It was a Vauxhall Cavalier, B registration. Mike, my husband, and I bought it for our daughter, Anna, in 1996. We paid £700 for it.
Anna had returned home from a two-year stay in Nepal, with a broken engagement behind her, and a severely damaged leg waiting to be repaired. She was too late that year to take up the place reserved for her by Oxford University, so she had to work out what to do over the next 18 months. She decided to accept a three-month contract as an instructor at the National Mountain Centre in Plas y Brenin in Wales, before spending a year in Leeds.
The car would be an invaluable aid to her, as she travelled about on her climbing trips. It was a hideous brownish-orange colour, but it was in pristine condition and had low mileage clocked up. When Anna moaned about the colour, her friend, Eddie, promptly remarked, 'Beggars can't be choosers.' What an excellent example of homespun philosophy! Anna's friends endear themselves to me!
That car was a miracle. It carried Anna and her friends from Land's End to John o' Groats, laden with furniture, climbing equipment, mountain bikes and people. It went over high mountains and through deep floods. Anna and her friends often slept in it. She sped along every motorway in the country, on one occasion suffering a burst tyre at high speed. She was lucky to have survived. The force of the explosion had badly dented the metal around the wheel. Fortunately, she was driving late at night and there was no other traffic nearby. She had been on her way home to see us, so I was able to take the car to my garage to have it made safe, although it still looked the worse for wear. On other occasions, she was fined for exceeding speed limits and for parking in no-parking areas. The car survived every crisis.
Mike and I loved to see it as we approached Anna's various places of residence. There it was in the car park in Plas y Brenin when we arrived on a visit. Later, we would arrive in Leeds by train and Anna and the car would be waiting outside the station to meet us.
One day, while she was in Leeds, Anna found a gang of yobs cutting the petrol line, so she gave chase. Fortunately, Simon, her partner at that time, heard her shout and he ran after her, afraid that the gang would knife her. Anna seems to have no sense of danger. The petrol line was repaired and the car continued to give good service.
Whenever Anna visited us, I took the opportunity to clean the inside of the car and to give the exterior a good wash. I would take it to my garage whenever she left it on my drive while she went abroad, and soon it would be like new again. That car was a symbol of stability in Anna's life of constant change. I became very attached to it. It may have appeared to others as an inanimate lump of metal, but it was an anchor for me. It made me feel as if I still had some relevance in Anna's life, as if I could still act like a mother to her.
One night while she was in Leeds, she had a phone call from an Army friend of hers. He was in York and he had missed his last train back to Grantham. If he turned up late in his barracks next morning, he would be in trouble, so Anna set out at midnight to pick Justin up and get him back to his barracks. I was pleased she had the car, thus being able to help an old friend in need.
I often worried about her driving alone through the night but she promised me that she would keep her doors locked and that she would phone the RAC for help if she broke down. This happened once, and I was glad that she had acquired a mobile phone. The RAC give special consideration to women on their own, if their car breaks down, and I made sure Anna was aware of this when I paid her RAC subscription for her.
Another thing that worried me was Anna's driving alone while she had had little sleep. I did not think that she was aware of the danger of falling asleep at the wheel and, as a result, being involved in an accident. I worried, too, about her using her mobile phone while driving. Both of these situations are now treated as criminal offences. Anna used to carry a spare duvet in the car, and if she felt tired, she would pull in at a service station and give me a ring to tell me where she was. She would then curl up in the duvet and get a few hours of sleep before driving on.
In September 1997, she moved to Oxford, where she had off-road parking on university property. She now lived on an up-market road, whereas in Leeds her house was in a really rough area. On our first visit to see her in Leeds we were shocked to find that most of the houses had steel barricades on doors and windows, and heavy security locks. Police were saturating the area in an effort to curb crime. How different the Oxford scene was!
One day, Anna was walking behind some Americans, as she returned to where she had parked the car. She heard one of them exclaim, 'Oh! Look at that car! What a hideous colour! How can anyone bear to have a car like that?'
Anna walked past the car, not wanting to acknowledge it as hers. I would have rushed forward and, as I opened the door, I would have asked them if I could offer them a lift! Oh to have witnessed the expressions on their faces!
Anna would drive home whenever Mike and I were going to catch coaches or planes and were having to rely on public transport or on taxis to take us to our points of departure. She would drop us off wherever we needed to be, and she would be there to meet us on our return. What a joy it was to see that car!
She took up her first full-time post in September of 1999, in London. She lived in North London and worked in Kensington Gore. We grew used to seeing the car parked on the road near her flat. She seldom travelled to work by car, but cycled or ran across London. This was a far quicker way of beating the traffic jams, and it helped her to keep fit. The car was there mainly for travelling out of London, although Anna took us on many a tour of the city in it. It was as reliable in the heavy London traffic as it was in the Scottish Highlands or on the motorways.
Anna then moved South of the Thames. Sadly, this would turn out to be the car's last known home. One day, around the time of Anna's birthday in the year 2001, it was stolen. It had vanished from the road outside her flat and was never traced. I felt like weeping. It was somewhat similar to bereavement. I found myself wishing that whoever had stolen the car would crash and would be injured so badly that he would wish he had never set eyes on it.
The insurance company paid £200 in compensation. That old car had been worth its weight in gold. It was stolen one morning, just before a judge was mugged at the station from which Anna would sometimes travel to work. I found myself wondering if it was the muggers who had stolen it to use as their getaway vehicle. The judge quickly gave chase in his own car but the thieves escaped.
I was really sad that this is how the car had ended up, not on the scrap heap, but the victim of thieves. Twice, previously, it had been broken into, once in Oxford and once in London. The Oxford thief had stolen a computer, which Anna had borrowed from the University, and the London thief had ripped out the cassette player, leaving an ugly gap and loose, trailing wires on the dashboard. The car was full of shattered glass and for ages afterwards I was picking fragments from the carpet and from under the seats.
We all missed that car and I doubt if such a bargain will ever again come our way. When we bought it in 1996, we anticipated that Anna would have a year's trouble-free motoring from it. We would have been perfectly happy with that. However, she drove it for nearly five years and trebled the mileage during that time. What a bargain! I wonder where it ended up.