When you’re a student, any car is great, even if it’s a rubbish old Mini
Porter reminds us how amazing access to any car was when we were young, even if was a bag of bolts and belonged to a mate
When you’re a teenager you can never underestimate the power of a mate with a car. The year we turned 17, only my mate Bricey had his own car, a ropey Capri 1.6 bought by his dad off a man in a pub and which he promptly stuffed into the side of a lorry. Since his dad made it clear he wasn’t going to ask the man in the pub for another one, that was the end of that and the best anyone could do from then on was hope to borrow their parents’ car.
When I went to university, no one had their own car either. Actually, that’s not entirely true. A bloke in the flat below once acquired a ropey old Ford Orion that never seemed sure how many cylinders to run on, only that it should never be four. And there was a friend-of-a-friend who inherited his grandma’s old FSO 125P with a vinyl back seat so slippery that if you got in while it was parked on any sort of camber you would immediately travel the width of the car and fall out onto the pavement at the feet of the person getting in on the other side. Neither lasted long.
Then I met Mike. By dint of being in his late 20s and having had a proper job before returning to higher education, Mike had access to the money to buy a car. And by dint of being from Llanelli and having relatives who worked at the old British Leyland factory there, Mike had access to a Rover Group discount, which he had used to buy a Mini. This was the mid-’90s so it was what we now call the classic sort, though back then people used them as actual cars rather than squirreling them away lest brief exposure to a bank of fog caused the entire floorpan to rot out.
So Mike became our only mate with a car. A reasonably new one at that. Yet, despite its youth, the Mini was comically troublesome. Much of this is related to an incident early in the car’s life when, during an attempted theft, someone had silenced the alarm by slashing the wiring under the dash.
The subsequent repair was visibly rubbish and the car agreed by constantly developing some sort of electrical sickness. Most commonly, it would simply drain its own battery, rendering it immobile; yet, ironically, when it did agree to start, it would then refuse to stop again. So you could turn off the ignition and remove the key while the 1275cc motor chugged away to itself until you slotted first gear and abruptly released the clutch to kill it. ‘Oh my God,’ Mike would rage in thick South Walian tones that dissected words into distinct chunks. ‘I’m so sick of that fu-cken Mi-ni.’
Yet not all the car’s failings were the fault of thieves and/or Longbridge quality control. Mike had, for example, managed to knock off the driver’s door mirror. He was a little accident-prone like this. I once accepted a lift in the Mini and asked about a strange box with a pin in it sliding around on the dashboard shelf. This, Mike explained, was an attack alarm given to him by a former employer. If I pulled the pin out now we would both be literally deafened he said, seconds before he accidentally pulled the pin out. Have you ever seen two men trying to exit a Rover Mini as quickly as possible while keeping their hands over their ears? I imagine it looks quite funny.
And yet, you can never underestimate the power of your only mate with a car. So when a man who had recently tried to deafen me asked if I would like to drive with him in his Mini from Cardiff to Edinburgh, I said yes. I think it was the lure of being told I was insured to do some of the driving. And the fact I was 19 and a student and, well, what else was I going to be doing?
These days, being old and tired, I would attempt such a journey by setting off early. But back then, being young and stupid, there was a lot of faffing about and doing ’90s student things like eating Super Noodles and watching the same episode of Neighbours twice in a day, and it was late in the afternoon when we finally pointed the Mini towards the motorway.
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Unsurprising, then, that in the middle of the night somewhere near Preston I was lulled to sleep by the smooth, consistent rush of the tyres against the M6 until suddenly I was awoken by the juddering of the rumble strip that divides carriageway from hard shoulder and realised not only that were we still doing 70mph but also that I was driving.
Amazingly, we made it there. And back. And some time later, we did it again. And went many other places, often with three or four or maybe even five of us in the car. It seems stupid now, and probably quite uncomfortable. But when you’re a teenager, never underestimate the power of a mate with a car.
