The Founder's Tale by Pip Hills

Author:Pip Hills
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

CHAPTER 15

The Lagonda and the Fall of Communism – Part 1

Since my motor car features regularly in this story, perhaps I ought to tell you about it. I bought it in 1974, when it was already thirty-seven years old, and I used it every day for the following twenty-five years, barring a few spells when it was off the road for repairs. I could never have been classed as an old-car enthusiast, for I didn’t much care about old motors other than the one I happened to be driving. That this was a Lagonda 4.5 litre pillarless saloon was a matter of mere chance. I bought it for £500, drove it for about half a million miles and sold it for about twenty times what I paid for it, so it has to be classed as one of my better transactions.

I grew up in a society in which any reasonably well-informed boy could expect to understand how things worked and might, as I did, expect that when they stopped working, he could take them apart, find out what was amiss and fix them. This, I must admit, initially owed more to juvenile self-confidence than it did to an understanding of mechanisms, as Mrs Campbell’s clock was witness. (Aged sixteen, I had volunteered to fix an heirloom grandfather clock belonging to the mother of one of my school friends. Having dropped the pendulum through the floor of the case, I retired, defeated and deeply embarrassed.) I think my arrogance was the product of a school curriculum which prized academic over practical subjects: irregular Latin verbs were important, the structure of our bit of the universe was not.

The fix-it mentality was applicable to most motor cars of that era and by the time I came to buy the Lagonda I had had several, none of which cost more than five pounds. All of them ran, though – some of them for years before they went to their next owner, the scrapper. In between, I kept them going by a variety of devices and in the process learned a bit about how they worked. I came to understand that the guys who made them were just as clever as the folk who knew about irregular verbs, if in a different way. For some years I was aided in my tinkering by a friend called Frank Levitt who, almost alone among my acquaintances at the time, was interested in things mechanical and appreciated their ingenuity. A Jew and a former delinquent from the slums of the Bronx, Frank had been saved from a life of crime by some Jesuits who, perceiving his formidable intelligence, had thought to save him for Jesus. Under their care he matured to be a polemical atheist, which no doubt disappointed the fathers. He married a girl from Vassar, which created an interesting set of social problems in their homeland, but none in Edinburgh where Frank was studying philosophy. His main interest was philosophical logic, a discipline (if that’s the right word) in which he would quickly lose me.

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