THESE I HAVE LOVED

It cost me fourteen pounds to get both of us in. “Daylight robbery,” I said, accusingly, to the museum at large. The building was occupied by very few people, but an awful lot of cars. I glanced only cursorily at the room full of red sports saloons. I don’t much like sports cars. I’ve never owned any. I’ve never been the right shape to fit into one. I was more interested in the hall that contained the mundane family saloons of the fifties and sixties, for I had owned many of these marques and models, though invariably in a terminal state of decay and decline.

There was a Rover P6 2000, one of my more successful buys – it ran for two years and that was a mere fifteen years ago. A 1965 Mk 1 Ford Cortina, the same as the one I bought from a warehouseman at Buck and Hickman, only to find the engine wouldn’t pull – no compression whatsoever in one cylinder. MJ Wallis’s Ford Anglia 105E, which I bought and discovered had holes in the floor so large that you could have pedalled it, Fred Flintstone-style. The Ford Consul Mk II 375 Hi-line I bought and painted pillar-box red but which the MOT man said was so dangerous that he wouldn't drive it onto the hydraulic ramps. The Triumph 2000 that I purchased in Blackpool and which ran out of oil somewhere near Haltwhistle on a journey back to the North-east.

The Ford Popular 103E, 1959, my first ever car in 1967, for which I paid a fiver and which I was driving to work with my dad as passenger (I was a learner) when it stuck for ever in second gear. I actually manged to drive it for some days afterwards, avoiding any manouevre that required reversing, because it only had three gears in the first place, and it used to pull quite happily away in top, when I engaged top by mistake (which I did frequently, when top worked).

The Standard 10, the 8 hp version of which was the most successful buy of my early, halcyon days, lasted four long years from 1968 to 1972 until Bloxham’s coal lorry reversed down the street into it and demolished half the back end.

The Morris Oxford Series VI, which belonged to my dad and was driveable until I jacked it up on the steering control arm and it wasn’t thereafter.

The Vanden Plas 1300 Mk II, which cost me £400 only to find the sub-frame rotted through on the second day. The Riley 1.5, which I bought and sold for £50, a marked success for me, for I rarely broke even on these transactions. Its sister, the Wolseley 1500, which cost me a fiver and from which I made £45 profit, less the cost of a sponge painting stick and 20 tins of life-expired blue-grey cellulose touch-up paint that I bought from a car parts shop and which I used to paint the exterior – one of my better efforts, as it turned out. Better certainly than the shocking pink I painted the Singer Gazelle Mk V. It made only one more trip – to the scrapyard.

The Hillman Imp I bought from Gareth Davies, now the Chief Executive of Imperial Tobacco. I started to paint the white car black, but lost interest, so it ended its life as a motorised chessboard. The Humber Hawk Series III, which looked beautiful bodily but whose piston rings were worn out so it couldn’t pull up any gradient higher than 1 in 15. The Hillman Minx, Series III, whose oil pressure started off at a robust 30 lbs per square inch, a reading which had plummeted to zero by the time I had reached the end of the street.

The Austin A40 Farina that I jacked up with the side jack. The wheels stayed where they were, but the whole side came up with the jack and I suddenly owned a corrugated car. The Morris Minor, found in the garage of the first property I ever bought, in 1972. It wouldn’t go, as it had two holed pistons that dad and I replaced and from then on it ran like a charm. I painted it with Valspar blue grass paint and went on honeymoon in it, all the way to Winterton-on-Sea, Norfolk. I sold it to Dave Armory of GKN for £30 and he said he subsequently blew up the engine at 90 mph on the A1. He always was an inveterate liar, a trait which eventually cost him his job. I could never get her above 55.

The Fiat 600D that Jack Mains sold me for coppers, and which I had delivered to my lock-up on the back of Keith Roberts’s lorry. The brakes wouldn’t work and it never turned a wheel in anger. The Honda N600, whose steering arm collapsed with my mother and father in the car (I fixed it) only for it later to catch fire when something went wrong with the dynastart mechanism.

The Daf 44, that I completely rewired and set on fire whilst welding it in the garage, nearly setting fire to the car and the house. The VW Beetle, whose throttle cable snapped at Beal at 8 p.m. one Sunday night in winter with two small boys in the back. I fixed the cable to its abutment with an electrical connector, but the new shortened cable meant an idling speed of 2,500 rpm. Then the feeble 6-volt battery gave out at Willington Quay, and we had to walk the last mile home at midnight. If I hadn't had that super wheeze to repair it, we might have had to walk the last sixty.

For those of you who grow nostalgic over the so-called ‘golden years’ of motoring, I have a short message – ‘Baloney.’