1. The Renault 5 (1975)

Description

Strictly speaking, my very first car was a hand-me-down from my wife.

Yes, you read that correctly, I said my wife.

By accepting this generous gift, I had unwittingly become the first ever metro-sexual! Except it wasn’t a metro, it was a Renault. Before we were man and wife, it had been my then girlfriend who’d taught me to drive in her BMC British Racing Green Austin 1300 MkII. Now for completeness sake, and before I continue with the mainstream flow of the narrative, I want to let you know that the Austin 1300 wasn’t the first car I had driven. To be fair to my father he had taken me out in the family’s Hillman Hunter estate, but I couldn’t say that he was overly enthusiastic about it.

The driving lessons were on Sundays on the way to my grandfathers’ farm for the traditionally roast dinner. My mother’s manic rallying of the family into its Sunday finery was hardly conducive to establishing a karma in me that I required to learn to drive. This was further amplified when the family were finally crammed into the back variously suppressing sniggers or gasps of horror as I kangarooed off from a start or over estimated the severity of the twisty curves on the country lanes on the way to the farm. My mother had point blank refused to teach me, my father felt he was left with the short straw and had no particularly enthusiasm for the venture either. The stress induced in both my father and I on these occasions was such that both of us found excuses to abandon the tuition for each subsequent weekend. After maybe only four such lessons they stopped for ever. I was never going to learn with my parents, that at least was obvious. This left me with a terrible feeling of being left out and falling behind my mates, all of whom could by now drive. It was fortunate that they at least could see the benefit of helping me so that I could take on some of the driving and they could enjoy some of the drinking.

After the family’s Hillman Hunter estate, the next car I drove was a Triumph Spitfire MkIII. My mate who was seventeen had bought himself a maroon soft-top version with a beautiful wooden dashboard and stumpy little gear lever. Today, your father would have to be a multi-millionaire to help you pay the insurance premium alone, but in 1978 the car was inexpensive and the insurance was a minimal expense for a whole host of reasons – car theft was small scale, cars were easily repairable, there were less cars on the roads and cars were not very powerful. We would go to Waitrose car-park in Godalming on a Sunday – there was no Sunday trading in 1978. The car-park was empty apart from other learner drivers and I drove that little Spitfire enthusiastically learning about fast gear changes, taking bends, parking and three-point turns. Another mate would take me out in his Morris Traveller – for those that have been in an alternative Universe for the last fifty years, this is a Morris Minor estate. This was a fabulous car with re-conditioned wooden side stanchions and re-painted bodywork in British Racing Green. This would take us to Cornwall for the summer or to Avebury for a spooky ethereal after closing time outings on crisp winters’ nights. My experience of the Morris Traveller was limited to driving it once or twice around the car-park and around the local villages, but even for that brief experience I was blessed.

My last memory of the Triumph Spitfire was my mate and I deciding to go up to London the evening before the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. We weren’t Monarchists, we’d just heard that it would be a once in a lifetime experience. It was a warm evening and we had the roof down, the streets were packed solid and there was a wonderful carnival atmosphere amongst revellers and police alike. We drove around for hours and hours until the sun coming up signalled it was time to go home.

So I had had some experience of driving by the time I met my girlfriend with her BMC British Racing Green Austin 1300 MkII, but this time the stars aligned and the driving tuition would lead to a driving test. The Austin 1300 was the car with the speedometer that had a red bar that increased in length from left to right the faster you went – like a thermometer tilted on its side. That might have been its unique selling point! I remember this car with affection. It was part of my childhood – when British Cars were ubiquitous on our roads. They had their own sounds and you could identify a Morris Minor, 1100 or A30 without the need for visual identification. Unfortunately, just before my driving test it had been found that the sills on the Austin 1300 had rusted irreparably and nothing could be done about it – it had to be sent to the knackers yard. In its place, my girlfriend bought herself a Renault 5 (first generation, 1100) – which was a pretty chic motor car in those days.

I had to take up the driving tuition from where I’d left off with the 1300, but the Renault proved much easier to drive being a modern vehicle and I took to it quickly. Incidentally, I was taught to drive by both my girlfriend and her father – my future wife and father-in-law. He was an advanced driver in the police force. I never had a formal lesson. Just think how much that would save against the cost of today’s driving lessons. It is testament to their patience and resilience that I passed first time. The driving test, however, was not without incident.

My driving examiner was an enormous chap and he had some difficulty manoeuvring himself into the passenger seat. Once he’d shut the door and placed his papers on the dash he announced that I could start the engine and pull-off from the kerb when I was ready and if it was safe to do so. However, I was in a tidy-pickle, as my grandmother used to say, because he hadn’t put his seat belt on, more precisely, I don’t think he could get it around his vast frame. So I didn’t know what to do.

Was this part of the test? Would he fail me if I didn’t ask him to put the belt on? On the other hand, if I said something, it would be obvious that I was really saying “Oi, fat bastard, put the belt on!”

I was temporarily dumbfounded – what should I do?

I pretended not to have heard his instruction. He repeated himself.

Oh God!

I decided to communicate none verbally so that I couldn’t later be accused of insulting him. I looked him in the eye and then pointedly looked down at the belt fixing unit. Fortunately, he grasped the essence of my dilemma immediately and told me that it was alright because he was instructing me to start even though he hadn’t secured the belt and it therefore wasn’t a trick.

The first part of the test was wholly unexceptional, the routes around Guildford were well known to me. The biggest hazard in those days was the Stoke Park roundabout on the old A3, but there was nothing on it on both occasions we circulated and I drove straight around without incident. This did not satisfy him though and he said that we’d be going back around it later to ensure a proper challenge. I was a little annoyed, but otherwise the test seemed to be going well and I had something to look forward to: the emergency stop! I knew that he was in trouble with that because with no belt on I could quite easily put him through the windscreen even with the Renault’s fairly soggy breaks. I awaited instructions expectantly. He instructed me to go down a quiet leafy street and do a three-point turn. The street was so wide I could have gone straight around like a London taxi even though my turning-circle was not brilliant, so I had to ham it up a bit in order to affect the impression that a three-point turn was absolutely necessary. He ticked his sheet.

I was getting excited, the emergency stop would be coming up very soon and I knew enough about Newton’s Third Law to know it would be easy to propel the bloater forward with an alarming force. Should I put the fat man through the windscreen, across the bonnet and watch him bounce onto the road? Or should I run the risk of failing the test because I had stopped too gently to prevent his body from reacting to the heavy retardation of my emergency stop?

Put the fat boy through the windscreen!

He was getting his papers off the dash. It was close now. He still hadn’t said anything but I was primed as I drove forward anticipating the hard stop. Just at that moment a cat dashed across the street and I had to break firmly to avoid hitting it. The examiner affected a little leap forward, steadied himself against the dashboard and declared that that would suffice as the emergency stop.

Jammy bastard!

After I’d passed I drove my future wife back to Godalming and she got out of the car and said that I should go out on my own for an hour. This was the habit of the times, it was a sort of an initiation. I’d planned my route weeks in advance and I was going to go fast, at least as fast as the little Renault could take me. The problem was I hadn’t reckoned on something fairly fundamental: I’d never driven by myself before. Suddenly, there was no-one else to warn you of hazards and things you might not have seen. My concentration levels were working overtime, I was filled with trepidation, going fast was not an option for me in this initial confused and anxious state. As it happened, I had a very nasty experience on that very first day alone in the car.

My route had taken me on lots of country roads around Godalming and the last part of the route would take me passed my parents house so I could drop in and let them know that I’d passed and collect my winnings from my doubting sisters and dismissive father. I was about a mile away in a little village called Compton slowing down as I approached a T-junction some fifty yards ahead of me. It was a hot day and my window was wound down. From out of nowhere, an old Ford Escort Mk I appeared from the right careering around the corner across my side of the road and, with little apparent control, it swung this way and that along the middle line in the road until, thankfully, settling back onto his proper side. It flew past me, the drivers’ eyes set forward with no recognition of his recklessness. He looked like a crazed lunatic, his skeletal head rippled with embossed veins, full to bursting. My adrenalin was pumping too, I’d faced death and then been reprieved. Spontaneously, I screamed out the window at him.

“You bloody idiot!”

I’ve come a long way and not all of it has been for the better, but when it comes to the language I used that day I think you’d agree that under the circumstances it was pretty tame. If the same thing happened yesterday, my response would be barely printable! The screamed insult seemed to have had a therapeutic effect on me because I was able to drive forward to the T-junction and turn right as normal, but then I heard something behind me. In my mirrors, I could see a deranged, incensed degenerate chasing me down the road, his own Ford Escort abandoned, deep tyre marks leading to it skewed across the road behind me. Today, I might get out of the car and have a fight, verbal or otherwise. After all, this prick had nearly killed me and if he was offended by my insult, so what? He might also have been offended by a kick to the groin or a punch to the nose, but this was different, I was young and diffident, inexperienced and frankly, there was a criminally insane person with his eyes out on stalks looking for all the world like he was going to rip my limbs off, one by one, chasing me down. Discretion being the better part of valour, I decided to accelerate hard and get out of there. Even so he was able to kick the car hard and offer some choice swear words aimed in my general direction! I drove to my girlfriend’s house as quickly as I could taking the most circuitous route I could think of to ensure I wasn’t being followed. I was pretty shaken when I got back, grateful that there was no dent in the car and that I’d survived my encounter with the Surrey psycho. For a few weeks afterwards, I would drive around studiously examining every blue Ford Escort to ensure that there was no mad-man driving it.

We both drove the Renault around happily for a couple of years, but it was her car and she was paying for it and so when we got married and moved thirty miles away to Basingstoke, it was only appropriate for my wife to take the car to drive to work and I would take the train. About a year after we were married she was given a company car, a secondhand red Astra MkI estate. I am now ashamed to say that the rancour and humiliation of this sleight to my ego (my wife getting a company car before me) hurt me then and still does a little today. However, fears of sliding down the emancipation ladder towards a life as a house-husband were soon dispelled when I found myself in sole possession of her old Renault 5.

It was a metallic orangey-bronze colour reminiscent of fake-tanned menopausal mid-day television presenters. Mechanically it was sound but for the leads which only just stretched over the spark plugs. One of the leads would frequently pop off leaving the Renault spluttering. With a few expert modifications, gaffer tape and chicken-wire, the Renault became a little gem. The most important of these necessary modifications was the very large prancing horse sticker on the back windscreen.

It took me back and forth to Maidenhead, where I was working at the time, in a little over 30 minutes. This journey would otherwise have taken nearly two hours by train including two changes and then a walk through Maidenhead town centre and out the other side to a nearby industrial estate. This was dreadful in the winter: dark, cold, lonely and often wet! It was not much better during the spring or summer. The joy of hammering down the M4, closeted from the vagaries of the English weather, with the Cure rasping miserably from the knackered in-car entertainment system (mono cassette) was the embodiment of freedom and enlightenment. The car’s little idiosyncrasies served only to endear her to me, because I alone could cure her and she responded by purring obediently – most of the time. I was her car whisperer you might say. This was typified by my ability to sense when the spark plug lead had slipped off, stopping in a lay-by fixing it back and returning to the finely tuned whine of the little 1100 engine. There was always a little tweaking to be done. For example, in order to force the cassette onto the tape heads to get consistent playback a tuppenny-bit had to be expertly wedged between the cassette and the tape heads as the tape was being pushed into place. Get this delicate fix wrong and the tuppenny-bit disappeared into the tape player and an assortment of probing devices were required to remove it, get it right and you were rewarded with the best reproduction it was possible to get out of the system.

The car had changed me, it had given me independence from the vulgar savagery of public transport with its breakdowns and seasonal vicissitudes, not to mention having to sit next to the occasional slobbering drunk on the verge of chundering or having to avoid eye contact with the plethora of sociopaths who seemed to roam the railways freely in those days.

Don’t you miss British Rail of the 1980s?

The car calmed me, allowing me the personal space to blow-off steam and verbally abuse arrogant bosses and colleagues after a bad day at work within the soundproof sanctify of the cockpit. I was able to turn up Bauhaus to the cassette players’ gloriously tinny full volume when I felt the need to let rip along to ‘Kick In The Eye’.

The Renault became my second skin, an exoskeleton that allowed me to travel through space and time in all four dimensions available to me. For someone previously manacled to public transport, this was an inestimable step forward. The Renault changed me, it helped my confidence, banished the diffidence and I have loved Renaults ever since!

Occasionally, my over confidence and resultant casual stupidity caused contemptuous mirth amongst the more diligent ‘observers of the Highway Code’. On one such occasion, I was coming out of our cul-de-sac waiting at the T-Junction for some local traffic to pass before it was safe to turn right onto the main road. Absentmindedly, whilst the wheel was turned hard to the right, I noticed that I hadn’t reset the odometer from the previous evening when I’d filled her up with petrol. As an aside, I think that I filled her up with 2-star leaded petrol, that’s something you don’t hear about today! So, back to resetting the odometer: I put my right arm through the steering wheel and pushed the reset button to set the numerals back to zero. As I was doing this, the road cleared. I eased my left foot off the clutch and the car started to move forward but the wheel started to unwind as I moved off and it trapped my right arm between the wheel and the dashboard. The wheel could not turn any more because my arm was wedged through it like a deadlock. The car travelled across the street and bumped up the kerb before I was to able to stop and extricate my arm from its entanglement. Only then was I able to get the car off the kerb and get back on my way. Fortunately, no harm was done, not even to my ego as no-one had seen me. Actually, if there had been anyone watching they wouldn’t have believed that it was possible to be that stupid and they would have checked themselves for signs that they weren’t imagining things.

Idiot!

On our first Christmas as a married couple there was an age old dilemma to be solved. Put simply, both sets of parents had invited us for Christmas dinner. What on Earth was to be done? I decided to display the judgement of Solomon and announced that we would be spending our first Christmas together, we would have Christmas dinner alone. This was a great decision and neatly extricated ourselves from the dilemma. It was only after our little Christmas pullet had been consumed that I noticed my wife crying.

Oh shit!

There had been a flaw in my reasoning. So I packed the Renault with presents and we drove off to see my wife’s parents who were with their relatives in Chichester. It was a very foggy day on Christmas Day 1984, so foggy in fact that going on the motorway was not an option so I planned to take the minor roads cross-country to Petersfield and then over the top of the South Downs at South Harting on the B2141 and down to Chichester from there. The only problem was that it was starting to get darker and as we climbed the hill outside South Harting the fog got thicker and thicker until I had to stop because I couldn’t see further than a couple of yards ahead. The B2141 looked fairly innocuous on a map, but the reality was very different, it was a twisting road bedecked with chevron signs and with steep drops to the left as it wound up and over the Downs. I was alarmed that all peripheral vision had disappeared into the gloom. We were on a narrow, twisting lane and I was by now very worried about driving over the verge and careering down a steep bank to our deaths. I got out and walked ahead peering into the void whilst my wife drove the car slowly behind me. After about a mile, the fog cleared sufficiently for us to continue normally. I was the most frightened I’ve ever been driving, but I was on a mission to do right by my wife and rescue her Christmas Day for her. Eventually, we got to Chichester and were able to make a big and surprising entry to enjoy their evening’s festivities. We were welcomed into the warmth as lost travellers having found their way home. I’d done it and tranquillity was restored.

The fog cleared in the late evening and the drive back was thoroughly uneventful.

 

SUMMARY (9/10): The Renault 5 was my very first car and because of that it stands out as the first to give me the freedom I craved, allowing me to venture into the unknown without having to suffer British Rail and the British weather. More than that though, it gave me independence because I could control my own life, I could choose to work late to finish something rather than put it off until the next day and I could wind down by playing cassettes or listening to the radio on the way home. Renaults are still dear to me and that is all because of this first car given to me by my wife!

Next time, it’s the Rover 213S (1986).