NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 22, 2005
On cars
Delilah was not the name of a girl, but of a car -- indeed, more than a car, a Land Rover. Debbie Osman was the name of the girl who named her. She (the vehicle) was parked for many months in the drive of a house no longer extant, in Soi Phet, Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok. She (still talking motors here) had an orange-painted body, and a custom-built wooden hutch over her flatbed hindquarters, which Debbie had painted with colourful cartoons in the style of Yellow Submarine. The approximate date of this memory can be deduced from that fact.Departing from near Woodbridge in Suffolk, Delilah (and her three riders) negotiated the English Channel, then struck eastward, ho. After the grand hippie tour of Europe, she found herself in Istanbul; found her way to the other side of the Bosporus; then pointed for India. She sped through eastern Turkey, but criss-crossed the Shah’s Iran, lingering at Isfahan, and Persepolis. Attaining Meshed, through Luristan, she went on to Herat; to Kandahar, Ghazni, and Kabul; then up mountain and down on side adventures to Mazar, and Bamiyan (where the standing Buddhas still filled their towering niches). The courage of her riders thus tested, she ascended the Kabul Gorge and the Khyber Pass. Then descended into Peshawar. There is nothing quite to describe the moment when a man first looks from the height of the Khyber -- and down over all India. The heart that beats in one’s chest is Babar’s. The dust shines, and the small birds sing. Delilah drove to Lahore, Amritsar, Delhi. She visited Goa, and she visited Kathmandu; she visited Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, and Puri. In the absence of a visa through Burma, she was eventually loaded on a tramp steamer at Madras, and floated over the water to Penang. She went up to Bangkok, loitered, and was last seen heading south again -- alas, under new owners -- to Singapore and Sumatra. We return to England, with dear Mike Berry, one of Delilah’s original crew -- now married and with two tiny tangled red-haired girls, but suffering from the itch to travel. He got himself an old laundry van for a hundred quid, performed some oily surgery, and drove his small cohort across the Sahara to Lagos, along mud tracks through the jungles of Zaire, and almost to Nairobi. It had finally to be towed, and then abandoned. Alas, even the most venerable British laundry van is no substitute for a Land Rover. Neither is a Range Rover, for that matter, let alone a Land Cruiser, or any of the other soft, over-wired descendants. Old jeeps are nice, I have nothing against them. Humvees are excessively wide. And among Land Rovers themselves, a line must be drawn about the year 1970, when Series III came in, and the headlamps were moved from the radiator panel to the wings. This is no mere aesthetic consideration. What the laundry van had in common with Delilah (who was an early Series II) was a winch mounting. Also, simplicity of design, and a repair manual written in English. And a bit of luck at key moments. But only the Land Rover could be operated on banana oil, in the absence of local supplies of “petrol”. It could be assembled and disassembled like a kit of Meccano, and was certified free of comforts or vanities. Well, okay, it had springs, but only for the sake of the axles. I have myself never held a driver’s licence, never bought a car except for a woman, and have only once steered one, since the age of ten. It is a real failing in a man, which was brought home to me some years ago when an excruciatingly attractive young lady was examining some books I had just bought, by authors who wrote in Latin. She expressed knowing approval of the books, but on leaving my office, yawned and stretched in a shaft of sun, her palms against the lintel of my office door. “Real men buy cars,” she observed, before disappearing. My excuse -- for which I was left without an audience -- would have been that I prefer walking. But also, that it would be fakery in a man to own a car he couldn’t dismantle and repair beside an Afghan forge. The only reasonable alternative to this, is to have a car that demands a uniformed chauffeur (and in that case, preferably, a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow). Any other sort of driving is “common”. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top