Читать книгу Class of '79 - Chris Rooke - Страница 4

And so it was that I bought my first car, still only aged 17, a British Racing Green 850 Mini, reg no. BUD 929B, with an original long gear change lever that went straight into the gearbox, and a button on the floor to start it. I paid £120 for it and I loved that car to bits, but almost needless to say, it was an absolute old banger, being already 12 years old and having had a hard life. The seller had seen me coming; a callow youth, and he ripped me off completely. It transpired that the sills of the car, which were structural, were completely rusted through and the car required major surgery to put right.

Just after I bought it, I remember once attempting to jack the car up to adjust the brakes, but instead of the car lifting off the ground, the jack just went straight through the sill! The MOT was due 2 weeks after I bought it, and of course it failed miserably, requiring two new sills and these would cost around £140 to fit, which was £20 more than I’d paid for the car! I had no hope of ever paying that amount and so instead I spent my revision days applying plastic padding to the bottom of the sills, sanding it down and then painting over it, in the hope that the tester would be fooled into thinking it was metal, and pass it. Oh, the folly of youth!

Why had I spent most of my revision time trying to mend my old Mini, instead of studying for my crucial A level exams? Why had I got up at 5.30am to go to work every day as a cleaner for two years thus making me constantly tired and unable to concentrate? Because, as an eager and slightly wild teenager, owning a moped/motorcycle/car was far, far more important than doing school work or passing exams, and if the only way I could buy and run a vehicle was by getting up at 5.30am and going to work, then that’s what I did. If the only chance I had of getting my car through the MOT was by spending all my time mending the car instead of revising, than that’s also what I did. My only excuse is that I lacked any parental guidance or censure, but I have to shoulder most of the blame.

Not only had I spent two years slaving as a cleaner and then a few vital weeks of revision time trying to mend my Mini instead of focussing on my studies, but, needless to say, all my work in trying to mend the bodywork on the car was completely fruitless and the car failed the MOT again anyway. The tester also made it very clear that ‘someone’ had clearly tried to fool him by attempting to mask the terminal rust on the sills with plastic padding, and that he didn’t think much of this at all. At this point my mum suddenly said that she’d pay for the repairs and had the car welded and MOTd the following week. Just like that. Why hadn’t she done so several weeks previously? As a teenager, the actions of one’s parents are nothing if not mystifying.

My A level exams themselves didn’t go quite as smoothly as I’d have liked, especially my English Lit as I’d panicked slightly in the exam, and instead of answering the question, I had just put lots of quotes in that weren’t directly relevant! I’d spent ages learning loads of quotes from all my set texts: Anthony and Cleopatra, Nostromo, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Mill on the Floss, The Inheritors, Brighton Rock and an anthology of Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn’s poetry, and be damned if I wasn’t going to use them!

Note that in those days you weren’t allowed to take your texts into the exam with you, and if you wanted to quote anything, then you had to learn it by heart before you went in. Anyway, my exams and those of my friends were all now finished, I had a roadworthy car, and we had the famously long hot Summer of ’76 stretching out before us. Bring it on!