The Cars That Drove Me to Drink

1 Motorway Dreamer is is “ edited” and published by John Nielsen Hall Please direct all contributions,letters of comment and prophecies of bloody misery and death to: Coachman's Cottage, Marridge Hill Ramsbury, Wilts SN8 2HG U.K. E-mail: [email protected] In This Issue: Editorial Puff Puff Page 3 The Cars That Page 4 Mike Meara Drove Me To Drink The Years Most Page 15 Taral Wayne Thrilling Buy An Interesting Page 25 Roy Kettle State To Be In Obligatory Poetry Page 48 Section Back Seat Drivers Page 51 Art & Picture Credits Cover Taral Wayne Page 3 Brian Zaikowski Pages 4,5,7,8,9,10,11,12 &13 Mike & Pat Meara Pages 15,21,22 & 24 Taral Wayne Pages 34,38,39 & 44 Roy Kettle Everything else.... Shamelessly pirated from the web or clip-art Motorway Dreamer is an Electronic Printed Fanzine. The Electronic version is available at eFanzines.com by the grace of Bodhisattva Bill Burns. That is also where all the previous issues live. If you are holding in your hands a printed copy this is because: You have Locced You have contributed to this or past issues, or you appear in written or photographic form 2 You are a fellow faned and therefore a very superior type of human being. You have asked for a copy ( Its up to you now) You must consider how you may yet return to the path of the righteousness. Try responding to this issue as a first step. Editorial When I started this fanzine, I never intended to do editorials at all. What a boring load of bollocks that would be, I thought. Then, I perceived a necessity for small public service announcements and a little puffery of my esteemed contributors. Now, it has come down to the usual apologia common to fanzines down the ages: Sorry I'm late! I have a reasonable set of excuses. They begin with the fact that the last issue was rushed out so that I could get it done and dusted before I went into hospital to face what I then thought might be a very uncertain future. It wasn't life or death exactly, but it was life with some semblance of normality versus life hooked up to a machine scrubbing my blood three or four days out of seven. Phew! Thanks entirely to the skill of my surgeon and the brilliant NHS who have saved my life for the umpteenth time, I dodged that one. Then, the money river, already running shallow, turned into a tiny trickle in a stony bed. Even now, this issue, I'm sorry to say, will appear in a guise somewhat less than its former splondacious appearance, as it appears to me as I write this. Various other problems both in business and real life have also placed obstacles in the way of the appearance of this eighth issue. But now its here. At long last. I have some excellent contributions of, as usual, transatlantic provenance; Mike Meara takes the driving seat quite literally, Taral Wayne, who has drawn and lettered the excellent cover this ish, also contributes an almost automotive piece of writing, and Roy Kettle hired a car and got his wife to drive, then laughed when she got stuck. Okay, it was in Kentucky. Then there is poetry by Sandra Bond, as well as verse of differing flavours by myself and John Purcell. Finally, there are pages of LoC's, and there could have been more but that this is already a very large ish. I apologise to anybody who feels left out or poorly done by. Two and a bit years. That's not too long. Johnny 3 MikeMike MearaMeara The first car I ever owned was a Popemobile. No, it’s true. I bought it in May, 1970. That’s just over 42 years ago as I write this, possibly somewhat longer as you read it. Since then I’ve owned about twenty others, each “new” one (after the first two or three) being progressively more reliable and therefore less interesting as time went on. This is less a reflection of my increasing skill in selecting motors, or even the increasing funds I had available to pay for them, and more to do with the almost immeasurably huge improvement in quality and reliability which has happened to the car industry’s products during those decades. In the early days it was always November 6th, if you see what I mean. (Dead bangers everywhere.) One consequence of this, which is bad news for me, the writer, is that my tale begins full of excitement and near-disaster, and ends, not with a banger but a whimper. I did consider writing it backwards, but that is beyond my ability to do, and yours to read, I feel. Let’s see how it goes. And I have indeed begun the tale before. An embryonic version of what you’re reading now appeared in the second issue of HELL, edited by Brian Robinson and Paul Skelton, 4 back in 1971. By all means dig out your copy and re-read it. “Horseless Carriage Blues” is what you’re looking for – page 44. But a comparison of dates will show you that what you have there is a mere taster, like the first chapter of the next novel that the publishers give you at the end of the previous novel. Though I think that’s actually a malfunction in the giant machine that chops this stuff into book-size chunks. But anyway. I trust I’m addressing that fine body of men and women who passed their driving test at the second attempt? It’s a well-known factoid that all the best people pass second time, and we can feel justifiably superior to the dregs of the motoring world who passed first (pah!) time, or even worse, third, fourth, fifth... I cannot go on. So if there’s any dregs in the audience, just sit at the back, please, and keep the noise down. For me, this life-changing event happened on 22nd October 1970. So why had I acquired a car I couldn’t drive almost six months earlier? Put it down to the optimism of youth, and the persuasive tongue of Stuart Pope, from whom I bought it. Stuart was one of my new colleagues in the research laboratories of Courtaulds in Spondon, near Derby; whom I had met when I started my first job there in August 1969. I expect he gave birth to his plan almost immediately, and then, nine months later, I was fucked. So that bit is backwards. The vehicle in question was an Austin A30, vintage 1955, and probably bulletproof – the metal was certainly thick enough. It further resembled a battleship in both colour and lustre, and its top speed was about the same. £50 it cost me, and it had failed its test (MoT) even before I passed mine. In the three weeks between me becoming a fully fledged Knight of the Road (metaphors mixed while-u- wait), and deciding I couldn’t be Fafhrd with the Grey Mouser any longer, we – that is, me and Pat, my wife of three months – managed to fit in a visit to my mother, who, then as now, lived 100 miles away on Humberside. It didn’t actually take that long to get there and back – it just felt like it. This was in the days before the M18 Mike and Austin A30 Battleship existed, and we had to stop halfway there, in Thorne, to stretch our legs and massage each other’s numb bums. It’s these terribly uncomfortable seats, Officer. But in the first six months that I owned SFJ683, we had one too many instances of flat tyres, flat batteries, brake and exhaust problems for a novice car-owner to cope with. This car had to go, and indeed it eventually did – in April 1971. I’ll come back to that. But in November 1970 I became the proud (but not for long) owner of car #2. November 13th, 1970. Friday, November 13th 1970. I am not superstitious, but I should have been. I paid a crook dealer £80 for a 1961 Ford Consul Mk II, (see title picture) 5 whose dark blue paintwork looked pretty good in a poor light, at least to begin with. It had a three-speed gear change mounted on the steering column, the kind of thing I still have trouble with today. Having picked it up in nearby Nottingham, I drove it back through the one-way system, in the dark, in the rain, in the rush hour, with no indicators and only one headlight. I should have got a medal. For stupidity, perhaps. I can’t imagine why I thought it would be a good idea to take my Mum – and my Gran, who was now living with her – out for a ride in the country in our new car. At first, all went well. Gran was in the front with me, Mum was in the back with Pat. No seat belts, of course. At some stage I must have got over-confident. We came to a long slow left-hand bend, which I, not going slow, failed to negotiate, going straight on instead, ending up in a grassy patch on the other side of the road. The guy coming the other way, whose bows we had just shot across, must have shat himself, but was commendably quick in coming to our aid. The Consul had rolled on its side, and my Gran, no small weight, had slid down the bench seat and trapped me between her and the driver’s door, knocking the wind out of me in the process.

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