MY FIRST CAR

my first desire to break out of home onto the open road focused on motorcycles, mainly because it was possible to start a year earlier and furthermore, if a sidecar was part of the deal there was no limitation on engine size. I remember looking at a decidedly mature Ariel Red Hunter combo, advertised in the local paper at ￡25, in Tunbridge Wells with my father but turning it down due to the impressive pool of oil under the crankcase. We didn't know that they all did this. Interest then shifted to T-series MGs, a school friend was presented with a very handsome TD by his parents for passing his test. It cost ￡125.

?At the end of my final term at school I returned home to find that my Mother had taken an executive action and absolved me of any further indecision. There in the back of our converted cowshed garage was a very tired 1932 Austin 10/4. Most of the paint had gone, the tyres were bald and soggy and the back axle shot. In addition to this my five year old brother, with my father pushing, had managed to steer the head-lamps precisely onto the handles of the ancient Atco mower I had bought for 5/- and never been able to make run.

?P J9797 had belonged to old Charlie Gasson. He had lived and worked in the village all his life as a farmhand. He remembered Col. Haig's father having the first car in Blackham and he and the other village lads having to help it up Ashurst hill. In his retirement he worked in my parents' garden and his wife, Violet-Annie, helped in the house. They had bought the car when courting in 1933 but abandoned it around 1961 when the crown-wheel and pinion parted company. She had sat on the forecourt of the old garage at Colestock Cross-roads for two years before my parents gave old Charlie a fiver and had her dragged home.

?I knew nothing about cars; this was not necessarily a disadvantage with so simple a mechanism as PJ. The problem with the crown-wheels and pinions I later discovered was endemic to old Austins and simple to resolve, eventually I ended up with a cupboard full of old crown-wheels, pinions and shims. Engineering lore has it that these, like swans, mate for life, but it isn't so. With the right shims and sensitive fingers any old bit will fit with any other. I did it lots of times with PJ and my 1934 12/4. However this is in the future. At that time I knew nothing of this. What I did know was that Fred Brown who ran the village garage might be able to help me out.

?Fred was something of a local cause célèbre; he lived with May to whom he was not married. The garage had been an old war-time transport depot and covered a large expanse of land for what was basically a one-man service station. Fred remembered that he had another axle somewhere out the back. After 15 minutes of kicking about in the stingers he returned with that rusty old piece of spindly pipe that is a 10/4 rear axle and carefully loaded it into the back of my father's new Mk.l Cortina estate. He wouldn't take any money for it.

?Back home I began my self-education about mechanics. This was before "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance". The original axle came out without too much struggle, one spanner, a wire-brush to remove the rust, Plusgas releasing oil and a big hammer; the big hammer was always the most important tool in those days; God bless the Birmingham screwdriver. There were no hydraulic pipes to undo; the brakes were pulled on by wire cables connected via hanging levers and rods to a simple cross shaft under the middle of the chassis. To slow down, I won't say stop because old Austins never did this very well, you just twisted the cross shaft with the pedal or better still pulling back on the locomotive-sized hand-brake lever and this, theoretically, pulled all four cables tight. When the cables stretched as they inevitably did it was possible to buy a little gadget that hooked over them and by turning a finger-wheel put a kink in the wire thereby shortening it's effective length. It was not unknown for these to relinquish their grip in-extremis and fly out like shrapnel leaving the wheel they had been connected to totally without retardation. It was this sort of thing that made motoring more fun.

?I remember bringing the sister of an old school friend home, in the Cortina, and showing what she had to look forward to riding around in in the "nearest future".

?The sight of P J on blocks with no rear axle, cracked windows testifying to her winters of abandonment, and no paint reduced her to hysteria. Young women don't understand these things. They have no vision of restoration complete. Gleaming head-lamps, sparkling paint, softly polished leather seats. It was the last time I saw her, she went off with a friend of a friend who's mother had a new convertible Triumph Herald and was last heard of embarrassing him hugely by unexpectedly climbing into the rafters and displaying her knickers at a Tonbridge Rugby club dinner and dance. The sister, not the mother: Served them both right.

?Paint never was PJ's strong feature at the beginning. It took me quite a while to come to terms with finish. Her original colours had been maroon and black. The Black was easy enough but the maroon proved a problem. I thought cars had to be painted with cellulose. What I didn't realise is that it should be sprayed on. It was also very expensive. I bought as much as I could afford of BMC "B" maroon and began to brush. Immediately it touched the metal it dried. I found that the only way to a reasonable finish was to paint thickly and incredible fast. It worked but I ran out of paint before I could do the bottom-halves of the doors. I couldn't leave them so did the only thing I could. Ransacked the household paints. The only exterior gloss I could find was white. The end result was rather raffish, like a 1930s New York taxi. A lad using one of Fred's sheds sprayed the bonnet for me for a quid when he was doing a crash repair in the same maroon. The problem was that his finish was a deeply glossy perfection while mine was, well, textured.

The axle went back in. The paint was finally completed. New glass fitted to the lamps, new points to the distributor, and a second-hand six volt battery scrounged. there was nothing to be done about the cracked windows. Everything was tested, mostly everything worked. Not that there was much of anything. A 7-day wind-up clock, an oil-pressure gauge which was to turn out to be far and away the most useful instrument ever together with it's mate the ammeter, an alcohol-filled fuel gauge long-since dried out and a non-working speedometer. A single screen-wiper that had to be spun by hand to start it's feeble little motor, and that was it.

?The exhaust had long ago followed the dust-to-dust route so a Servais straight-through from an upturned Morris 8 G.P.O. van in Fordcombe breakers yard, complete with a length of copper pipe, was persuaded into place with the big hammer. This marked serious optimism because I still had no idea if the engine would run. Charlie had said it ran well before the axle went but this was nearly three years later and nobody remembered how well "well" had really been. Certainly the plugs needed changing; where to find 18mm plugs? Even in the sixties 18mms were not an everyday over the counter item. I eventually struck on an endless supply of good, better yet, free, plugs from the Tunbridge Wells Saab agent. Saabs then still used the three cylinder two-stroke motor and that had 18mm plugs, it was also rather sensitive to plug condition so this place always had boxes and boxes of Saab-expired sparkers that from the Austin perspective still had millions of hours of life left.

?It was at this time that I learned the lighter-fuel-down-the-plug-hole trick. The limited effort afforded by a second-hand 6-volt battery meant that either PJ would need towing, cranking or pushing to get into business. In the end we settled for taking out the plugs, squirting lighter fuel into each bore and shoving her down the hill outside the house. My friend Steve drove because I needed a hand clutch and to fit this the old girl had to be taken the seven miles to the Wells for specialist attention. So specialist that I have made all subsequent examples myself. Down the hill we went, in with the clutch and into second gear; without a flicker the engine lit up and ran like a train for many thousands of miles thereafter.

?Weak crown-wheels were only one of the many entertaining design faults of old Austins. The rear hubs were locked to their drive shafts by a simple Woodruffe key; this not only seriously weakened the end of the shaft where it met it's maximum stress point but coupled with the fully-floating hubs themselves produced secondary results of a much more challenging nature. A fractured half-shaft, they always did it inside the hub, inevitably meant unilateral independence for the wheel, brake-drum and hub. Sometimes it was possible, after some experience to notice the sudden loss of drive and _heave on all the brakes thereby seizing the ready-to-run wheel to the still attached braking mechanism. More often than not the first warning that something was amiss came when the end of the axle dropped to the road with a sickening crunching and the wheel and it's accessories bounded past towards the oncoming traffic.

?The six-volt electrics were a serious impediment to nocturnal travel; anyone who has been cursed with such will well remember the wartime expression "Bombers' moon". In PJ the current was generated, rather too dynamic a word for such a feeble process, by a Lucas 3-brush dynamo that sat in a little alloy cradle atop the cylinder head and was turned at more-or-less engine speed by a great fat fan-belt; the two bladed alloy fan, like a model aeroplane propeller and about as robust was bolted to the pulley. The ignition switch on the dash panel was connected to the third brush in this apparatus and marked "Summer charge" and "Winter charge"; the idea being that the extra brush created higher current in the winter when the battery needed more intensive feeding to encourage it to crank the starter. On the side of the dynamo was a metal-covered blister containing a Bakelite block and a wire coil, presumably the idea being that excess current produced on "Summer charge" was dumped to this coil which dispersed it as heat, like a little electric fire, which in turn was cooled by the draught from the fan blowing through the air-holes! Most of which may have been fine in 1932 but was wishful thinking by 1965.

?After a couple of years of being obliged to select whether to use the lights or the wipers, but never both, I took the decision to change to 12 volts. This was not easily done, the decision that is, not the change, that was actually rather easy. In the late Sixties it was not difficult to nip into any garage and buy dynamo brushes off-the-shelf; just as well considering the appetite PJ’s generator had for these small squares of carbon. I well remember fitting a Wipac fog-lamp, yellow, on a separate circuit, to use in conjunction with the wiper instead of the single-dip headlamps because it ate fewer of my precious amps; I actually became extraordinarily adept at calculating ohms, amps and volts in relation to the precarious balance between production and consumption. The drain was pernicious; nothing actually "went out", illumination just faded away like sunset. On a long drive, i.e. London to Tunbridge Wells, the best policy was, on dry nights, to idle along in lit-areas until a slow enough truck came past and then belt after it so as to be able to drive on side-lights only.

Sept. 1995 Night Flight from NY