Skip to main content

Country Garage


Just South of Ashburton there is a dog leg turn in State Highway 1, where the road passes through Hinds. Right on the corner is a garage, which has a yard full of knackered old British cars behind it, and always a few rusting hulks out the front where folks can see them. At the moment, there's a Triumph Mayflower, which used to be known as the panelbeater's nightmare because its arrogantly presumptuous coachlines made it difficult to repair and its dreadful handling made it likely to need  it. There's a Hillman Minx, like the one my father once owned, and Standard Vanguard, like the one in which I sat my driver's license.


They were appalling cars, all of them: slow, cumbersome, ugly little things, but they were all that were available to us because of the special trading relationship we had with Britain. We bought British, even though they were ridiculously expensive and hideously iunreliable. American and European cars were even more expensive, and cheap, reliable Japanese ones weren't around then.

These were our status symbols and markers of our social progress.We pined after them. Lusted after them. There is a Phase III Vanguard (a 1957 Australian made one, as you can tell from the mesh grille. Obviously.) of the sort my father always wanted but could never afford. Now it's just a piece of junk, not worth worrying over. But actually, that's all it ever was. As are most of the objects of our desire.

Labels:

Comments

Brian R said…
I first visited New Zealand in December 1966, at the end of my first year of high school teaching. I was with a group of students (16-17), so not a lot older and some are still good friends. However we were very amused at the English cars everywhere. In Australia we mainly had American cars and, of course, the Holden. Actually, when learning to drive, my father had a Hillman Husky (4 on the floor) while my driving instructor had a Holden (3 on the wheel). No wonder I took a while but I am fairly flexible now and actually hate driving an automatic. When I moved to NZ, I bought a Ford Fiesta. My 20 something year old Holden owner would have been horrified. However I had moved through VW Kombis and Suzuki Sierras in between.
6 January 2019 at 08:45
Kelvin Wright said…
For a long time there were heavy import duties on all cars but especially on non English ones. As well, they could only be paid for in overseas funds, which not everyone had access to. So sometimes second hand cars were more expensive than new ones. And they were kept alive for years. My early cars - Morris 8, Austin 8, Austin 10 - all needed weekly repair which I had to do myself, using used parts and improvising where necessary. I too had a Kombi and Clemency had a Vauxhall Viva - a truly dreadful car whose gearbox failed at 27k miles ie about average for Vivas and whose plastics all cracked in the sun. But then again, Britain did make some remarkable cars - the Jaguars, Aston Martins, Alvis, Bristols, Bentleys and Daimlers which were beautiful and fast and handled well. And could be obtained if you were courageous enough and were a good enough mechanic.
6 January 2019 at 08:56
Alden Smith said…
The photo of the Hillman Minx sparked some memories for me. When I was living in Christchurch many years ago, a good mate of mine always insisted on delivering me home by car after a night on the town. At around 2am in the morning he would sneak into his parents bedroom and remove his fathers car keys. We would then release the handbrake on his fathers Hillman Minx and roll it silently out onto the road, assisted by a downward sloping driveway, push it forward on the road a distance and then start her up. The return journey (which I sadly never witnessed otherwise I would have taken a photograph) was completed by turning the engine off a distance from the cars garage and gliding silently up the road and into the sloping driveway. It was a clandestine adventure that my good friend relished - I sometimes think he missed his calling and should have worked for MI5. I can remember his name but my lips are sealed.
6 January 2019 at 09:07
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...
10 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more