Our pesky Beetle and a honeymoon scare

AGED eight or perhaps nine, sitting upstairs on a double-decker, I was dreaming, as young boys do, of scoring for Manchester United. Then vroom — a flash of green overtook us, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, a Jaguar XK120. Thus began my lifelong love of sports cars. I couldn’t wait to be a big boy, get a job, earn money and buy an XK. Reality kicked in when my big-boy job and pitiful savings stretched no further than a seven-year-old VW Beetle with 63,000 miles on the clock. The nice man at the garage told me that, for an extra fiver, he would replace the speedo with a better one with 27,000 miles on it, but my money was too tight for such fripperies. Decades ago, cars were perhaps rudimentary, but for us they were always bursting with charm and character. For example, Dr Ferdinand Porsche, who had designed the Beetle, in a rare attempt at Teutonic humour, placed the engine at the back and the windscreen washer reservoir in the Beetle’s nose. This stroke of engineering genius guaranteed that, without a hot breeze from the engine, the water — no anti-freeze back then — froze solid at the first slight chill of winter. Creative owners like me used washing-up liquid bottles, to reach out into the freezing air to squirt water onto the windscreen. That the wipers then often froze to the screen was merely another expression of our beloved car’s character. My wife and I spent our honeymoon in July 1968 in Hossegor, south-west France, where after checking into the campsite, another facet of the automotive personality emerged: the heat went straight to the Beetle’s head, fried its battery and the little imp refused to start. Sniggering Frenchmen — OK, they might have been smiling sympathetically — pushed us to our pitch, where we spent a restless night worrying (stress hadn’t been invented then) about the repair bill which, by dawn, we had decided would easily exceed the UK’s balance of payments deficit. The next morning, the rusting money pit that had caused us a sleepless night burst into life at the turn of the key. In a wave of euphoria, we packed the plucky little chap and drove him to the Channel port without once turning off the engine. On and off the ferry we drove and then home to Lancashire in a flat-out 60mph motorway speed frenzy — and do you know, TTB 840, the little bug that ruined our honeymoon, never missed a beat.

Ian Clark, Freuchie, Fife.