In My Humble Opinion
Mike has a racy encounter.
Urning a living
I have been lucky enough to circumnavigate the automotive globe a few times since 1988. I started off as 16-year-old spanner monkey, before moving on to a stint in retail parts management on the High Street. After a few positions selling everything from Minis to commercial vehicles, it’s fair to say I have encountered a strange selection of individuals over the last 30 years, but none quite as unusual as a lady whose name will stay forever etched in my mind: Mrs Hillier. What began as an uneventful Saturday in a dealership panned out into one of the oddest 48 hours of my working life.
Once upon a time, people use to visit a car dealership to browse and buy a vehicle. Only when the local football team were playing at home would there be a dip in showroom traffic. Today, thanks to the internet and a dying High Street, retail showrooms are much, much quieter places.
Back then, your typical weekend would fly by with people browsing, test-driving, signing deals and so on. Anyway, on one such weekend, Mrs Hillier dropped in to have a look at new cars. Telling me she had limited time to go through the whole process, we exchanged contact details and I told her I would call her in a couple of days to make some time to deal with her enquiry at her leisure – the nice chap that I am.
Now Mrs Hillier was a formidable woman. Picture a lady of similar bearing and breeding to Honor Blackman and you’re pretty much halfway there. Despite being in her late 70s, her eyes twinkled and her body talk potentially would break many a younger man into a cold sweat. From what she told me in the showroom, she had been widowed for a number of years and had spent her married life driving fast cars and holidaying in faraway places. No doubt in her younger years she would have been quite a catch.
One early evening a few days later, I called her as promised to see if she wanted to take her interest in a new car any further. She was in the market for an MG TF – she was keen to point out that whatever she bought had to have enough room to fit herself and her mother – but her social calendar was busy and she was unable to come in to the dealership. However, during the course of the conversation, she said she would be at home the following Sunday. I said: “Why don’t I run an MG over to you? That way you can try it out at your own pace and perhaps see if your mother would like it too.” Arrangements were made for me to drive to her home in a very pretty village a few miles west of town.
Fast-forward a few days and I prised the keys to a demonstrator vehicle off a colleague and, within half-an-hour, arrived at the picture-postcard-pretty country cottage of Mrs Hillier out in the middle of nowhere. We chatted for a while about this and that, enjoyed a pot of tea and a cigarette in her garden and, after a short time, I steered the topic back round to the car. We went for a brief test-drive, whereupon she drove the damn wheels off the thing. Oh, she could drive all right!
One small thing was nagging me, though. She’d mentioned living with her mother, but when walking through the house, I only noticed coats, shoes, etc, for one person. It had also crossed my mind that Mrs Hillier was well into her twilight years, so I couldn’t help but think: “How old is her mum?”
By now feeling slightly apprehensive, I suggested maybe her mother try the car for size. Mrs Hillier agreed and asked me to bear with her as she trotted off towards the cottage. Returning a moment later. she was carrying a small china trinket box – the sort of thing you’d find in chintzy bric-a-brac shop.
In an instant, it all made perfect sense. Some folk like to travel with a medal of St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, dangling from the rearview mirror. Mrs Hillier preferred to travel with her late mother’s ashes. “I always feel she’s with me wherever I go,” she confided.
For the record, Mrs Hillier went on to buy the MG and also referred me to her just-as-glamorous younger cousin. But that’s another story.
‘Picture a lady of similar bearing and breeding to Honor Blackman and you’re pretty much halfway there’