Читать книгу Driven - James Martin - Страница 10

I inherited many things from my father. My height, for one: I’m 6 ft 3 in and so was he when he was a strapping young lad. My work ethic: my father believed anything was possible if you were willing to work hard enough for it, a sentiment I wholeheartedly endorse. My temper: for both of us the line between calmness and absolute mayhem is a very fine one you don’t really want to make us cross. And my love of food and wine: as well as being a catering manager my dad was an internationally respected sommelier, one of only two non-French judges on the Jurade de Saint Emilion, which classifies Bordeaux wines. Thankfully, though, of all the things I inherited from my father, his taste in cars wasn’t one of them. If anything, the exact opposite is true. If he had a particular car, you can be pretty damn sure I never will. He has what can only be described as an unhealthy obsession with French cars. I, again thankfully, don’t. The only thing he likes more than a French car is a cheap one. If it’s French and cheap, well, nothing makes him happier.

My earliest motoring memories are of my dad’s ‘bargains’. Needless to say, they aren’t happy memories. There was the MkI Escort, the Datsun Sunny, and the white Ford Capri 1.6 Laser with the brown cloth interior, the kind chocolate crumbs used to be drawn to and were then impossible to get off: when you tried scratching chocolate off the seats with your fingernail it just got even more attached and went white. Being a proper Yorkshireman, my dad could never resist a bargain. It didn’t matter how rubbish the car he ended up with was, just as long as he got a good deal on it. I remember, years and years later, him ringing me up full of excitement and telling me that he’d just bought himself a Rolls-Royce. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, this is it. He’s done it. He’s finally come to his senses. He’s worked hard all his life, he’s saved up his money and he’s bought himself a proper Rolls-Royce.’ I was genuinely excited for him and couldn’t wait to see it. When I got to his house, there it was, sitting outside, his Rolls-Royce. And it was white. He’d gone and bought a white Rolls-Royce, like the ones they use for weddings – which was quite fitting really because he’s on his third marriage. His liking for wedding cake and giving all his money away in divorce settlements are two more of his traits I managed to avoid, although my sister wasn’t so lucky.

It’s like he can’t say no, to bargains or weddings. Yes, it’s a hideous car and a horrible colour, and he probably knows it’s a hideous car and he probably can’t stand the colour either, but it’s cheap, so he’ll have it. If he had eight grand to spend on a car and there was a nice one he really liked for eight grand and one that was French and not very nice at all for six grand, he would buy the not-very-nice six grand one, even though he could afford the one he really wanted. If it was a bargain he just wouldn’t be able to turn it down. I got my first car when I was twelve, a little Fiat 126, because someone offered it to him for £40. I’m not complaining. I loved that car, drove it all over the farm and had a great time in it. But I was twelve. I didn’t need a car. All right, I’d had bikes and trikes and I’d driven tractors, and I know he thought it would be a good experience for me to learn to drive in the relative safety of the farm, but the reason he got it was because it had failed its MOT and someone at work was selling it cheap. It was a bargain too good to turn down. Same with the Beetle he bought my mum, and the six Minis he bought my sister. She wrote off five of them but he kept them coming because they were all cheap.

He was always getting a deal from some wheeler-dealer somewhere. Even his cars, which were partly for work and for which he had a budget, he had to try to get a deal on. He would never do what most of my mates do now, which is look at the 40 grand budget their work’s given them for a car and think, ‘If I add 20 grand of my own I can get something really good.’ He would say, ‘I’ve got 40 grand. If I can find a car for 20 grand I’ll have saved 20 grand.’ Which of course is what he did, and which was why all my mates’ dads had amazingly cool cars and I was being dropped off at the school gates in a white Ford Capri 1.6 Laser with brown cloth interior.

It wasn’t just cars my father’s nose for a bargain got in the way of. It also had a laughable effect on his ‘farming’ skills. As you already know, we weren’t farmers, not really. My dad was a catering manager and my mum worked in a shoe shop – what did we know about farming? In his day job, my father was a very successful man; later, as promotions manager, he was responsible for bringing the filming of the the Granada TV version of Brideshead Revisited to Castle Howard and for putting on huge outdoor concerts featuring Bryan Ferry, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti. When he first started the place was attracting something like 30 or 40 visitors a day; when he left it was more like 4,000. Part of the deal was that the better you did at Castle Howard, the bigger the place you got, so we had a load of land with our house and it seemed a shame to waste it. As the place was called Lime Kiln Farm – the huge lime kiln was still there and perfect/lethal for a boy with a bike and no sense of danger – it was obvious to my dad that agriculture should be our sideline.

I think I was about five or six when my dad decided that it might be a good idea to try his hand at farming, and it was probably about eleven or twelve years later that my mother finally reached the end of her patience and decided that it wasn’t. In between, I, along with the rest of my family, was subjected to a long list of ridiculous schemes. When we started breeding pigs, my dad spotted a ‘bargain’ boar in Exchange & Mart which was a deal too good to pass up, just like his cars. Now, anyone who knows anything about pig farming will tell you that in order to have good piglets you need good sows and, most importantly, a good boar. They’ll also tell you that though boars can be very expensive, if you get a good one, it’ll be an investment. My father had found a boar for sale for £50 – suspiciously cheap for most, but he thought it was his lucky day. He hitched the trailer up to the car, drove the 60 miles to Northampton, paid the old dear who was selling it, came back, put it in the pen next to the females – who were ready, able and by this time well up for it – opened the gate and waited. And waited. And waited. You’ve never seen a male so disinterested in the female of the species in your whole life. So my dad called the vet, who came over, took one look and asked, ‘Where did you buy it from? It’s not the one from Northampton is it?’ Turned out this boar was famous as the only gay boar in the village. My dad went nuts. We were eating bacon for months after that.

My dad was just a useless farmer, there was no two ways about it. At one point we had 50 chickens, 25 cockerels and 25 hens, and the hens weren’t laying. My dad, in his infinite wisdom, decided that the cockerels must be the problem, interfering with the hens and stopping them laying. So he went out one afternoon and just killed the cockerels. All of them. A week later, still nothing, no eggs, so he got the vet out again and it turned out that he’d got rid of the hens. We had 25 cockerels running around and my dad was waiting for them to lay.

In the end it was once again his complete inability to turn away a good deal that proved to be the last straw (pun intended). One day, for no reason other than it was really, really cheap, he decided to buy all the hay from the field next door. At the time we had pigs and cattle so we needed hay for feed and bedding. But we only had 16 pigs and a dozen cows and the field next door was bloody massive. A Texan ranch wouldn’t have been able to use all the hay that came from it. When he had it delivered it made a 50 foot by 50 foot stack. As you drove up to the hill, you couldn’t see the house any more, just this giant haystack. My mother was furious. It didn’t help matters when she discovered that my dad had left all the windows open at the back of the house so there was hay and dust everywhere inside. That was it. My mother decided enough was enough, we were getting out of farming for good.

Meanwhile his fixation with cheap cars continued, and if it wasn’t a bargain it had to be French. Peugeots, Citroëns, hideous, hideous things I had to go to school in which left me mentally scarred for life. After years of this cruel and unusual punishment I vowed never to buy a French car, and I never will. He had a Peugeot 306, a 406, a 505, Citroën Xantias, an XM and a BX, the one with the hydraulic suspension that made the back go up and down although no one ever really knew why. They were dreadful cars that looked like they’d been specifically designed to be rubbish. I can only think that his obsession with French cars was because he loved French food and wine. I listened to him on the subject of the food and the wine, but not the cars. They were crap. And I mean really crap.

My dad’s apparent phobia of anything even approaching a proper driver’s car is all the more ironic when you know that he’s actually an ex-traffic copper. Not only that, he used to be an advanced police driving instructor. Yes, he actually taught policemen how to drive. When we were kids, if me and my sister were playing up in the back of the car and my mother wasn’t around, he’d suddenly pull some of his old moves and scare the shit out of us. That would shut us up. Back when he was chasing robbers all over the south of England he used to drive a big MkII Jag, like the one Inspector Morse had, only with a blue light and a siren. Literally, you couldn’t get anything further removed from a Citroën Xantia if you tried. I can only think that he felt he got all the driving he wanted to do out of his system when he was in the police force and didn’t see the point of having something more driveable afterwards. Maybe it was enough for him to know he could do it; he didn’t need a flash motor to prove it. Still, a MkII Jag to a BX?

Maybe it has something to do with how he left the police force. He’s a real no-nonsense type of a character, my dad, not one for big shows of emotion or niceties. He’s all about getting the job done and that’s that, and he’s got loads of great stories about giving yobs and nutters a bit of old-fashioned treatment, the kind where the rule book went out the window and the baddies got what was coming to them.

The best was always the one about the armed robbery in Pepworth in Brighton. The robbers escaped in a Transit van and were thought to be heading to London. Everyone knew that if they made it to the capital they’d get away, so the best chance the police had was to stop them en route. My dad was sat in his MkII Jag in a lay-by on the A3, listening to the reports coming in on his radio – details of the robbery, a description of the robbers and their van, which of them was armed, their current location – and he realised they were heading his way. After a while he saw them coming up the hill, and knowing that they had to be stopped before they got much closer to London he decided the only thing to do was throttle down and T-bone them. Which he did. He T-boned them so hard that he knocked their van off the road and into a ditch, and his MkII ended up on top (he said this was probably just as well because it meant they couldn’t open the doors, and if they’d got out they would probably have shot him). It was a good result. When the chasing police cars arrived they nicked the robbers and everyone was happy. But in taking them off the road my dad had rolled his Jag and done his back in, and he had to leave the force as a result. He then did what all ex-coppers do: he ran a pub. Two very successful pubs in fact. Then he moved to York where he ran a Terry’s restaurant (as in the people who make the chocolate oranges), which is where he met my mother, who was going out with Stan the head chef at the time. She dumped him for my dad, the restaurant manager. (Head Chef Dumped for Restaurant Manager – story of my life, that is.) From there he went to Castle Howard, and his interest in cars and driving has rarely been seen since. Which was a shame, because when you’re a kid, getting a new car is the most exciting thing in the world. I can remember as clear as if it were yesterday the day my best mate David Coates’s parents got their MkII Escort. Now that was a cool car. It was only 2 litre, but that didn’t matter, it was just a really cool car. Even the 1.6, the RS, was cool. Some cars are just cool, and the one David Coates’s parents had just bought definitely qualified. I can also clearly remember the day my dad got his new Citroën XM, and we arrived at school just as another good mate of mine was pulling up in his dad’s brand-new bright red Opal Manta (which, as I said, is quite obviously shit now but back then was the bollocks).

Ten years old, my dad’s got a brand-new car, I arrive at school, and the whole car park, David’s MkII Escort and the Manta included, just Top Trumps me.

Even when my dad did come close to getting it right he still managed to find the world’s most uncool cars. I don’t know what happened. I think he must have been hit on the head one day, but he suddenly went from buying nothing but French cars to nothing but Audis. Ordinarily this would have been a very good move, but once again my dad’s love of a bargain did its worst. First we had an Audi 80, in gold, which he got because it was cheap. Of course it was cheap. Who the hell wants to drive a gold car? After that we moved up in the world with an Audi 100. A metallic lime green one. With a lime green interior. Jesus Christ you were buzzing when you got to school if you got a lift in that. No wonder I always preferred to ride my bike the 5 miles to school rather than face the embarrassment (and the headache).

The only time I can ever remember being genuinely excited at the thought of my dad buying a new car was one afternoon in York at the end of a long day touring the showrooms as part of our ritual two-yearly car hunt. For some reason it was just me and my dad going round the usual suspects, looking at the least exciting cars you could ever imagine – well, he was; I was looking at the latest hot hatches. After going to all the Peugeot and Citroën garages he knew, we made an unexpected stop at a very different type of showroom. I knew the garage in question well because I used to pass by it when I walked my gran’s Yorkshire terrier Tuppence. It always had a very fine selection of the latest sports cars on display. Not the kind of place you’d expect to find my father.

We went in, and sandwiched between a white and green Lotus Cortina and a white Ford Escort RS Turbo was a red Lotus Eclat with cream interior. Definitely not my father’s kind of car. My dad was, as always, in a suit, so the salesman was all over him like a rash, and before I knew what was happening he was handing the keys to my dad who looked at me, winked, and asked me if I fancied a spin. My dad wanted to go for a spin, in a Lotus Eclat. I couldn’t believe it. I really, really couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t just surprised, I was in shock.

Off we went down the road in the red Lotus Eclat with the cream leather and suddenly my dad came alive. Speeding down the dual carriageway it was like he was back in his MkII Jag, chasing bad guys and showing what a former advanced police driving instructor could do. It was like the car had instantly taken 20 years off him.

He didn’t buy it of course. It wasn’t French, it certainly wasn’t a bargain, and no doubt my mother would have had more than a few things to say about it. I was a little disappointed when he handed the keys back, but at the same time I was so shocked by the fact that we’d gone out in it in the first place I don’t think I ever got as far as thinking about what might happen at the end of the test drive. It’s a shame really. For a minute there he looked like he was really enjoying himself, like he’d remembered there was more to cars than deals and boot space. I wish he’d rediscover it again, blow off the cobwebs and the stink of garlic and get behind the wheel of a proper car. It’ll never happen though. Last I heard he’d just bought a Citroën Xantia. The cheap one.