SPREADING THE JOY
The sound of a Morris Minor is unmistakable. Bouncing off houses, it is a fanfare. We are accelerating up a narrow street in the historic quarter of Dorset’s county town, and an adventure is beginning. My mate and neighbour Frank Warren is at the wheel. By calling he is a talented musician who runs an agency which brings music acts from all over the world to gigs, festivals and events in Britain, but today he is our captain, pilot of the good ship Lily – the pristine 1961 Minor convertible he has owned for a good 20 years now. His passengers on this voyage are myself and a visiting friend, fellow contributor to this very publication Andrew Everett. The sun is out and the hood is down. Dorset awaits us.
Although a Morris Minor is a pretty userfriendly kind of classic, it is still a vastly more effortful thing to drive than a modern car. Frank keeps Lily in apple-pie order. Thanks to the knowledgeable attentions of a local mechanic and a conversion to electronic ignition, she fires up with a judicious touch of choke and runs perfectly, but there is no power steering, no synchromesh on first gear and there are no reversing sensors. The indicators are actual lamps rather than semaphore levers, but the stalk doesn’t selfcancel. Braking requires anticipation rather than just reaction. Lily demands that Frank knows her ways and works with them.
But this is partly why he loves her. There’s a relationship going on here. We’re all involved in the actual business of making progress in this vehicle. There’s no in-car entertainment and no sat-nav. Frank’s phone isn’t connected. In fact it’s locked in the boot, on silent mode. The sat-nav is myself, bellowing directions from the back seat.
A couple of turns later we are sailing down Dorchester’s High Street, part of the traffic flow. None of the pedestrians pay the cars much attention, except for the Old English White Minor. People smile, wave and chat with us as we pass. We smile, wave and chat back. It’s rather like being on a carnival float.
Leaving town, we proceed sedately to a local forest, where we dismount and enjoy a health-giving stroll while Lily takes a breather in the car park. It’s a beautiful place, a varied woodland inhabited by wild ponies. At one point, the birthplace of celebrated author Thomas Hardy is visible through the trees. Exercise begets thirst so, climbing aboard the Morris, we embark on a voyage through the lanes to the ravishing village of West Stafford. Television fans should note that the lord of the manor here is Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, but more importantly it is home to an excellent pub. We park the car out the front and enjoy a drink in the sun. People admire the Minor as they enter and leave the pub. A couple turn up in a Porsche Panamera. The driver spends a while gazing rather mistily at the little white convertible, which packs less than a tenth of the engine power of his ride but has an ability to attract attention and goodwill that the Porsche behemoth will never possess.
It is time to return home, a gentle ride through more lanes, back into town. On the way Andrew Everett completes his own very personal mission – to locate the site of the Dorchester Morris dealership where, some time in the early 1970s, his father purchased a Mini 1275GT. It’s a coffee shop now, with a yoga centre above, but it still boasts large, plate-glass windows. We imagine a selection of British Leyland stock gleaming behind them, far more exciting to our inner small boys than flat white and cake.
Our day out in Lily illustrates perfectly why old vehicles matter. These days we are encouraged to view cars mechanistically, as no more than transport. It is this narrative that will ultimately sell us the notion of driverless cars, where we cede the experience of driving to an autonomous pod in exchange for the opportunity to spend even more time on our screens online. We are a long way down this road already, and it is unlikely that I would feel moved to write about a jaunt out in a contemporary automobile unless it were one of the few sports cars that are still the stuff of dreams. Six decades ago a Morris Minor was perfectly ordinary transport, but then and now a simple, short voyage in one could be an epic experience.
Old cars connect with people. On just a simple pass down the High Street of a country town, this small British car gifted an allimportant bit of joy to the people it passed. Perhaps they were responding to its cuteness, the rare, distinctive bark of its overrun. Perhaps it evoked fond memories of nowdead relatives and friends. In the back seat I was myself thinking of my long-gone, adored great aunt Olive, who once drove from South Yorkshire to Newcastle in a Minor Traveller before she realised that she wasn’t heading for London as intended.
Perhaps old cars fuel simple nostalgia for simpler, more gentle times than those we live in. Thanks in part to the growing amount of news in our lives, our world does seem to become more brutally complex and threatening by the day. Anything that connects us to something calmer, nicer and more positive is worth grasping. A couple of days ago my parents asked me how I thought I would be able to run my own older cars in the future, when the rise of electric vehicles has rendered petrol pumps obsolete. I replied without hesitation: we, those who love and value old vehicles, who realise their deepseated importance and worth, will band together to make sure fuel is made. The jaunts must happen, because they bring love to the world. For Lily, extinction is unthinkable.