I prefer things to make sense and, after a fashion, they had been doing so earlier that Thursday, April 16. Going over the accounts receivable with Marjorie was a start.
The objective of my incisive, pointed questions was to elicit firm answers demonstrating that the business was healthy. Believe me, when your business is repairing old English sports cars, you want facts that demonstrate good health. And Marjorie was providing them, sort of.
And through the internal glass window of the office, I could see signs of definite activity.
Dougald had the head off the engine of the dark gray XK150S Drophead and was peering in at the entrails, giving an effective demonstration of an expert sucking his teeth upon viewing an impossible job.
Two bays over, Reg was replacing the wheels of the green MGA, having just finished his work on the brakes.
The ’61 Mark II Jaguar, entering its third week with us as an alluring fixture on the main hoist, was still going nowhere. We were waiting to refit its radiator, which was being re-cored by the specialist we use. Outside on the forecourt, partially sheltered under our shop’s roofing and out of the worst of the April drizzle, were the bread and butter cars of our work: two MGBs, a TR6, and a Frogeye Sprite. Both ’Bs were ready to be collected by their owners after minor tune-ups and oil changes, while the Triumph and the Sprite needed closer looks for misfiring and a slipping clutch respectively.
JP, our delivery man, trainee apprentice, and general dogs-body rolled into one, was still out in the Land Rover supposedly picking up my Arizona crates of parts from the Border Agency depot near the airport.
And Jerry, our resident black-and-white alleged pest controller, was yawning on his favourite car seat cushion near the washroom.
All in all, a normal, sensible Thursday at Britfit.
But then some would say that operating such a business in a city like Ottawa, where our northern latitude winter puts a stop to open-topped sports car driving for almost half the year, is a senseless idea in the first place.
Except for this: The city and surrounding area are full of retired and semi-retired public servants who now had the financial wherewithal to acquire cars they used to have, or dreamed of having, back when they still had hair that grew straight out of their heads instead of being combed over their bald patches.
There are half a dozen clubs in the city dedicated to each of the main English marques, each club numbering at least a hundred members. We were starting the season that would see, every weekend for at least another six full months, car shows and rallies, show and shine concours d’élégance competitions, and organized tours and outings. Baseball-capped, gray-bearded drivers and their moderately enthusiastic female navigators would be joyfully puttering anywhere and everywhere about the countryside in their MGs and Jaguars after a long hibernation.
We weren’t the only repair garage for these cars in the area. At least five other competitors around and about were chasing the same customers. But we had carved out a solid niche through word of mouth, which is a prerequisite in a business like this. Dougald and Reg were veteran mechanics who knew their way around these lumps of compound curves that had been designed by artists’ eyes but assembled by trade union hands to a price.
Marjorie was a key element of our modest success. There’s nothing like a saucy receptionist with a caustic Manchester accent for making owners feel apologetic for having complained about parting with their money. She invariably took pity on them, though, offering them a seat and a cup of tea in a corner of her office that she’d repainted herself over a weekend and decorated with classic car posters and filled with plants.
My own standard speech to red-faced men squawking about their bills goes something like this:
“Look, you bought this MG (or Jaguar, or Triumph, or Austin Healey, or Morgan, or Lotus, or Bentley) because you love it, not because it’s reliable. If you want reliable, get a Miata.”
We guarantee our work, and our customers keep coming back. While not rich since taking over the business some two years previously, I was solvent. The first year, as I tried to make sense of Dougald’s financial situation, was the most difficult.
Dougald was close to retirement by then. He had apprenticed at Britfit as a young man when the streets of most Canadian cities, and many others in countries around the world, from Australia to Zanzibar, were clogged with all manner of English cars. Selling millions of Austins, Morrises, Triumphs, Vauxhalls, MGs, and so on, the British enjoyed a huge market share.
The death of their car industry is well documented. Add militant trade unionism to management lassitude and complacency, stir in German and Japanese aggression in marketing excellent products, dilute with good old American know-how, and you got Brits in a stew. They lost their initial advantage, especially in the crucial North American market, and moved to the bottom of the food chain.
By the time Dougald, working alone, was considering closing the doors for good, Britfit was certainly not humming with activity – even though he did have a few loyal clients left, including me.
At that point, I had left the federal government, and, armed with a healthy severance package, decided it wasn’t too late in life to take a chance on running my own business.
My family had emigrated from England to Canada when I was a lad, and I had grown up with a Gilbert and Sullivan soundtrack and a Peter Sellers–driven sense of humour. As an English sports car fan from the time I could speak, I had enthusiasm and a modicum of knowledge about the cars. I also had some public service experience in management and a definite need to fill the hours.
Dougald had the expertise and a core client base. Once we’d got a few false starts with some new personnel out of the way, things started to pick up. I’m not terribly comfortable with active marketing, but attendance at a few key car club meetings handing out business cards and a gradually expanding positive reputation by word of mouth were seemingly doing the trick. Now in our third year, we were doing okay.
In response to my questions this day, Marjorie was incorporating much rolling of her eyes, the odd giggle and shrugging of shoulders into laconic answers along the lines of:
“Well, I’ve left two messages reminding him of his bill, haven’t I?” and “They say the container was delayed at the Southampton end, but should be in Montreal next Tuesday,” and “He’s sent another e-mail asking when it’ll be ready because he’s booked in for a paint job elsewhere in ten days.”
“All right, Marj, I’ll put the kettle on.”
I fussed about in our galley, while Marjorie attended to the ringing phone. Then I headed across the shop floor to consult Dougald for a few minutes.
A third-generation Canadian, Dougald O’Neill was the son of dairy farmers of Irish heritage who first settled in the upper Ottawa Valley. Growing up, Dougald had shown an aptitude for fixing farm machinery, which eventually led him to car mechanics half a century ago.
“Anything but cows,” he told me.
Now seventy years old, Dougald was short, compact, and very strong and fit. He was quiet, a member of his church choir, married to Molly for fifty years, and a devoted gardener. Over two years ago, when I had raised the idea with him about buying his business, stressing that as far as I was concerned I couldn’t do it without his staying on, he asked for a couple of days to think about it. He left his answer on my telephone answering machine.
“Conn, it’s Dougald. Give me a call, boss.”
In the ensuing months of paperwork, licensing, meetings with my bank manager, accountant, and lawyer, and endless faxing and city hall maneuvering, he never hesitated in seeing the ownership changeover through to completion.
We kept the original name of the business, Britfit, after bandying about some alternatives using various combinations of our names. It simplified the changeover process, and I kind of liked it. Running a British car can give you fits of temper, for sure, as illustrated by some well-known jokes about problem-plagued Lucas electrical wiring, with which most of these cars were originally equipped. Many owners sport t-shirts with “Lucas – Prince of Darkness” lettering on the front, for example. In fact, owners who tamper with the wiring, adding fog lights or radios incorrectly, often caused electrical problems themselves.
In any event, we preferred to think that the name reflected that we were making Brit cars “fit” for use.
When the day finally came that we were able to pin our first licence to operate under new ownership on the office bulletin board, we had a little celebration. An ounce of Jamieson’s each in a plastic cup.
“Boss?”
“Dougald, please, I’m putting in the money, but you kept this shop going by yourself for so long I’d rather you just call me Conn.”
Dougald looked thoughtfully at the cup almost lost in his large freckled fist. It always took him awhile to say things, which is unusual, in my experience, in a man of Irish descent.
“Conn, I think you saved my life here. I have Molly, and my garden, and the singing, so I do. But I’ve got to keep working.”
We finished the whiskey bottle around midnight. By then the volume of the shop’s radio, tuned to a golden oldies station, was pretty loud and our voices hoarse from our duets. But we were both in the shop the next morning, in our overalls, pulling the rear axle off a Triumph Spitfire very, very slowly and carefully.
“How’s it looking, Dougald?” I asked now about the XK150S.
“The lobes are gone, the chains are gone, the waterways are plugged; we can save maybe four of the pistons …”
The Jaguar XK twin-cam straight six-cylinder engine is a legendary unit, used in the cars for nearly forty years in various litre capacities. Designed to run hot and use lots of oil, the engine will give thousands of miles of high-speed service provided that it is maintained properly. The cooling system needs regular flushing and refilling with the proper antifreeze and water ratio. Neglecting this servicing aspect will create all kinds of havoc.
The car in question, a rare 3.8 “S” designation with higher compression, was the apple of a lawyer’s eye and we were going to have to give him bad news on two fronts. First, the major rebuild required for the engine was going to cost him something like six thousand dollars, and second, the job was going to take weeks, not days, to complete.
“Okay, Dougald, let’s push her to the back and get the TR6 inside. We’ll get Marjorie to phone the owner and see what he wants to do.”
The afternoon proceeded apace. The lawyer reluctantly gave the okay to proceed with the 150S, grumbling about the time needed. Marjorie told him we’d put in Saturdays to work on it, which mollified him to a certain extent. The MGB owners picked their cars up and left happy with only moderately emptied wallets. JP burst in waving the bills of lading for the crates of parts shipped from Arizona he’d picked up near the airport and packed into the Land Rover. Marjorie grabbed the paperwork out of his hands for filing, while JP and Reg unloaded the Landy and stored the crates in the basement level of the shop. Dougald and I pushed the Drophead Jag to the back area. I managed to start the TR6 after several attempts, and in she went to the front inside bay.
We all had more tea.
The Sprite owner called again, anxious about her car. The radiator shop called to say the Mark II Jag’s radiator was finished and successfully pressure-tested, and we could pick it up tomorrow. Four faxes came in advertising various “sales” of parts from distributors and manufacturers, and an MG Midget was delivered by its owner for a carb tune-up. The president of the Ottawa Triumph club called around 4 p.m. to confirm that the evening’s technical session was still on.
These sessions, where some dozen or so of a club’s more hands-on members came to the shop for how-to demonstrations for working on their cars followed by coffee and muffins, were proving their worth. Depending on the subject of each session, either I would handle it myself, or Reg would assist. The members got some valuable pointers that equipped them to work more confidently on their cars themselves, and we got additional customers for the times when they found themselves out of their depth.
It could be tiring after a long day to answer pretty dumb questions from a few of these folks – know-it-alls at least in automotive theory – but our customer base was expanding in no small measure thanks to these sessions.
Tonight, the subject for the Triumph club was “interiors” and I went over to Reg, still tidying up the MGA, for a chat.
If Dougald was a quiet soul who worked hard and well with a ready grin and an inner peace based on confidence in his skills, Reg was another matter entirely.
Thrice divorced, sporting the bulbous red nose and pot belly of an enthusiastic drinker, Australian-born and bred Reg Pritchard had a scathing tongue and a seriously warped take on life. He was quite possibly the most politically incorrect person in Ottawa. He and Marjorie, in particular, got into some animated discussions over various issues. Reg found to his cost that Marjorie was more than able to hold her own.
It was gratifying that people in the shop got together with or without me. Most often on a Friday night, but not every Friday night, we trooped to the pub up the street as a group for some pints. Sometimes these sessions were relatively short, an hour and no more. Other times, due to special alchemy or in celebration of a good week’s work, we closed the pub raucously. On those nights, I insisted on providing everyone with taxi fares out of the shop till – no messing about with beery driving for Britfit workers.
But other times such evenings happened without my participation, usually with Reg as the organizer, and that was fine by me as long as people weren’t too shaky to work safely the next day. There are many, many hazards in a car repair garage, some obvious and some not so obvious. Apart from JP banging his head on a protruding edge of the second bay hoist and requiring concussion tests and several days off (“Might do the little wombat some good,” said Reg), it had been a case of so far, so good. But safety was a constant worry, and I looked carefully each morning for the telltale signs of too much drink the night before.
A couple of times I’d had to suggest to Reg that he go home and come back in the afternoon. He was unwilling because he was constantly broke – putting two and two together wasn’t his strong suit – but when he returned after a nap and a clean-up, he put in several solid hours until we closed down for the day.
And that was the thing with Reg. Dougald was methodical and careful, with a surgeon’s fingers, a tuning-fork ear for errant noises in a running engine, and a depth of hard-won experience that enabled him to diagnose any mechanical ailment. Reg was simply a genius. He worked with a casual flamboyance; at times it seemed he wasn’t even looking at what he was doing.
He had been late for his initial interview, his employment record at one of our competitor’s was spotty with no letters of reference in hand from anybody, and I was disquieted by the evidence his fifty-years-plus face showed of a hard life spent in lots of pubs. Dougald had looked dubious as I walked Reg over to a running MGB. It was clearly off-balance and decidedly tappety, as they are prone to be, sounding especially noisy with the valve cover off.
Reg simply pulled out a feeler gauge from a pocket of his grubby shirt and inserted a leaf from the gauge in each valve top one after the other while the motor ran, something you shouldn’t try unless you know what you’re doing. His hand moved in a blur as he went from valve tappet to valve tappet with his gauge, finally saying, “Okay, it’s number three and if it won’t go quieter than this, the camshaft lobe’s probably worn right down.”
Reg started the next day. Despite his shaggy appearance, insulting manner, fondness for breaking wind, and, at times, shaky demeanour, he was worth the trouble. And he could make us laugh, which is no bad thing.
“Getting a bit thirsty, Guv’nor,” he said now. “Do you need me tonight for the Triumph bunch?”
“It’s just interiors, Reg, so no, off you go.”
“Yeah, meeting an old pal from Windsor tonight, so that’d be great if I can leave early.”
“Okay, is the ’A all done?”
“Sure, it was just cleaning the drums mostly. The lines are tight and the master cylinder’s holding with the new kit. She’s ready to go.”
“Fine, then. See Marjorie with your hours and I’ll take the car home tonight for a road test.”
Reg gave me a salute and marched, arms swinging in a parody of a soldier on parade, over to Marjorie’s little office. He slammed his feet to a stop.
“Oh Marj, darling, the Guv’nor wants you to record my hours for today, which is six and half. Can you put your tea down for a minute?”
Marjorie, rolling her eyes, stood up from her desk and placed her hands at her waist, arms akimbo.
“I don’t know why you always march around like that, Reg. You look like an idiot. And you were never in the army.”
“I fink,” he replied, “that it would be good to have a little more discipline around here, and I don’t takes to being called an idiot by a civilian like you!”
“I’ll have you know, Reggie, that I have real military history in my background. My dad was with the Royal Cheshires.”
“Oh, right. Call me Reggie, will you? Well, you know what they say.”
“Oh? And what would that be, Reggie?”
“She was only the corporal’s daughter, but she knew what Reggie meant! Regi-ment! Do ya get it, Marj?”
Dougald shook his head.
“You really walked into that one, love.”
Reg headed out to the bus stop, whistling the Colonel Bogey March. I knew he’d be a bit red-eyed and the worse for wear in the morning, but he’d soon have the panicky owner’s Sprite sorted. Marjorie set up the coffee machine and muffins for the Triumph group and teetered out on her high heels to meet her mysterious “Mr. X,” as she called her current flame. Who this was, we had no idea – the Prime Minister for all we knew, but more likely a well-heeled, camel-hair-coated middle management public servant.
Dougald and I talked a bit about the TR6. He was going to start from scratch with it the next morning, checking the electronic distributor timing, trying fresh spark plug leads and other basics. The home market fuel-injected TR6 is the ultimate hairy-chested mass-produced English roadster of the 1970s with 150 bhp of grunt at the rear wheels. The lower-specification North American model, though, has always been plagued with ignition and spark delivery idiosyncrasies, as well as problems with its supposedly more environmentally friendly Stromberg carburetors.
Dougald left for the day and I went to look for JP in the basement of the shop.
We had taken a flyer on this kid, no question.
Dougald and I had been talking about the need for an apprentice and had come up with a big blank. Trolling the local community college had produced no results. The young people enrolled there in automotive technology were firmly fixed on careers in the modern industry, which was as much about on-board computer diagnostics as what makes the wheels go round. Advertisements produced a few inquiries, but no takers for what was seen as an archaic business dealing with old cars.
We put the idea on the back burner. Then I got a call from Odette Johnson. Odette was a former Public Safety Department contact with whom I had dealt from time to time on overlapping case files. In her free time, she volunteered as a parole officer.
“Conn, it was great to see you at Jeff’s retirement party,” she said. “How’s the car business?”
“Well, we’re keeping our heads above water. Are you keeping the country safe for us to sleep soundly in our beds?”
I’d always loved her chuckle and heard it loud and clear on the phone now.
She spoke about the machinations in her department for a bit – who was out, who was in – and then paused.
“Conn, I’ve got a favour to ask.”
“Uh-huh? Well I’m all ears.”
Again that chuckle. My ears stick out.
“I’ve got a case …”
Jean-Paul Desrochers was the case she had in mind. His story was all too drearily familiar. A bright kid, whose parents divorce, drifts into drugs and out of school, runs with a bad crowd, commits petty crimes such as breaking and entering, is given a second chance by the courts, blows it with more stealing, gets a six-month jail term, and ends up as a file in Odette’s hands.
“Odette, what makes you think we can do anything for this kid?” I asked.
“Well, you mentioned at Jeff’s party you were thinking of an apprentice …”
“Well, sure, we still are, but …”
“C’mon Conn, hear me out. He worked in the prison shop and scored really well in welding …”
“We don’t do bodywork here, just mechanical.”
“But he’s got an aptitude …”
We went back and forth, but I’d always found it hard to resist Odette’s persuasive abilities.
I ended up looking across my office desk at a skinny, surly French Canadian nineteen-year-old with a tattoo on his biceps, a stud in his nose, and a shaved head.
“Well, at least you won’t get your hair caught in a fan belt,” was my opening line.
No reaction from him – not a smile, not a smirk – nothing.
I outlined what he’d do to start with, how much I’d pay him, our hours of work, and spoke a bit about the spirit of what we were trying to do at the shop.
Again, no reaction.
Sighing, I led him out to the shop, showed him where all the brooms, mops, and cleaning supplies were, and then stopped talking. He was gazing at an XKE, called an E-Type outside England, that was in for a major tune-up. This Jaguar, a pristine regency red example of what is probably the most sexy, iconic, look-at-me car of all time, had stopped him in his tracks.
He did show up the next day, and the next, and the next. He said little. Dougald talked to him, Reg joked with him, and Marjorie rolled her eyes and teased him. Now and then, a little laugh escaped his lips. I couldn’t fault his work. He mastered the foibles of the ancient Land Rover and picked up supplies and parts on time, no problem. He cleaned up the shop thoroughly. He seemed to gravitate mostly toward Dougald, who patiently showed him how to jack up a car and place the stands under it safely, change an oil filter, and flush a cooling system.
But I could barely get a word out of him much beyond a murmured “okay.”
Then, late one afternoon, I went down to the basement where we kept all our stock, parts, long-term restoration projects, and assorted junk to get some part or other. JP was supposed to be taking inventory, a boring job but crucial to ensuring we had an adequate supply of the parts we needed. Instead, he was sitting on an old Sunbeam Alpine car seat cushion looking at one of our illustrated Jaguar history books, one volume of a library that Marjorie had amassed for the owners to read in her “reception area” while they waited for their cars to be ready.
“JP?”
He slammed the book closed, his face beet red. My first thought was to say: “I’m not paying you to sit around reading.” But instead I went with a second thought.
“Which one would you have?”
The floodgates opened. He must have talked for five minutes solid, barely drawing breath, in a rhapsody of eloquence about the merits of the 3.8 S sedan compared with the largely ignored 420, comparing the Daimler V-8 variant to the Mark II. The C was purer than the D, the Mark X was “too grosse” but had appointments second to none, but the E-Type, the E-Type …
Finally, he wound down.
“Come with me,” I said.
I led him upstairs to the little library in Marjorie’s office where he replaced the book.
“I am sorry, Conn, I am carried away …”
“That’s okay, JP. Here, take this one home.”
I passed him a history of Le Mans racing that concentrated on the early 1950s, the glory years for Jaguar.
“Will there be a test tomorrow?” he asked, grinning shyly.
“Yes.”
“Bon. I will pass it.”
He shrugged into his leather jacket and left quickly.
From that point, he went from surly non-speaking youth to someone who wouldn’t shut up. It was “Jaguar, Jaguar” all day long. He peppered Dougald, Reg, and me with questions incessantly.
“What about Turner’s V-8 engine in the Mark II hull, why didn’t Lyons develop that further, what if the V-12 motor was in the Mark X, why hadn’t anyone thought of that?” Why this? Why that?
When we had a Jaguar, any Jaguar, in for servicing, and we had a lot of them, from post-war Mark V’s right up to more recent models, he was all over it, pestering Dougald, our resident expert in the marque, to work on the cars. And when we had an E-Type in, not uncommon in our area, he was in heaven, practically drooling over the sleek beasts.
In the midst of this, Odette made her fortnightly call to follow up on his progress. This time I was able to tell her that JP was probably going to be all right. Perhaps better than all right. He had made some mistakes, chief of which was backing a Spitfire into the back wall of our shop while moving it around our fenced-in rear compound. Reg yelled at him a lot for this error of judgment, but we had a spare rear bumper in the basement and the owner was happy enough getting a newer one.
This Thursday close of day I found him in the basement counting lever arm shock absorbers in a box, murmuring to himself.
“Okay JP, go home,” I said.
“Yes, sir. Hey boss?”
There followed more of a speech, than a question, about why the British Leyland company had killed the MGB and focused on a new Triumph range instead, a dismal history I had known about before this little pipsqueak was born.
He could tell I was gearing up to deliver my pipsqueak comment.
“Okay, boss, see you tomorrow.”
“Look, JP. Maybe tomorrow at the pub after work we can chat about it, but let’s close up now.”
Upstairs I gave him the history book plus a magazine out of Marjorie’s library that had a decent summary of the BL debacle and shooed him out.
It was just before 6 p.m. and now I had my own time at the shop. The Triumph club members would start arriving in less than an hour. I went around altering the lights, checking the back door and coffee machine, and then went into my office.
I switched on the TV monitor and the old technology VCR and then sat down at my desk. Marjorie had stacked what I had to sign in my in-tray. I leafed through this, signed the easy stuff, and started reading the local Citizen.
The florescent lights buzzed. Jerry stretched and yawned on my lap as I scratched his ears. The Caprice pulled into our forecourt and the Deputy walked in to tell me about Rodney Morrison. In hindsight, I really wish she hadn’t.