Cars in my eyes #3

I learnt to drive circling the barren field around the house in the Australian outback, often with the baby in the back to get him to sleep. It was an old blue Holden which I had purchased, along with some curtain material, out of a modest inheritance from an old great aunt when I reached twenty-one. No photos remain but I remember it fondly.

I didn’t actually take my driving test until we were living back in England on a farm near Saffron Walden. We had quickly advanced from the Ford Anglia we first had to a dark green Jaguar, the kind Inspector Morse drives. Again, no photo survives. However, I took my test in the driving instructor’s car in Cambridge at lunch time, which was a nightmare as there were bicycles coming at you from all directions. It had been impressed on me that you couldn’t overtake a bicycle if there were double white lines no matter how slowly it was traveling. Try telling that to a Greek!

One of the first cars I drove was a Bristol. It was not a happy experience. I picked it up from the local garage where it had been taken to have some work done on it. As I was driving down the hill into Saffron Walden I saw a ‘sludge gulper’ in the distance so I braked, but nothing happened and I crashed into the back of it. Fortunately the baby was strapped into a car seat in the back but I got a nasty crack on the nose from the steering wheel. No airbags in those days! It turned out that although the garage had done the work they had not reaffixed the brake tube correctly so it had rubbed against the wheel and lost all the brake fluid. Eventually the car was declared an insurance write-off although, apparently, I should have asked for it back as it was still worth a lot of money. In retrospect I expect we probably were cheated but it never occurred to me at the time.

Not long after we operated a bus service from Amsterdam to Calcutta. We bought an old Bedford bus and removed the last few rows of seats to make a living area for our family, now 2 children, and the co-driver. The first trip left in July 1970 arriving in Calcutta in September. I didn’t drive the bus but did my share of navigating as well as cooking and looking after the children; baby born in April and a 3 year old. I had a super system for washing the baby's nappies in the boot consisting of a drum, with a tight fitting lid, full of soapy water getting bounced up and down as we drove along.

Time for a photo: the bus in Calcutta showing its innards with our Indian friend Muni Chand holding the baby.

Sept 1970