Extract from “The Haunting
of a Favourite Son” by Noel Hodson*. Childhood memories of holiday journeys –
being driven round the bend by a rally-mad dad!
 |
| Edwin Hodson with his TR4 which he drove in the 1962 Monte Carlo Rally |
“Though Father had not
yet embarked on his racing and rallying activities he took every opportunity to
practice winning. Every car journey was to him a competitive event. With a big
family he bought big second-hand cars. We had a black Wolsey, the familiar ‘forties
police car. We had a pale-green Rover with a Viking ship on its nose. We had a
great Jaguar, racing green with wide running boards and huge free-standing
headlamps that Father and I toured Scotland in together. We had an Austin
Sheerline, an immense machine with built in under-floor hydraulic jacks and a
secret emergency petrol tank that could be switched to from inside the car.
These sedate family cars became high revving, Formula One racing machines in
Father’s hands.
A holiday would start
with the loading procedures, Father was tidy and precise;“Shipshape and Bristol
Fashion,” as he put it.
Luggage for up to six
children and two adults takes a lot of space. Father despised roof racks for
aerodynamic reasons. At least two of the children, at any one time, would
suffer acutely from travel sickness, exacerbated by the real leather, the real
wood, the anxiety, the tension and, when in flight, the bucketing, pitching and
rolling at maximum speed. Father, as driver and captain, had the most space. He
needed room to hold his arms straight – as good racing technique demands, he
needed clear space around him to ensure his lightning fast reflexes were not
obstructed, and he needed clear views in all directions.
Mother was installed
in the front passenger seat, apprehensive but silent at this stage. This was
before the government decided to insult the inherent skills and good sense of
all drivers by insisting on cars having safety belts, so there were no
entanglements of that sort to be accommodated. Under her legs would go a
suitcase and on her lap would go the youngest child. The boot would be
hard-packed with cases and slammed tight. The remaining children and luggage
would be crammed into the rear seat and on the floor. Older children would
baggsie a corner seat with window, though we were mostly too short to see out,
and the younger ones would end up perched on suitcases in the middle of the
seats. Sometimes we took the dog with us just to make up the numbers.
Mother would become
deeply silent and pale. Father checked the car, checked the house, checked the
weather, re-checked the house, used the loo, then did a roll call and then
started the engine. At which point Mother would say tensely, “You will drive
carefully won’t you Edwin?”
And he would reply “Hrrrummphh!!
Hrrumph!! Of course dear, of course.”
Only in towns and
built up areas was there a speed limit. There were no motorways, dual
carriageways were rare and the ubiquitous lethal three-lane highways to death
were highly regarded. On a modern map the journey from Stockport to Llandudno
looks short enough and safe enough. In the late ‘forties, on twisting country
roads, through market towns, up hill and down dale, in a loaded car weighing
two tons, with primitive brakes, puking, bitching children and an increasingly
hysterical wife; it was a long, long way. Several times we made the
thirteen-hour trip to Cornwall; and of course, back again.
But Father never
wavered in his parental duty to get us to the holiday destination as rapidly as
possible, dead or alive. On one return journey, with the car bucking and
heaving with the terrified family, racing up the busy Chester Road to
Manchester, Father dancing the car past all lesser mortals and dodging into
spaces two feet shorter than the car at seventy miles an hour, we were followed
and were eventually stopped by a police car. The policemen looked perplexedly
into the jammed interior. There was no question of exceeding speed limits, as
there were none.
“Where did you learn
to drive, Sir?” said an officer in a neutral tone, and before Father, shrinking
into his seat, could answer…
“…We’ve been following
for about five miles, and couldn’t keep up, Sir. You passed four lorries back
there into oncoming traffic, Sir,…” He paused then continued admiringly
“...And I’d swear the
back of your car shrank as it went through the gap! Mind how you go,
Sir.”
Half an hour into a
journey, as we left the relative sanity of thirty-mile-limits behind us and as
Father swooped past all other road users at frantic speed, Mother’s nerve would
start to fail and she would launch into an endless critique of his driving and
a continuous prophecy of doom.
“Slow down Edwin!
You’ll kill us all. You’ll kill all these children. Oh my God, you nearly hit
that van then. Look, he’s shaking his fist at us. Oh My God, you’re going too
fast. If you don’t slow down now Edwin, I’m getting out at the next police
station and I’ll have you arrested. Look Out! Look Out! Those lights are on
red. Can’t you see? Can’t you see? Oh you’re NOT going to try to overtake here
are you. You’re a madman. Stop the car Edwin – I’m going to turn you in. I will
I swear it. I’ll see you in prison for the way you’re driving. Oh Holy Mother
of God save us – look out! look out! he’s pulling out...”
And on and on she
would wail.
Father would
completely and utterly ignore her and our headlong flight would continue, with
squealing tyres, booming exhaust, opposite lock, braking on a sixpence and with
all the excitement of Le Mans until an inner-seat child was sick. Inner because
the outer children, before they spewed-up usually had time to wind down the
window, stick their heads out and, if they didn’t get their heads knocked off
by a passing branch or fence or car, they could happily retch and watch the
bile liquid spatter onto the rear wing and make its way with the full-speed
slipstream round onto the boot. Most journeys ended with both sides of the car
thus redecorated and two retching, wretched children in danger of falling out
of the back windows as Father negotiated a double-chicane on opposite lock with
masterly skill. But Father’s fastidiousness overcame his racing instincts if a
child threatened to spew inside the car. By long experience he had learned that
sick over his luggage was unpleasant and took a lot of cleaning; so a heaving
child without access to a window, could, in extreme circumstances, bring the
express journey to a halt. We would all pile out, shivering from the shock of
continuous vomiting for a breath of clean air with no sick fumes and Mother
would become silent again, gripping the passenger bar and staring palely and
tight lipped into the far purple mists of the Welsh mountains still ahead of
us.
As he rid himself of
the obligation of ferrying his wife and six children, driving fast became
Father’s overriding passion and in nineteen-sixty-two when I was nineteen and
he would be forty-eight or so, Triumph fitted his two-seater TR4A with engine
number one and made him leader of their rally team for the Liège-Rome-Liège
Rally. Later that year he also privately entered the car, red, low and lethally
quick, in the Monte-Carlo Rally that then still ran on public roads, mostly
through ice and snow, from Edinburgh or London and other European capitals,
across France, into the French Alps, through the cols and over the peaks, and
down after three days and nights of frantic driving, without sleep, to the
warmth of Monte Carlo. Of course this event required preparation and practice.
The car was equipped with six additional spotlights plus an adjustable
spotlight on the roof for examining snow covered French signposts. The engine
was tuned to perfection and a new copper straight-through exhaust added, to
give it tone. Racks were welded on to help carry the four spare wire wheels
fitted with spiked ice tyres. This was Father’s twelfth or thirteenth entry as
a private competitor and he spurned the modern, dependent, corporate idea of a
support team in a van carrying all the spares they might need.
Perhaps in late latent
revenge for the locked lavatory, or more charitably, maybe stirred by a distant
feeling for what other father’s seemed to do with their sons, Father invited me
one rare snowy evening to accompany him on a practice run. He had to use every
snow and ice hour that came, to test and hone his driving skills.
We burbled menacingly
out onto the deserted roads of Alderley Edge as snow fell heavily and silently
in the darkness. In the passenger seat I was confronted by technical
instruments screwed roughly onto the fascia and an additional horn button – all
aids to the navigator. The large red horn was to relieve the navigator’s
mounting tensions and terrors as the car hurtled into blind corners on sheet
ice, on public roads, often with a thousand foot drop at the side. Airplane
cockpit type harnesses pinned us into our seats. We turned towards Prestbury
and growled through the deepening snow as all the Manchester millionaires
withdrew into their mansions and turned up the heating – this was no night to
be out and about. The road took us through Macclesfield and up into the narrow
stony lanes of the Pennines. As we passed the last terraced cottages Father
opened the throttle and fed full power into the new snow tyres, that span and
spat grit and stones viciously as the rear of the car snaked and slithered and
the exhaust boomed its challenge to all comers.
I pitied the would-be
navigator who would sit in this madly bucking seat for three days, inside the
protective steel cage welded under the roof, all the way to Monte Carlo, head
buried in maps and shouting warnings of what twists and dangers the road ahead
presented. We shot up the narrow main road towards Whaley Bridge, slipping and
sliding into hairpin bends at sixty miles an hour to skid through them
sideways, wheels on opposite-lock, relying on the power of the engine to the
rear wheels to thrust the car forward in the right direction at the correct
split second, and to avoid cannoning into the murderous black rocks flanking
the road. Exciting stuff on the main road but far too easy for Father. At the
Highwayman Inn, lighted but closed up and deserted, we turned off into narrow
lanes, past the stone inscribed with the mystery of the death of a faithless
husband, and scrambled and scraped at dizzying speed through the lanes towards
the forbidding and mournful Goyt Valley and its vast, deep black reservoir, as
the snow fell ever faster. Now the spotlights came into their own. On a good
straight the TR4A would rocket up to seventy or eighty miles an hour making it
important to be able to see at least a little way ahead. Brakes were of course
completely useless at those speeds; the driver had to rely on rapid gear
down-shifts and screaming deceleration to reduce to speeds where we stood the
slightest chance of chewing the car through the next unsympathetic bend. The eight
lights streamed ahead of us into the snow laden air, forging a fabulous white,
glowing, dreamlike tunnel through the black night; a tunnel that we fell down,
faster and ever faster. Father, hands in his lap, spun the steering wheel from
below at an impossible rate, passing it through his dancing fingers. ‘Never, never, never cross your
hands when you are driving’. He
would advise his absent audience and whoever happened to be in the car at the
time.
Not all of that part
of the Pennines is uninhabited. There are remote hamlets, lonely farms and
gaunt isolated houses with immovable rusted gates set into unwelcoming stone,
blackened by the industrial revolution. The taciturn and hill toughened locals
mostly have the wisdom to lock their doors and stay off the roads in
snowstorms. But sometimes, just sometimes, they have to venture forth. Thus it
was, as we thundered down to Wild Boar Clough, through a snow tunnel on one of
the rare straight stretches, at eighty miles an hour, with eight headlights
searing through the snow tunnel, with the narrow lane reduced to less than a
single track by new snow banked down from the walls, banked over the rocks and
spread blanket like on the verges, that the local district nurse, out on an
errand of mercy, nervously steered her black Morris Minor 1000 through a right
angled bend in the snowy night and came face-to-face with us at the bottom of
our straight run. Our six spotlights and the two headlights were all full on.
As we plummeted towards her, every minute feature of herself and her car’s
interior was blindingly illuminated. She was driving, sensibly, at about five
miles an hour, we were plummeting down at her at eighty miles an hour and
behind her was an unforgiving, craggy rock-face that marked the tight bend that
she had, a moment ago and a lifetime away, so carefully negotiated, little
suspecting that within a split second she would be in the limelight and facing
total annihilation.
I knew that our time
had come and was able to reflect briefly on my short life and its adventurous
end. I could hear Stephen Court, my long headed, fatherless, young-fogey friend
who owned the shoe-shop on Heaton Moor Road and who warned us constantly of the
apocalyptic Yellow Peril that would soon invade the district and who greatly admired
Father’s driving, breathing in his hushed slow baritone, ‘Magnificent’ as they untangled the tortured red
metal and chrome lights from the Triumph embedded in the staid black metal of
the Morris, and tried to reconstruct the deconstructed people. I dispassionately
noted the hairs on the mole on the District Nurse’s completely startled face,
the minor red veins in her popping blue eyes and the wording on her jaunty
little hat. The phrase ‘Rabbit
in the headlights’ came
easily to mind. She in her turn could see nothing. She was blinded by the light
and transfixed by panic. Instinctively, and some might say, intelligently, the
District Nurse stopped her car in the middle of the snowbound lane.
Father, hands
flying from steering wheel to light switches to gear stick, feet tap-dancing
back and forth to effect a double de-clutch, feather the brakes and modulate
the accelerator, muttered “Bloody Fool.” at the hapless nurse, flipped the red
missile, TR4A, engine number one, up the snow bank on our left, on my side of
the track, at a forty-five degree angle, where the ground miraculously held
firm, around the paralysed Morris Minor and its briefly illuminated woman
driver and down again into the roadway with just enough time and space, about
forty yards, to get the hurtling vehicle into a sideways drift at ever reducing
velocity, into the right-angle of the bend, from where we screamed out again in
second gear, full power to the bucking and slithering back wheels, to regain
the speed the bloody fool of a nurse, now plunged back into total darkness and
undoubtedly composing a UFO report, had lost us by freezing-up in the middle of
the track at such a crucial moment. On a racecourse, such as at Oulton Park,
her obstruction could have cost a split-second - and the winner’s laurels.
“If only…” Father
might say,
“…if only people would
learn to drive properly before they took to the Queen’s highways, the world
would be a better, happier and a safer place.”
Some years later, as a
Justice of the Peace on the Bench, to Mother’s eternal embarrassment, Father
enjoyed a moment of infamy. He was interviewed on TV by the fearsome, merciless
intellectual Bernard Levin, and was caricatured in the Daily Express by the famous
cartoonist Giles, for refusing to try motorists who exceeded the new
seventy-miles-an-hour speed limit; on the logical grounds that if everyone
drove at that same low speed, they would lose concentration, drive in convoys
and it would cause Motorway pile-ups, killing God only knows how many district
nurses in the ensuing chaos. And who, apart from Bernard Levin, in the light of
subsequent events, could assert that he was wrong? - a Prophet in his own time
and country. And we, the loyal family even including Mother, after full
consideration, concluded that Bernard Levin had at last met his match.”
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