First Car

Elsewhere in my journal I have written about the circumstances I found myself in, in September 1972 but just for the record, again.

My parents and I had left Trinidad in early 1970 and they bought a small house in the village of Old Buckenham in Norfolk, my father"s "home" county. I was still at boarding school in Somerset until July 1972. My father was sent off by his company, BP, to do some chemical spraying research work on cotton for the following three years, the first in Thessaloniki in Greece and then two years near Izmir in Turkey. He was only there from early spring until autumn each year and generally my mother would try to join him for as much time as possible.

In July 1972, I left school and took planes to Frankfurt to visit family and then after a week, flew on to Athens and a long summer holiday in Greece. In September I had to return to the UK to start doing something about my failing grades to take up an offer at Birmingham University to study German. They had told me to get the A level grades a bit higher by resitting the exams and I should do this at the local Technical College in Norwich.

So I duly turned up on enrolment day but the woman who started to fill out my form took it upon herself to tell me it was a waste of time - "Why don't you study something useful?" she said. Puzzled I searched the courses on offer. The only sort of help I had was an "career advisors" assessment from a year or two back that had said I should go for the diplomatic corps. So that was why German (and visions of being enrolled by MI5) had been the choice. What on earth fits to the qualities I apparently had for a diplomatic career that you might find at a technical college? Mechanical engineering? bricklayer?  My new careers advisor knew all along - Hotel Management. She now had filled the quota for this Higher National Diploma Course , the first year it was on offer. No doubt a bonus for her and my life was sorted.

So I guess around mid September, I was to be at Norwich Tech Monday to Friday at 8:00am. But how? Parents chauffeur service or at least a car drop off at the bus stop a few miles away, wasn't on offer so long as they were in Turkey. I eventually managed to get a lift from a childhood friend of my father's, daughter who was also studying. A pain no doubt for poor Bobsie to fit me in, especially as she was so charmingly and  lovingly "skitty".

Somehow it all worked out until my parents returned end of October. I don't know whether I had to moan and groan or whether, and I suspect it was, that he said he would buy me my first car and that was it - the car and nothing else. Again not sure if he set a limit nor quite how the deal came to pass that I got this particular car. I belonged to a local lad, just married and child on it's way who had been given orders to get rid of it for a family estate. And I think he may have worked on some of the house renovations done by a local builder for whom he worked.

Anyway for I think the no doubt too expensive £300 for TGP46, a one time VW beetle with 1100cc 6V electrics which the amateur mechanic had built himself, came to be my pride and joy for the next 32 months.

I was convinced it would be a state of the art "girlfriend puller". Those who know Norfolk in winter and the UK in general as well as some basic experience of the VW Beetle heating system, will know this idea was quickly squashed. The leaky roof and requirement for girls to "slip" over the top of the non existent mud covered doors and place their legs in a large dustbin plastic bag to keep dry, didn't improve the odds. Nor me trying to peer through fog covered misted windows with my nose firmly attached to the windscreen so as to get a hint of where the cats eyes were twinkling back at the two tiny 6 Volt powered spot lights, all made for only the chance of an Amazonian type and that wasn't my thing at all

And so it came to pass that within weeks,the first boy-girl relationship was exactly that - Sue Pepper was her name, blonde as tall as me and a figure of a top flight Olympic high jumper. It didn't last that long as she disappeared off to some foreign parts (The Amazonian Basin perhaps) for an extended research project and I moved on.

Still, over the time with my relationship with TGP46 (I think Devon born according to the log book) was amusing and fun at least during the times the carburettors were not blocked, the rotor arm not cracked and enough petrol in the tank to get from A to B.

Here in the Blip, my father inspecting it after we had driven away from the sellers house. He even did a short drive. He was a life long Land Rover man so I guess I had chosen this spot to show him how useful the car would be in the jungles of Norfolk. He was very tolerant of my reasoning but repeated "Rest down to you, lad". So no VW dealer annual inspections but lots of greasy hands on cold winter days on the side of the road willing the girl to start. Somewhat jokingly the previous owner had called it "Roadrunner" and had duly painted the word on both side in large letters to remind it, that it should be running on the road. Didn't help.

More to the vagaries of the car to follow.