I have found another old, unpublished piece about my first two cars. Have removed surnames though. Herewith.
FIRST WHEELS
The first car I owned was a black pillarless four-door six-cylinder 1,500cc Fiat saloon, of late-thirties vintage. It belonged to an architect, Mike *****, who drove it as he drove everything with great elan (for sheer terror a trip in his Bond Minicar, mechanically a dodgem with a lawn-mower engine that would not now be allowed to be sold, took some beating). Mussolini's secret police would have felt at home in the Fiat, sinister and beetle-like in appearance with headlights hidden behind the grille (like a Healey Silverstone), spare wheel on the boot-lid and very narrow rear track. With totally bald rear tyres its handling in the rain was entertaining to say the least. I recall a trip down the crowded Fulham Road, then a patchwork of cobbles and tarmac with lengths of exposed tramline, in which every lane-change involved not one but two full-blooded tail-out opposite lock slides, all at safe speeds. Eventually the front shackle of the offside rear leaf spring, weakened by rust, tore free from the monocoque and came up through the rear seat, fortunately unoccupied at the time. He parked it outside the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, where he was a student, and a few weeks later gave it to me in a pub. Having no driving licence I felt it would be more discreet to collect it in the middle of the night. While I was searching vainly for the starter a policeman came up and asked what I was doing. When I told him, more or less, he helped, and eventually we managed to push-start the device whose battery had seen better days. Things have changed a lot since 1959.
I drove it to Chiswick where I then lived. Mike had warned me that apart from the lopsided stance and gait caused by the semi-detached rear axle, the worn and very peculiar independent front suspension sometimes caused a violent resonant oscillation of the front wheels, the cure for which was to go faster until it stopped. The oscillation was far more violent than I expected and I lacked the courage for the McRae solution, being a very inexperienced driver, so I slowed to a crawl instead and then cautiously got back up to speed. It occurred three times on the way to Chiswick. Having no money and no licence I gave (he says I took 25 quid off him for it, but I don?t remember doing so) the car immediately to my landlady's brother who had cast covetous glances at it. Nick *********** was an enthusiast who did a bit of club racing (one of his friends was the Bugattist Richard ******, another Angus ********** who had an early competition-tuned TVR). He had a bit more money than me and welding connections. Repaired, the Fiat became his transport, I suppose only for a few months (time passes so slowly when one is young). He liked it a lot and once drove me from Oxford to Henley and back very briskly indeed, the seat right back to facilitate the then-fashionable straight-armed driving position. I don't know what happened to the Fiat but Nick was later an executive of Ford Europe, and also worked for Unipower which made a small number of mid-engined Mini Cooper-powered road bullets.
Real first car (in 1962 or so) was a left-hand-drive 1948 Citroën Light Fifteen, a French-built small-boot example with the spare wheel carried on the boot lid under a pressed-steel cover. I bought it for £60 from two Aussie girls in West Kensington. It was a modified example with a big four-spoke steering wheel and two skinny, mushroom-like Solex downdraught carburettors, devoid of air cleaners, perched over the engine. I may be wrong, but I also seem to remember six-volt electrics - certainly the yellow headlights were not up to much. The drive shafts, objects of suspicion in those days, were noisy on full lock but gave no trouble.
Even rusty and clapped out it was a terrific car, terrific-looking too with matt mushroom paintwork - sort of desert camouflage - and very little chrome. The early-post-war trim was extremely austere but the seats and torsion-bar suspension were comfortable. The front tyres, fat Michelin crossplies, squealed a lot around town, but there were no handling vices at the speeds it could manage and the roadholding and braking - the front drums were large and finned - were exemplary.
This was just as well because although the device was insured I had virtually no driving experience, had never taken a driving test and was rushing about as fast as possible on an Irish licence obtained by a friend in Dublin for a quid, backed by a couple of untrue statements and a forgery. I was absolutely terrifying: not only I but all around me were leading (I later realised) charmed lives. I recall a nimbly-leaping traffic policeman one wet morning in the middle of Oxford Circus - in those days an acre or two of unmarked cobbles - and a hitch-hiking airman who begged to be let out on a rainy night in the middle of nowhere on the A1 in Yorkshire, as the speedo needle strained for 135 Ks and the draughty cabin filled with oil smoke once again...
The three-speed gearbox stuck out at the front, under the radiator, and was controlled by two push-pull rods moved, in their turn, by a drooping lever that stuck through a rectangular hole in the dashboard on the right of the wheel. Being a left-hooker my car had this hole in the right place; cars for the British market had a longer lever skewed to the right, an arrangement that worked perfectly well but looked messy. The linkage like all the Citroën's running gear was well-designed and solid, but the synchromesh had gone and I quickly learned to double-declutch on all gearchanges, up as well as down. This, rushing round London, caused the clutch cable to fail at Denham on the way to Oxford one evening. I left the car at a big garage there which said it would replace the cable.
This took more than a week and naturally cost a lot. The garage left oily fingermarks all over the car's beige fabric interior, and although it had been installed after a fashion I had to adjust the new cable before I could drive the car. Two days later the new cable parted in Marylebone Road (scene of so many motoring dramas through the ages), but the car was moving in second gear and I was able to drive straight round the corner and park (yes, children, in the olden days London was like that). Another new cable from a Citroën dealer cost about £6.10s. The sheath was a rugged flexible steel spiral, but the inner cable would only bend in one plane because instead of being woven Bowden cable it was a simple strip of spring steel. A kink surrounding the break in the "professionally" fitted cable showed what had happened: the "fitter" had forcibly bent it sideways while trying to thread it through the holes in the left-hand side-member sprouting from the front of the car's epoch-making, if rust-prone, monocoque. This cannot have been all that difficult, as I did it myself in a couple of hours with a couple of spanners under the rather snooty gaze of the Marylebonians. An early lesson in the iniquities of the automotive service industry.
In those days, however, they were as nothing to my own iniquities. Feeling that the Citroën, which never received a tuning check at my hands, needed some sort of routine care, I took it to a small garage (still a service station) near the top of Parkway in Camden Town. The service man, a gloomy but fairly sympathetic Greek, agreed to flush the engine and change the oil, and suggested an underbody oil spray. I had never heard of one of these, but it didn't cost much and sounded a good idea although things were frankly pretty far gone. As an afterthought I asked him to drain the gearbox. When I collected the car he was frowning in a worried sort of way, but didn't say anything. Soon the gearbox began to make random grinding and groaning noises, which became worse when the car was warm. After a couple of days of this I consulted another garage whose proprietor opened the gearbox drain plug. Nothing came out. I stuck my finger inside. It emerged covered with what looked like silver metallic paint. I had asked for the gearbox to be drained but omitted to say anything about refilling it. Refilled with new oil - silver metallic oil before long - the gearbox stopped making noises and seemed unscathed, for the few weeks more that I used the car. But in any case a lot of exhaust seemed to be coming out of the crankcase breather and the tune was getting worse and worse.
I was not capable enough to prolong its useful life, let alone restore it (something that might have been possible, although expensive, with the aid of a really good welder). Writers used to complain in a litany about the allegedly "agricultural" long-stroke two-litre engine and three-speed gearbox, but most Light Fifteen owners retained a lasting affection for the model which was doggedly faithful, tough, stylish, comfortable, long-legged, safe and (by the standards of the time) fairly economical. But so it goes. You don't know what you've got till it's gone. My late friend, the artist Edward *****, who loved Citroëns and drove them exceptionally well, at the same time had a much more respectable example, a mid-fifties Big Fifteen, with the limousine-like body of the Big Six (obviously a Light Six would have been the one to go for, but I have never seen one). Like all the late Slough-assembled cars it had a practical but ugly add-on box boot lid which improved the boot but ruined the car's lines. French Citroëns had this boot for the last couple of years before the company broke major new ground once again with the DS.
Eventually, as the winter set in, my own Light Fifteen became impossible to start and the battery expired. It had lasted me four months at the outside. For a while it sat at the other end of my street in South Hampstead turning away in disgust whenever I slunk past. Later, to my enormous relief, it disappeared from the street, but it will live for as long as I do in a corner of my heart.
ends
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