She gleamed, and her red leather rippled invitingly. I zipped her up in a plastic bubble
Published 21 August 2000
About 25 years ago, I saw in the street an MG TD sports car. She was pretty old then - they were made between 1949 and 1953 - and had that coach-built, prehistoric look that spoke of A Proper Motor: running-boards, tombstone-shaped radiator and dinner-plate-sized headlights on brackets either side of the two-flap bonnet. She was a real Spitfire pilot's car: the sort, as a perceptive friend put it, in which Anthony Steel or Richard Todd would drive Virginia McKenna up into the Surrey hills, pulling into a lay-by before addressing her with a fervent "Happy, darling?".
I had to have one. And I wasn't even old enough to drive then.
When I was, the twin realities of finding the cash for this mobile antique and learning how to maintain her conspired to prevent me from getting one.
As youth advanced into middle age, the money arrived. My completely unmechanical streak was all that kept me and my dream from each other. I took cold showers, went for long walks, tried to think of other things. Then my wife saw one last winter and she, too, was enthralled.
We were not getting any younger, as they say: so I dived in.
They made nearly 30,000 of them at Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in the days when we had a car industry; but 27,000 went for export, mostly to America. The one I found was a late model, built in 1953 just before the end. She had spent most of her life in Dallas. Her engine was pristine and had even been converted to unleaded petrol, although, to get her really going, you stick a bottle of something called octane booster into the tank every time you fill up.
I felt a bit of a fraud, buying her as I did from a professional restorer, since the few others you see on the road have usually been rebuilt painstakingly over several years by the chap behind the steering-wheel. I know my limitations; besides, just driving this thing and keeping her going are exacting enough.
The restorer drove her over on a trailer and parked her in my garage one wet day in March. A deep red with immaculate chrome everywhere, she gleamed. Inside, her red leather rippled invitingly. I zipped her up in an air-conditioned plastic bubble, wittily called a Carcoon, which plugs into the mains and keeps her warm, dry and rust-free when she is not being driven. I had taken The Motor for what we had better call a "spin" before buying her and, girl that I am, had been most disturbed by the lack of power steering. But there was no putting it off any longer.
My wife rang our near neighbour Francis Wheen, the celebrated columnist, game-show participant and biographer of Karl Marx - and we heaved The Motor the five or six miles to his and his partner's cottage. Arriving was a great triumph, although I felt I had developed muscles in several places that I had not been aware existed before I met this particular steering column. I was not relishing a long drive, but supposed I would get used to it.
The Wheens looked over The Motor and made the right admiring noises. Eventually, it was time to leave.
She would not start. The engine would not turn. I had been boning up on my mechanics, to the limited extent that I had found a 4ft-long starting handle behind the seat, and knew exactly where to put it. It would not turn, either. Marx's biographer fought a heroic battle with his Schadenfreude. The AA was called. The AA man did his best. He could not shift her. We were gripped with despair: the dream was in danger of dying, and the large hole in the bank account would have been to no avail. As he radioed for a trailer to take us to a vintage car intensive care unit, my wife spotted the cause of the trouble. The Motor had been left in gear, jamming the engine. A quick stamp on the clutch, and order was restored. She - The Motor, I mean - has given us no trouble since.
My muscles have continued to develop, and now I can take her 70 or 80 miles without needing deep heat treatment. She looks more beautiful than ever, and I find on wet days that I just stroll out to the garage and look at her in her bubble, imagining the happy times we shall have together with the top off when the sun shines.
I reflect on my ill-fortune in having bought her in time for the lousiest summer for 15 years, but at least she is mine. An inordinate amount of time is spent cleaning her, polishing until one's proverbial face can be seen in her, and coating the chrome in gallons of rust-repellent WD-40.
I have still learnt little about maintenance, but I gave the man who services my other cars a workshop manual and now he loves her every bit as much as I do, though his knowledge of her appears disconcertingly more intimate.
He recently spent an entire morning under her dashboard reconfiguring some of her electrics, an event that filled me with a strange sort of unease. He keeps finding new excuses to drop in on her - a gasket needing replacing here, a spark-plug tightening there - and their test drives together after each repair is complete are getting longer and longer.
I am going to have to take my courage in both hands and learn, once and for all, how to grease her kingpins, for I know that, until I have acquired the knack of keeping her absolutely happy, she will not truly be mine. I now know what they mean by "high maintenance".
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