True Story 3

Feb 1, 2024

Here is a short story. It is completely true.

It was a winter morning either late 1977 or early 1978. The time would have been around 7.20am as I needed to be at work ten miles away by 8.00am. The car windscreen was frozen so, having started the engine and pulled out the heater levers as far out as I could, I briefly returned to the house to retrieve a can of de-icer.

I had only left the car for barely a minute but when I returned IT WASN’T THERE. I did one of those cartoon double-takes looking left, right and skyward trying to comprehend what had happened. It took perhaps a whole minute before I looked across the street and saw my car at the bottom of the drive of the bungalow opposite.

Obviously I hadn’t pulled the handbrake up far enough, and both properties, indeed the street itself. were on a slope. I rushed across to my car and realised just how close to calamity things had been. The neighbours slept in the front bedroom. There was a row of paving slabs in front of the property. Then there was a strip of soil perhaps a foot wide in front of the slabs. In this soil were a few small shrubs and also, one lone conifer perhaps seven or eight foot tall. The rear of my car was up against the trunk of this tree. A few feet either side of this tree and my car would have embedded itself into the property with dire consequences. I scraped a slit of ice off the windscreen and engaged first gear and shot off my neighbours drive and down the street out of their sight where I could properly clear the windscreen and inspect the tree trunk shaped dent in the rear valance of my car.

To the best of my knowledge the neighbours were never aware of what had/could have happened. I often wondered if they noticed the tyre tracks in the frost or the fact that the conifer in their pristine front garden looked a bit worse for wear. Fast forward forty years and I now own the bungalow my car almost collided with. Today, as I do every morning, I raised the bedroom blinds and looked out of one of the windows and smiled at the thought of a 1968 Dolphin Grey Triumph Herald 13/60 Estate hurtling towards me.