Back Street Heroes

MY DAD W·AS ASPEED FRE·A-K!

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' , dad, and his older brother Fred, also became keen racing enthusiast­s - initially racing pedal cycles and pedal trikes (which were very popular for racing in the 1920s and '30s), then progressin­g to racing cars, and motorcycle­s, as they got into their mid-teens. My dad, well and truly bitten by the motorcycli­ng bug, in the early 1930s began riding, and racing, an Ariel Square Four 600, before progressin­g to the Ariel Square Four 4 1000, which he loved more than any motorcycle he owned before or after. One of his favourite ways of describing it was: "On tick-over you could actually count the individual cylinders firing and then, with a decent length of steel chain attached, you could open it up and pull a brick shit-house right out of somebody's backyard!" Ioften wondered, knowing the sort of man he was, and considerin­g the very specific nature of this descriptio­n, who exactly it was who woke up one morning to find their outhouse'd been moved to the other end of the street?

In addition to his love of Ariel motorcycle­s, he had a profound love of racing cars in his youth, and his ultimate dream was to own a Bugatti. Eventually, on December 1st 1937, he finally became the very proud owner of a 1927 17.8 HP Type 38 Bugatti Roadster, which was a superb boattailed two-seater open-top car with a 'straight-eight' (eight cylinder) 2-litre engine. As far as he was concerned, even though it was ten years old when he bought it, there was no finer racing car in existence and, until he met my mum in the late 1940s, Ithink it was the love of his life. Coming from a long line of artists, Ettore Bugatti was an artist as well as an automobile builder, so I suppose it was hardly surprising that Bugatti cars were known and loved as much for their beautiful design as they were for their excellent record of racing victories.

My dad raced his Bugatti whenever finances and opportunit­y would allow, but it was only a couple of years until the Second World War broke out and, because of his engineerin­g prowess, he was co-opted into the merchant service, and became a ship's engineer. Though he initially made it back to Liverpool quite often, and would immediatel­y take the Bugatti out for a spin (often with a bit of 'black market' petrol he was able to barter for with his ability to fix engines), as time went by it became necessary to put it into storage. Like most people at the time, he had no comprehens­ion of how long the war'd last but, as the months turned to years, he did his best to put some money aside so that he could pay for the storage when he finally went to pick up his beloved Bugatti once again. When the war in Europe finally ended in 1945, he found himself looking at a bill for £300 and, even after scraping together every penny he could lay his hands on, he was still £85 short!

In those days £85 was almost three months' wages, and he didn't have a hope in hell of raising that sort of money any time soon, particular­ly as the wartime convoys were no longer needed, and a lot of seamen were being laid off.

Eventually the people who owned the storage facility offered to give him £100 in exchange for his debt and the car and, with utmost regret, he had no choice but to accept. If it'd not been for the ridiculous­ly high (£100) fine he'd received for 'smuggling' peanuts and powder puffs the previous August, he would, no doubt, have been reunited with his beloved Bugatti and, once again, experience­d that wonderful

'joie de vivre' engendered by risking life and limb behind a big metal block housing thousands of barely contained explosions every minute. Right up until his untimely death in 1988, he classed the loss of that beautiful Bugatti as one of his life's greatest regrets.

My dad's love of top-quality engineerin­g never waned but, as he got older, with family responsibi­lities and suchlike, his love of high speeds evolved into a perverse joy in driving slowly enough to annoy everybody else on the road.

Even as Isit here writing this, so many years after his death, Ican still clearly picture my dad's wry smile as he drove along, huffing an unidentifi­able merry tune with his famously almost silent whistling technique, at the wheel of an old ragtop Mk2 Land Rover, happy in the knowledge that any number of people in the long queue of vehicles behind were getting steadily more and more perplexed and annoyed with him!

A couple of years ago Ifound the log-book for that wonderful straightei­ght 1927 Type 38 Bugatti amongst a package of old papers my mum had 'put somewhere safe' many years before. There was a ragged old newspaper photo clipped to it of my dad working on the car, that instantly took my mind back to the evocative stories he used to tell me of what an elegant piece of engineerin­g it was in its day. He was a wonderful story-teller, my dad, and Ithought it might be nice for other people to hear a little bit more of his own story, so I hope you have enjoyed this timeless tale of the love and heartache that's so often a factor in the relationsh­ip between man and machine.

I've always said 'motorcycli­ng is in my blood'. Hardly surprising really, is

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