Cars in my eyes #4

The weather here seems to have taken a turn for the better. The end of this period of cold and rain, I hope. Although I could still see snow on the top of Mount Elati while I was sitting in the warm sun on the jetty during walking the dog this evening. It reminded me of when we bought a ruined house near Avignon, France in 1971 and the locals told us it hadn’t snowed for 100 years, until we got there of course!

We lived in a large compartmented tent parked adjacent to the ruin when we first moved there until it blew away one night in a violent storm. Gerry and I were both holding on to the tent poles for dear life but we were no match for the Mistral. Renovation of the house moved along a pace after that. We had the three dogs with us and obtained two cats, two geese and a goat. The geese held us all at bay and the goat kept leaping up onto everything, but the cats were sweet.

We also had the Aston Martin and a Mercedes we bought from Germany together with the bus, now out of service on the India run. I only went on the first trip to Calcutta but there were other trips. However, it was not successful enough to keep doing the arduous journey and eventually we parted company with our friends and left the farm to travel south to France. The Aston Martin had been purchased second hand out of the India business proceeds and I remember driving it through the narrow lanes of Cambridgeshire desperately trying not to scratch it on the overgrown hedges. The unmade lane to the French house was not ideal for a car so close to the ground and we got through a few exhaust pipes despite having a grader flatted the hump in the middle of the track. The bus was much too big to drive up to the house so it stayed parked in the village until the police came and said either we would have to pay the import tax or take it out of the country, tomorrow. Gerry made me phone my father to ask if he could loan us the tax money but of course he couldn’t. In those days you had to go to the post office and book a call to England and then sit and wait until the operator could get you a line. So the bus went off somewhere, not sure where now.

July 1971 France

 Meanwhile the Aston Martin and I were put to work driving up and down to Geneva airport to collect Gerry or Billy, our Australian friend, coming and going on their business trips to India. There’s no better feeling than flying along the motorway with all that horsepower under your bonnet. The engine’s deep throaty rumble was well named ‘such sweet thunder’.