Not being present for the start of that Marathon session I never knew what the initial asking price had been. By seven thirty that evening my father had been haggling with the salesman from The Brown Bobby Garage over the price of the green, second-hand Austin A50 half ton van which had been standing on our farm yard for over four hours. Why he came and why he persevered so long was a mystery to me at the time, he was clearly getting exasperated and I could not understand why he did not simply leave.
He was a tall man with a narrow, rectangular face, a shiny suit and a shabby
Mac. He joined us for our evening meal, after which the bargaining continued.
I remember feeling quite uncomfortable about it all before things were finally settled.
She was ours for £200 and we took it as it stood. There were only 14,000 miles on the clock, but it had belonged to Dougie Kinrade who kept pigs out along the Old Castletown Road. He had carried swill bins in her, and she smelt like it.
Still it was a lot of van for that money.
The restoration was carried out by my sister and it did take some scrubbing out.
There was a big bench seat which had to be removed, and tangled underneath was a dead mouse. The mouse must have had its head between the coils of a spring when somebody jumped into the drivers’ seat.
However when she had finished there was a rather smart looking motor sitting on our yard and that van served us well for many years.
At this point while writing memories flood back concerning that van. It is not really surprising, that vehicle was to play a significant role in my existence for seven or eight years, during my late teens and early twenties. The gear stick on the steering column and the long bench seat offering less impedimenta if you found yourself lucky enough to be doing a bit of courting.
However at this time I will restrict myself to the two incidents which I set out to relate.
We’d had the van four or five years, and I was delivering milk to the dairies at Spring Gardens in Douglas. I was loading up the empty cans when I noticed a man gazing thoughtfully at Old 4429. I had never spoken to him, only just barely knew who he was, Dougie Kinrade.
“An old friend of yours?” I enquired.
“Yes” he said “A good van that. You know I went in to buy her back a week after I sold her, but she’d gone.”
He hesitated a moment “Did you ones ever have any bother with her?”
“No”
“Did she ever break any rotor arms for you?”
“No”
Then the story came out, that van had a history of breaking rotor arms.
“We didn’t dare go off the yard without one or two in the glove box to get us home. In the end I got fed up and traded her, but I was sorry after.”
On my way home I remembered, I had told the man a lie, I never saw him again to speak to or I would have owned up.
One day a few weeks after she arrived she was sitting on the yard and would not start. Harry Stowell came along with a twelve volt light bulb on a piece of insulated wire and traced the problem to the distributor. Then it was a case of trial and error, so I robbed the rotor arm of an older van and that cured it.
That second-hand rotor arm is still in her, although she hasn’t moved in nearly fifty years, and we put a new rotor arm in the older van.
That van had done sterling work for us, nevertheless I knew then why the salesman had been so keen to get rid of her.
Those B.M.C. vehicles had a good engine and gearbox but the body work was dire. The door catch was a star wheel on a ratchet which latched over a small post, and sometimes the pawl did not hold. In her later years you could be driving along and the door would swing gently open of its own accord. My father never considered getting it fixed, he had another van by then and so never drove Old 4429.
When I felt the first gust of wind my right hand would automatically reach out and snag the chrome handle just below the window and slam the door shut.
A conditioned reflex!
Then one day things went seriously awry. Four hundred yards below our farm the Ballagawne Road bends and dips away to the left, and I was right on that bend when the door swung open. My hand reacted as usual but with the throw of the corner the door swung too quickly. I was just too slow and the same throw tended to take me out of the vehicle. As I caught the door frame by the windscreen to stop myself falling out, the door touched the hedge and slammed savagely shut. The window smashed clean out of the door and my face was lacerated by a blizzard of glass.
The pain was indescribable, I thought I had lost all my fingers and every bone in my arm was broken.
The van rallied on for 200 yards before I could summon the strength or the will to bring it under control. My hand was still intact and seemed to be working, and I found seclusion to undress sufficiently to extract the shards of glass from my under wear.
After delivering the milk I went to the hospital where they picked the glass out of my face and hair, cleaned the gashes in my knuckles and booked me in for an X ray. Then a senior doctor walked in and cancelled the X ray, he said the hand was not broken and it was a waste of a valuable resource.
The younger doctor still could not believe the fingers were all still there let alone intact.
After all these years I just found time the other day to rescue that door with the imprint of my knuckles in it. It is a bit rusty now but the dents are still there.
So are the scars on my knuckles!
One last, tiny memory about that van was stirred the other day when I met an electric tram at Ballagawne Crossing. At that point the main Douglas to Laxey road runs side by side with the tram lines. I have of course faced this situation all my driving life. Because of the bushes in Villa Como garden, until they installed a mirror you had to watch for the trolley on the wire. One day I did not see it and pulled out on to the lines. The next thing I knew the front of an oncoming tram was right outside my drivers side window. I floored the pedal and that van leaped like a stag and stopped with its wheels on the halt sign. It is one of those moments and sounds you never forget. I sat at that halt sign listening as that tram slid past the back of the van for over three quarters of its length with locked wheels squealing on the steel track.
If the engine had stalled this story may well have ended right there.
The driver, Mr. John Postlethwaite, came bustling round to see if I was alright.
I said “No problem. You never touched me.”
David Kelly
David Kelly | Poetry & Short Stories 