks can caught in the path of stampeding nightclubbers.
My brother looked a little pale when he came home that night.
Many years later I had something called a Fiat Polski. We called her Doris. It was very similar to a Lada but heavier, so heavy in fact that the steering column couldn’t cope and there was about a quarter of turn of play in the steering wheel. But it was my first car and I was very fond of it. In those days – the early nineteen eighties – you could quite comfortably drive into the West End from Streatham where I was living with my first wife. We would often park up around Charing Cross or on the South Bank without a care in the world. Now I think of it Doris probably belched out enough Easter bloc pollution in her own right to justify the congestion charge but that was much later. But she was a very well behaved car and I never had any trouble with her (apart from the time a windscreen wiper flew off into a hedgerow in the pouring rain and we got soaked looking for it) so when I traded up to something more stylish I gave it to my brother who took it back to Yorkshire with him.
One day he rang me up to say that there had been an incident. Once again a hill was involved. My brother lived halfway up a steep street in Keighley and he emerged one morning to find that Doris had let off her handbrake and rolled down the road, gathering speed and turning slightly until she smashed through the front doors of the local working men’s club. This was an old fashioned institution and did not admit women so we decided that it must have been a political act on Doris’s part, a woman symbolically breaking down the barriers to progress and challenging the sexism that went with men and beer.
These experiences no doubt influenced his decision to create an arts project around the theme of cars later in life. Called My Last Car it was an interactive project which reflected on the fact that the car as we know it was no longer sustainable. You can find it on 509Arts web site at www.509arts.co.uk. But you might want to start asking family and friends now for their funny car stories yourself because motoring as we know it will soon be a thing of the past as electric vehicles with driverless technology and an incredible array of safety features take over our world. The future will be cleaner, safer, slower and more sustainable but perhaps also a little blander. So cherish the history whilst you can.
Eyecatching 