I like to think that whatever talent or skill I may show when there’s a steering wheel in my hand, I owe to Sam. Without Sam I’d have had to learn it the hard way, figuring it out, bit by bit, acquiring the requisite techniques, hoping that, after a while, their deployment would start to seem a little more natural. But, thanks to Sam, I already knew.
Because Sam caught me, and taught me, when I was young. Young enough for my brain to gather data like a squeegee on a recently mopped floor but old enough, just, for my feet to reach the pedals. Sam’s pedals, as it happens. For Sam was a Morris 1000 of indeterminate age, shockingly poor condition and as beloved an automobile as ever turned a wheel. I can’t remember who found Sam where, but I do remember Sam cost 20 quid when 20 quid amounted to rather more than a small round of drinks. I washed cars for months, 50 new pence a pop, until I’d saved enough to make Sam mine. I’m not sure, but I’d have been around 10 years old.
Sam lived with Daisy and Sid, Daisy being a Morris Traveller belonging to my immediately elder brother, Sid an Austin A35 belonging to number one son. Anyone wondering why we needed three cars when one would clearly do has never had a sibling. And we’d tear around the two fields behind the house where we lived in Jersey, land that could perhaps have been given over to growing Jersey new potatoes or grazing Jersey cows, but scarcely more profitably: at least half of what I now know about driving was learned in those fields. And in the air over the hump that joined the two.
