I enjoy reading BeetleyPete’s series of short stories, and his latest one ‘A Good Runner‘ took me back to my first car, a bright red Ford Escort 1100. You can see what it looked like below, just imagine a red one instead of a yellow one. Sam took this picture at a classic car show on the IOW in September 2019. Unfortunately I do not have any pics of my old car.

My dad first bought the Escort in 1973, and I took my driving test in it (and passed first time!) in June 1976 and then went back to school, hot, sweaty but proud of myself, for one of my last exams before leaving school for good. Dad taught me how to put petrol in it, where to add water/antifreeze, and how to check the oil and tyre pressures. He allowed me to drive all my girlfriends to discotheques at weekends, and hey, I was having a whale of a time. I was young, free, single and mobile!

Dad became ill with prostate cancer and then rather frail in early 1977. I was still living at home and drove him to his hospital appointments at Guy’s, driving for the first time into the centre of London. Dad knew the way, and I learned the route as his hospital appointments were many. When the phone call came from the ward sister at Guys on that fateful morning in April 1977 I drove Mum straight there and parked in Tooley Street (can’t do that these days!), but it was too late. Dad had died.

Mum told me the car was hers now, and we started to argue as she expected me to drive her everywhere. I didn’t mind driving her to some places, but I was 20 years old and out forging a life of my own and sometimes it just wasn’t convenient. She could not drive, but by then I was using the car to go to work. She said she had a perfect right to sell it. Yes she had, but I knew I’d struggle to buy another one, and also no public transport went directly from my house to where I worked – it would take me hours to get to my workplace. I asked her if I could keep the car on. She told me she was going to learn to drive, as the car was hers. Knowing her as I did, I laughed and replied along the lines of ‘Good luck with that then‘.

However, to mine and everyone else in the family’s surprise, after 3 failed tests she did learn to drive at the age of 56 but could only manage an automatic car. The Escort was manual. Mum, bless her, was a terrible driver, and received many clenched fists and middle fingers during her 10 or so driving years from frustrated motorists. I have no idea how she managed to avoid getting herself killed, and neither myself, Sam or our boys would ever travel in a car with her.

Anyway, no longer grieving and happier that she was now independent, Mum drove herself to various singles’ dances, chattering ten to the dozen to any brave passenger, and she let me keep the Escort. I drove the Escort, complete with all my personal belongings, to my first flat (shared with a girl from work) in April 1978, but often drove back home to see Mum. She had taken up with Bob, whom she had met at one of her dances, and no longer bothered me about selling the Escort as Bob tended to drive her about in his car. She told me I could keep it for now, but that one day she might want it back.

She never did want it back, which was handy as money was a bit tight to say the least. I kept that car right up until December 1990, a full 17 years since Dad had first bought it brand new from a dealer in Bexleyheath. The car was parked outside the Cat’s Whiskers Disco in Streatham when I met Sam for the first time in September 1979. By then I’d gone back to living with Mum, as the girl I had shared with had met a guy and moved out and I could no longer manage the rent. Every weekend I’d drive from Greenwich to Acton where Sam had a bed-sit, negotiating the dreaded Hammersmith roundabout, Earl’s Court, White City, and the Uxbridge Road.

We took the Escort with us on honeymoon to Devon in October 1980, sharing the driving. The weather was bloody freezing. The car eventually transported our two babies about in their car seats in 1982 and 1985. However, time was catching up with it and one day I was with Leon, 8, and Marcus, 5, when the brakes failed. Luckily I was only in a side street and could coast along to the kerb, but when we took it to a garage there were holes as big as dinner plates in the chassis, and we knew it would never pass its MOT.

I couldn’t look as Sam drove it away to be scrapped. He came back with the front number plate, which was in the boot of his car when the car was stolen a few weeks later. I was distraught. Sam’s car was never found.

That car was my young life, but all I have left now are memories. I wish I’d taken a photo or two at the time, but I never did. Thanks Pete for bringing those memories to the fore again!

Blogs will be thin on the ground for a couple of weeks, as I’m working for the next 2 days and then off to the van with a friend on Sunday for a week. I’ll come home for a week and go back to work while Leon and his family stay at the van, and then go back to the IOW on 1st August to spend a girly week with my eldest granddaughter. I wish I could still drive that red Escort down the A3 to Portsmouth, but now I zip about in my Honda Jazz.