Braidwood’s a great place to observe Australia’s love affair with the motor vehicle. It’s perfectly natural that a country where distances are large, cities and towns are far apart, and both business and leisure require people and goods to be carted about constantly, should invest a lot of time and money in its cars.
Like most of us, I can’t help but retain a soft spot for the car I learned to drive in. It was a 1961 Ford Anglia 105E – the Harry Potter car, but a faded slime-green colour, and to my knowledge incapable of flight. Its distinctive design features a unique backwardly-sloping rear window (or rearwardly-sloping back window), seemingly designed to make the car look as if it’s in motion even when standing still. At the back it sports a modest set of fins housing the rear lights, as well as heavy chromed bumpers fore and aft and a front grille fixed in a manic chromium grin.
Our model had experienced a few lives before I got my hands on it – my mother had seized the engine, occasioning a rebore; it had been resprayed with a darker green stripe down the side, reupholstered in green vinyl, and recarpeted with tasteful moss-green offcuts from my parents’ bedroom. Its ignition was so worn it could be started with any key – or any other flat, thin implement. Although neither sporty nor sexy, it was bulletproof and reliable: the perfect small-town runabout.
My friend William, who had access to his father’s tools, would come over on a Friday afternoon and we’d spend hours with our heads under the bonnet, cleaning the plugs and resetting their gaps with a feeler gauge; we’d adjust the tappets, fettle the timing, and fiddle with the carb to optimise the mixture. Then we’d pick up a couple of friends and go to the drive-in or someone’s party, revelling in the g-forces from 997cc of pure power, capable of catapulting us from 0-60 mph (97 km/h) in a heart-stopping 26.9 seconds.
One day, in my final year at school, my parents went away for a week or two and, judging me to be mature and responsible enough, left me at home to attend classes and look after things. I’d found an old car radio somewhere and William and I spent an afternoon bolting it under the dash and connecting a bunch of speakers we’d accumulated. A man’s gotta have cool vibes in his ride, right?
During this time, one of Bulawayo’s premiere social events came up – the inter-schools’ public speaking contest, held at the City Hall on a school night. William came over on his 80cc Yamaha and we set out in the Anglia, resplendent in our ‘number one’ school uniforms (khaki shorts, ties, purple striped blazers). I’m not sure why we made this arrangement, other than that we thought it was cooler than turning up on tiny motorcycles.
About five minutes into our night-time expedition, with the strains of Depeche Mode or Spandau Ballet pumping from the speakers, we were bowling up a very long, sparsely-lit road called Cecil Avenue, when William said, “do you smell smoke?” It’s the kind of question that never bodes well. I’m pretty sure that’s how the whole sequence of events kicks off in The Towering Inferno; it’s pretty likely that someone said that in 1666 shortly before flames erupted from Pudding Lane and consumed 436 acres of London in what became known as The Great Fire thereof.
At that moment, though, there wasn’t much time to contemplate ‘70s disaster movies or historic conflagrations, because just as the question departed William’s lips, a billow of choking smoke ballooned from the air vents below the windscreen, instantly obscuring the view and causing us to cough uncontrollably from the acrid cloud.
Picture if you will the Anglia, hastily pulled over to the verge of an unlit street, with two pimply, bespectacled nerds in purple-striped blazers spilling out, coughing and weeping from the smoke wafting after them, panicked and expecting the little green car to explode spectacularly, Hollywood-style, I don’t think we actually threw ourselves prone in the ditch, but it was a close-run thing.
The thought that followed swiftly thereafter was that we should probably try to rectify the problems our hi fi installation had caused, so we ventured back into the car. It was soon clear that the wires under the dash were smouldering vigorously, so we grabbed fistfuls and wrenched them out. There seemed to be a lot of them and we didn’t stop until there was nothing hot left in there at all.
A quick examination revealed that the taillights and brake lights were no longer functional, but the headlights were fine, so we fired up the engine and carried on to the event, paranoid we’d be pulled over for our inadequate lighting. And home again afterwards, equally paranoid.
Next day, we met to fix the damaged wiring, which we managed on a trial-and-error basis using lamp flex and insulation tape. Eventually we got the rear lights working again, cleaned out the charred remains of the radio, and hid our jury-rigged wiring under the carpet. No sign remained of our audiophile enhancements, and no word of the fire ever reached our parents’ ears.
Many years later, my father brought the car home from a service and said, “the mechanic found a lot of burnt wiring under the carpets” – with a kind of questioning look. I feigned surprise, shrugged and changed the subject.
The Anglia met a sad end some time later, but we can go into that another time. For its whole life, despite its many adventures, it only belonged to one family. Thirty years of “only one owner”: two generations of learner drivers, nights at the drive-in and intrepid road trips. It was such a hardy little beast: I’m surprised there aren’t more on the roads to this day – it’s the perfect vehicle for an Aussie automotive love affair.