THE BIG RED MINI

It is a very strange phenomenon that when you really start to think about one thing, a whole raft of other memories can suddenly come to mind. This one particular photograph is a case in point. It is Christmas 1968, and the family are all staying at my grandparents’ house. The tiny potato-faced one is nearly four and a half years old and has just come face-to-face with his main present for that particular Christmas Day, a red plastic Mini that you could actually sit in and drive about the place.

This, it has turned out, was the only version of Alec Issigonis’s classic Mini car design that I have ever owned, well, apart from ones like the toy one I mentioned once getting around new year. Suddenly I’m noticing a slight trend in the pattern of gift giving here, which sadly never manifested itself with the “real thing” at a time when it would have been quite useful. I suppose that I’m being unfair there, because I did get bought a car shortly after I passed my test, a Mk1 Ford Escort in Electric Blue that cost about £300. It might not have been sparklingly new, and the brakes on the entire left side might have been a touch suspect, and you could open it with a half-pence piece, but it was a gift happily given and gratefully received.

Rather strangely, those early Escorts do seem to have become a bit iconic in recent years. I was in a craft shop recently, moping around the model kits whilst wool was being chosen, and amongst all the kits for making E-Type Jags and Ferraris, there were kits for that very Escort, a simple little family saloon from the early 1970s. Mine came to an ignominious end, colliding back-end to back-end with a Yellow VW Passat owned by a builder when those suspect brakes were tested rather too suddenly on a wet road and found wanting as the world slowly spun through about 135 degrees.

My friend Matthew at college used to drive a green Mini when he was occasionally allowed to borrow it during term time. It was a fine old classic from the pre-BL era with those rather funky horizontally sliding windows in the side doors, and a slight tendency to fling its wiper blades away at the worst possible moment. A later “sort of” girlfriend was also a bit of a fan of the Mini, and I fully expected her to take part in the annual owners’ club drive to Italy one year. It’s probably just as well that the relationship didn’t take, because four days in a Mini with me would probably have found her deciding to drive straight off the road and into a canyon.

So that’s pretty much my entire experience of the Mini car, apart from the one that the garage lent me once when Blinky was in for some major surgery. That was, however, one of the “new” ones and you had to start it by positioning something that looked like a tiny frying pan into the dashboard. It was an impressive car, but it just wasn’t the same.

The house we were all in on that long ago Christmas morning was called “The Hawthorns” and was a largish detached house built by my grandfather in the 1950s and (rather too) quickly sold by him 20 years later so that he could then go off and build their retirement bungalow. It seems odd to me now that a plumber would dabble in architecture, but I suppose that his various contacts in the trades and trade organisations helped to make it a slightly more feasible project for a tradesman to attempt. Oddly enough, I have few desires in that direction, finding even the prospect of having builders come to this ramshackle little place to do some much needed maintenance rather more than I can bear. Over the years, I have occasionally gone back and had a look at the place. The last time was admittedly quite a few years ago now, but it had been extended massively and the original house is all but buried within its new form. It looks as if some of the adjacent land has also been bought, as there is now a huge new driveway leading up to the house and so these days it resembles a tiny mansion. I do sometimes wonder whether the current owners might be interested in the construction photographs that I still have in a box (somewhere…), but I’m not really brave enough to go and knock on the door and ask them.

They might, after all, “release the hounds!”

My very first memories of having insomnia can be traced back to those Christmases in that house. I can recall one endless Christmas Eve where I didn’t sleep one wink as I lay next to a radiator, under the window, on the sun lounger that made up my bed in the guest bedroom my parents were also sleeping in. (I told you it was odd what else came to mind…). Some people try to tell me that insomniacs actually sleep a lot longer than they claim to, because they say that you spend a lot of the time in a half-dream state, but even now I can now recall every blooming second of that long and sleepless night from my childhood, and I can remember the almost agonising slowness of it ticking endlessly away.

Also in that picture is the petrol station/garage that was another gift that year. I thought that I had it for many, many years, because I remember the day I finally put it onto the bonfire. At our own house there was a patch of ground behind the garden swing where we used to regularly burn the rubbish on a Saturday morning. I got to quite like bonfires and would even be left to tend them at an age when it was probably hugely inappropriate for me to do so. One weekend, after the terrible “Summerland” fire had been all over the news, I decided that my garage should suffer the same fate, and up in flames it went.

I’ve just had a look and discovered that the Summerland fire on the Isle of Man was in 1973, but I was convinced that it was at least a couple of years later than that, because I would have been very young in 1973 to be so aware of the consequences of such a massive disaster. I suppose I must have started to become aware of the possibilities of disaster about that time, because holiday jets seemed to be constantly falling out of the skies in those days, and the Moorgate Tube disaster also sticks vividly in my memory. Serena Williams may well describe the past year as being a “disaster”, but I learned the true meaning of the word long ago.

My awareness of the aircraft disasters came, I think, because of the general air of nervousness surrounding my own first flight in late 1972. Cheap package deals to countries like Yugoslavia had finally become available if you saved really hard. I think they were so cheap because you got to fly on the pencil-thin Russian Tupolev 134A  aircraft that looked ever so flimsy sitting on the tarmac alongside the study looking 737s and never instilled the greatest of confidence as you approached it in the days when you had to walk across the actual ground to get to your plane.

One little photo, and suddenly we’ve been taken a journey through classic cars to Italy and Yugoslavia, a little bit of almost forgotten modern history, a touch of insomnia and some dabblings in architecture. All of this knowledge is, as yet, unknown to the tiny potato-faced one. I wonder if I could step into the picture and whisper in his ear to do something else with his life, whether he would take any notice?

I doubt it. He was a stubborn little sod.