ORCHID Chronicles 9 – Car Crazy

Put simply, she sings – or should I say sang? 

My brother asks me: What is it about you and cars? He basically thinks they are noisy, smelly, dangerous, appallingly wasteful and damaging to people and the environment in equal measure – unless that’s just my kind of car. And of course he’s right. On all counts.

But my answer to his question is: it depends on the car. 

Tim’s first Midget

And he is a hypocrite underneath the sneering contempt. I remember clearly travelling in his 1946 MG TC when you felt every pea under the mattress. The thing rattled and shook, water fountained up through the wooden floorboards when you hit anything more than a puddle. And he drove it flat out (at 77 mph) on its narrow wheels and non-existent brakes with a huge grin on his face.

I blame it – my obsession with cars – mostly on my parents who, on hearing my first word: ‘Car!’, accompanied by a pointing finger, shortly after I was born, clapped and cheered in their theatrical way, thereby encouraging me to think cars were a Good Thing, rather than just any old first word out of the mouth of the babe.

By the age of 6 or 7, I could sadly not only identify every car on the road by make and model, but by the sound of its engine. Well, not every car but quite a few. To this day, it irritates me to see a film featuring, say, an E-type Jaguar of the ‘60s (pre-lumpen V12), with a soundtrack of a V8 for its engine noise, or worse, a 4-cylinder anything-will-do ‘car sound’ as the get-away driver roars off, Police Wolseley 6/99 in bell-ringingly hot and hopeless pursuit.

A ride in a 1928 4½ litre Bentley – ‘the world’s fastest lorry’, as Ettore Bugatti called it – proved a seminal contribution, aged under 10, to the spell. 

The world’s fastest lorry…

With its drain-pipe exhaust compressed into a vertical fan at the back, the huge, louvred, leather-strapped bonnet that I couldn’t see over the scuttle, and a sense of unending, primordial, Big Bang thrust, we pounded our way up the road and back in the hands of an equally vast, tweed-suited gentleman who must have had moustachioes like the wings of a buzzard, surely.

I was lost, of course. A hopeless case. No more than T.H. White though. Author of the famous Sword in the Stone, part of the trilogy of The Once and Future King, he also wrote the even more marvellous Mistress Masham’s Repose, which has to be one of the best children’s books ever – highly recommended to adults too. 

But it’s his England Have My Bones that holds my heart, that my wonderful book-finder at Hay – Josh Green of Green Ink Books – has dug up for me, it having been nicked amongst a boxful of my most precious volumes in the boot of my Ford Cortina Lotus Mk II, outside my parents-in-law’s house in Blackheath back in ‘78.

Apart from his 1930s country pursuits of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ – which he makes funny and fascinating, even if it’s not my bag, so to speak – and early days flyin’ for good measure, White drives a 3 litre Red Label Bentley of ‘W.O.’ origin as fast as it will go and lives in a room above a pub. What’s not to like?

‘W.O’, by the way, stands for Walter Owen Bentley who designed the very Racing Green lorries that took on Ettore’s beautiful blue gazelles – and beat them! 

He was an extraordinary car and aero engine designer who founded Bentley Motors in 1919, just after the First World War. Having created ‘a good car, a fast, the best in class’, the Bentley Boys, of whom I have SCH ‘Sammy’ Davis’s personal memorial, swept the board at Le Mans four years in a row in the latter half of the 1920’s. 

Sadly, ‘Babe’ Barnato’s ‘Blower Bentley’, that achieved the fastest lap round Brooklands at 137.96 mph in 1931 but was too unreliable for Le Mans, as W.O knew it would be, signalled the swansong of the true ‘Vintage’ Bentley. Despite W.O. designing the wonderful V12 Lagonda engine, thereafter Bentley was subsumed by Rolls-Royce, not to achieve similar heights until Volkswagen took it over and won Le Mans with the EXP Speed 8, which was an Audi really, in 2003.

But reading Carter Bruce’s Speed Six as a 12 year-old fired me anew with the romance of Bentleys (if you’ve never heard of it, nor the Bentley Speed Six, just get hold of Josh Green and ask him to find a no doubt rare copy for you) and not just cars, or racing cars even, but old racing cars became my nirvana.

Reinforced by early trips to Oulton Park, Thruxton, Prescott, Castle Combe and others, with various friends, Pete and Johnny in particular, my father drove us to these circuits with us all crammed into the front bench seat, not a safety-belt to be seen, of course. 

There, often – best – in the rain, we watched super-heroes battling to control their wayward Chain-gang Frazer-Nashes and the like, at right-angles to their forward direction, sawing joyfully at the wheel. Or, the best among them, with hands like butterflies, maintaining finger-tip opposite-lock, controlled drifts, all with the iconic smell of Castrol R inhaled deeply into those tender, young lungs.

From when I was just tall enough to see over the top of the dashboard, my father would let me sit on his lap and steer and change column-mounted gear in the Farina, two-tone Austin A55, his company car in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s. Fortunately roads were less crowded in those days. While my mother would let me drive her early, proper Issigonis Morris Mini with the push-button starter on the floor, pull-cord door handles and pull-down windows, through the wild, rough tracks of Savernake Forest, from the age of 14 or 15, urging me on till the needle flickered not far off 50, or even 60 mph.

Yes, I blame my parents. 

So when, aged 17, three days after one lesson round the unnerving roundabouts of Salisbury, I passed my test, I was, you could say, dangerously confident of my prowess at the wheel.

With Jochen Rindt, Ronnie Peterson, Gerry Marshall, and a host of the more flamboyant of drivers as my mentors, I took to the roads of Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset in quest of the most foolhardy girls I could persuade to join me in my father’s Austin Maxi. 

The Maxi was a terrible car in so many ways – but it did have reclining seats.

On one infamous occasion, one of those young ladies, on the way to or from the pub, spotting a hump-backed bridge ahead of us on the fortunately straight, if narrow road ahead, said: You can put your foot down on this one.

And like a fool, I did. Thank you, Char.

Somewhere there must be a Brockbank cartoon of a car flying through the air off a hump-backed bridge, followed by an after-they-landed picture of a bump in the bonnet, and two in the roof, where engine and head tried to force their way through.

We were fine, I’m glad to say, but the Maxi was not. Nevertheless, I managed to drive it home, smashed sump and all, stuck in third gear and, at an early hour of the morning, called out gaily to my parents: ‘I’m home!’

Having worked through his wrath, my father decided that I needed my own transport, rather than imperil his. He couldn’t afford to keep mysteriously having to replace the tyres apart from anything else. So, with a combination of a small but timely inheritance from my grandmother and a top up from my over-forgiving Dad, I bought my first car.

It was egg-yolk yellow, small, perfectly formed, but not what you would call ‘safe’, as in Morris Minor, for example. Nor was it a Bentley.

The 1961 Mk.1 MG Midget, registration 392 ARX, was lovely – to look at. It had sliding, clip-on side-screens, an impossible canvas roof, no door handles, no brakes worth speaking of going downhill, and a tendency to overheat going up. 

Sadly, it too came to grief when I swear a rear tyre gave way on a tight bend on the way to Stourhead. The wheel-rim dug into the road and flipped us – me, a friend (sorry, Pete) and a dog – crunching every corner of the car and ripping off the windscreen, but not our heads, in the process. We were unharmed and very lucky but the car was a write-off.

7433DF was a serious improvement. Another Mk.1 Midget, yes, and a composite of some of the salvageable bits of the old one replacing the rotten bits of the ‘new’ one. But this one not only had the bigger 1098cc engine but disc brakes at the front as well. And no bumpers, which instantly gave it a more rakish, sporty look worth at least an additional 5 mph. Worthy of the name of ‘Buzz’.

Despite a chequered career that included being booted up the back-end by my friend Dave on a roundabout in Cambridge when he thought I was going straight on and not turning right, Buzz taught me everything I know about how to keep a car on the road. 

I discovered by trial and error that Michelin tyres on the back and Pirellis on the front were a recipe for disaster. The Michelins would hold on and then suddenly let go with virtually no warning. The Pirellis on the other would let go much earlier but nice and progressively with plenty of time to do something about it. So, genius that I was, I swapped them around. Hence the rather alarming wheel-twirling on my part for the untutored passenger but delight for my regulars who expected nothing less.

My fastest time from Zeals on the A303 to Cambridge, door to door, was 3 hours and 20 minutes, an average of over 60 mph on less than modern roads. T.H. White would have been proud of me, if not HM Constabulary. 

But rust waiteth for no man and the time came to pass Buzz on, for no money, not even for cucumber sandwiches as Oscar Wilde might have said, but on trust – accompanied by a detailed transcript of how to take Buzz round right-handers purely on the throttle.

The Dutton I will pass, save only to say I’m glad I didn’t kill my sponsor M. Hesp in the process – just. But it was a Close Run Thing.

Then came the loan of my Mum’s Renault 4 – what a beautiful little beast – that would lean, as Peter Cook or the Egyptian poet, Cavafy, might say ‘at a slight angle to the universe’ and never let go, despite Martin Hesp’s screams. Followed by the Cortina Lotus which had the gift of Colin Chapman’s gorgeous twin-cam, Dellorto’d 1557 cc that used a lot of oil. But, as he said, if it doesn’t use oil, it’s not working, or words to that effect.

Nevertheless, it span its wheels in first, second and third in the wet, on cam, and, although heavier than its forebear, could drift lovely round that bend by the perry orchard going up Taunton way.

Anyway, despite friends with swanky cars, earning an awful lot more than your very local reporter on the West Somerset Free Press, it wasn’t until I was back, unemployed, married, a father of two and just graduated from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, that I fell head over heels for a Real Car.

On 12 March 1981, I ‘fell in love with an Austin Devon’, the diary note says. A persistent wooing and £600 later and it was: Hello to Violet.

And she sang. And danced.

Slow and stately she might have been, our venerable 1951 Austin A40 Devon G2 in Portland Grey that I fell in love with that day in early March 1981 but, boy, could she dance.

The Bannermans picnicking beside a gleaming Violet

We called her Violet, after a distant relation I talked about in my previous story. Partly because of when we found her. Partly because her Portland Grey had a violet tinge to it, deep within her glossy grey, soft, curvy, Longbridge-fashioned, just post-war body.

But it was the gears what did it. No synchromesh on first, but 2nd and 3rd, pure Verdi, as she sang along in her unhurried way. When you have weight, not much power, drum brakes and somewhat vague steering though the vast old Bakelite steering wheel, the art is all in anticipation. Then it’s Fred and Ginger all the way.

So – cars? Orchids? Orchids – cars? Bit of a conflict there, it might seem.

But – no!

It’s a question of pace and always keeping your eye off the road.

If you’re travelling up, as opposed to down, the A303, there is a lay-by. I won’t say exactly where because it’s a secret.

But – 72 paces down from this lay-by, there is something special. Something you wouldn’t know unless, by chance, you needed a pee, had to change a nappy, blew your head-gasket – oh, you know, anything. 

Going a little way up the bank towards the end of May you may still be lucky enough to see something more than special. It’s unique! Or very rare.

The Flea Orchid is a hybrid. Which means that nature has confusingly decided to mix one thing with another to create – something different.

There aren’t many examples of a cross between a Bee and a Fly Orchid but this Ophrys apifera x insectifera is one of them. It’s much larger than either and sings happily there on the bank while the transcontinental trucks go gallivanting past, ruffling its feathers without turning a hair – or vice versa. 

I have to admit that we were given a tip-off about this one, from a devotee of Orchis Militaris, the very rare and beautiful Military Orchid, we were visiting in its well-known site in Homefield Wood, near Marlow in Buckinghamshire. He casually let slip about the Flea as we were comparing notes on other orchid sites we knew. So next late May trip back from visiting elderly parents in Dorset and Devon, we drove more and more slowly the closer we got.

An even more exciting encounter, all the more so for being entirely unexpected, came about in France when driving up the main road to Vimoutier in Normandy. A flash of vermillion on the uphill side of the road made me slam on the brakes of the 1963 Citroen ID 19 – or 1973 Citroen Ami Super, I forget which now. 

We leapt out of the car, having reversed back, and went to have a look.

There, inches from the wheels of the belching camions, was something that we knew immediately was special. More than special.

Our youngest son, Sam, aged 4 or 5, was, unsurprisingly, less than concerned about the intricacies of orchid flowering patterns. We, on the other hand, were looking and marvelling at something that looked like a Monkey Orchid, Orchis Simia, exciting enough under any circumstances, but – it was flowering from the top down, rather than the bottom up.

On a whim, Sam decided he would jump over it. The only one there. Perhaps anywhere. In the world – well, we’d never seen one before, that’s for sure.

So Sam jumped. And missed. Or rather hit, achieving what the camions had miraculously failed to do, day after day.

When I took it to Kew, in flattened, pressed as best I could, form, Phil Cribb, the orchid specialist at Kew at the time, pronounced it ‘most probably’ Orchis angusticruris, a hybrid or cross between the Lady, Orchis purpurea and the Monkey, with a possibility of Military, O. militaris, in there somewhere as well. Either way, pretty damn special. 

Sam’s orchid, pressed and saved for posterity

I was a bit cross with Sam, not helped when he dropped the largest double-yolk hen’s egg we’d ever had at home in Tordouet later that day. I think he’s forgiven me. I’ve certainly forgiven him. And he’s got the pressed orchid to show for it.

After all, without him it would be less of a story. And without the perennial excitement of seeing something out of the corner of your eye when driving along in your car – but not too fast.

Walking is best, always, of course. Particularly when you don’t know what you might find up on that hill that looks promising – South-facing, chalky, limestoney, un-mucked around, etc. But cars have their place too, in this busy, faster-paced world we inhabit, and roadsides offer up all sorts of unexpected treasures.

Even better when that car sings and dances as Violet once did. Our 1951 Austin A40 Devon that took us to The Burren in 1981, was resurrected from a field in Hampshire in 1992, came to France, came back to England in ’93, languished in our garage in Watlington for 15 years or so, and now sits in Sam’s drive, waiting for yet another resurrection, should he ever get round to it.

Perhaps, on her 70th birthday, who knows? In the meantime, I’m happy with my own hybrid. A cross between yet another MG Midget and a souped-up Ford crossflow heart and a 5-speed box, it goes like stink now I’ve fixed the carburation. But hopefully I’m not as young and foolish as I once was. Not young, that’s for sure. And quite a lot less foolish, I hope. But it makes a lovely, Weber-throated noise, whatever my big, sensible, hypocritical brother might say.

Violet’s interior