In these disconcerting days of the Celtic You-Know-What, "Beemers" outnumber "bangers" on the roads of Ireland, thanks to the scrappage scheme, the superabundance of spondulicks (in pockets not including mine), and now the National Car Test. A piece in this paper's recent motoring supplement, bidding an unsentimental farewell to the era of the second-hand "rust bucket", set me thinking of the day I bought my own first motor.
It was October 1968 in Belfast and I had just collected the cheque for my student grant, courtesy of Her Majesty's Government. As the boom days for my father's business were well in the past, the means testers deemed me eligible for the maximum allowance of £113 a term. My eye was caught by a postcard pinned to the notice board in the (then) new Students' Union building at Queen's.
"Must sell"
"Unbeatable Value," it read. "1951 Standard Eight. Going well. Owner must sell. £25, no lower offers." I wasted little time battling temptation: my very own passion-wagon might be just a phone call away. I rang the number and arranged to see the car.
The viewing took place that evening, just after dark. The car was small, bulbous, dirty-green and battered looking. The registration number was PZ-something. I stood on the kerb and gazed at it with what I hoped was an appraising eye, then bent and squinted along the mud-guards, kicked the tyres, lifted the bonnet and stared ignorantly within. "£20?" I bartered.
The vendor was an engineering post-graduate - beard, glasses, duffel coat. "Sorry," he said, "but I'm selling it for a friend of mine who's leaving the country, so I can't really accept less than what he wants. . .You can drive her round the block if you want to." Given the Standard's ample curves, his use of the feminine pronoun seemed in order.
She steered like a truck, sounded like a tractor, and reeked of exhaust fumes. She had lollipop-style trafficators, and only one of them worked. The handbrake didn't. Still, she went. Being 19, callow, and keen to enhance my pulling power, I bought her.
Third-party, owner-driver insurance cost more than the car; then there was road tax, petrol and engine oil (which, I discovered, she consumed more greedily than petrol). By the time I had old PZ on the road, my grant money for the Christmas term was nearly gone. KP peanuts - a cheap source of protein, I'd read somewhere - dominated my diet in the weeks that followed. I scrounged meals and drinks shamelessly from friends. Eating out - which in those days meant a fish supper at Smoky Joe's - was just that: out. But I had a car of my own, and was surely now a force to be reckoned with at any dance or hop within driving range.
Chill winds
No so, alas: my car proved a total failure as a passion wagon. Women's eyes did not widen at the sight of PZ, and few female forms felt the cold embrace of her lumpy leatherette seats. Moreover, that winter was a bitter one, and the chill winds - not to mention rain, sleet and snow - had no trouble creeping under the ill-fitting doors and through the holes in the floor. A snog in the back seat was liable to be the kiss of death by exposure, and if you tried parking for a "coort" with the engine and heater running, you'd be gassed in five minutes. For all that, I had some memorable moments in old PZ, like the day she nearly killed me by blowing out a tyre on the M1 motorway at a lunatic 55 m.p.h., or the night she skidded on hard-packed snow on Belfast's Boyne Bridge and glided tail-first through the traffic lights into Sandy Row.
Serious disenchantment with my very own car began on the morning I pulled the starter button and it came away in my hand, along with a foot-long piece of cable. From then on, starting the engine involved pushing PZ down a hill with one hand while steering with the other, then leaping inside to engage second gear and let out the clutch. This meant, of course, that I always had to find a handy hill to park on. Not long after that, the exhaust pipe cracked, and changing down through the gears - the Standard Eight predated the era of syncromesh - produced a deafening series of splutters, bangs and roars. Thankfully, backfires were safer in those days before road blocks and British Army patrols.
Loud bang
The end came only four months after that autumn evening when I first clapped eyes on PZ. I was driving up Camden Street, which rises steeply from the Lisburn Road, when a loud bang shook the car and she started to run backwards down the hill. Yes, the brakes were still working.
Next day I took the wheel for the last time while a friend towed PZ and me to Eastwood's scrap yard. There was a certain dignity about her passing. We caused so much traffic chaos on the Lisburn Road that we got a police escort.
I returned to pedestrian life with few regrets and slightly more spare cash. Two years later, flush with my first salary, the craving for instant mobility overcame me again and I bought another car. Brand new.