FINDING THE AUTODROME
In a land called Dunston many years ago, three friends, Brian Johnson, George Beveridge, and Ronnie Swaddle, decided to go and watch a motor race. Now, that was like finding a bishop at a bar mitzvah in the northeast of England. After much searching, we found that there was a race at Croft Autodrome at one p.m. on Sunday. Great! It would certainly spice Sunday up. You see, I hate Sundays. It’s the day before you go back to work, it’s the premature end of the weekend, it’s bath night, it’s Sunday Night at the Bloody London Palladium, it’s “I’ve set the alarm for 5:30 a.m.” night. But this weekend, we were going to the races in my trusty Ford Popular.
The trouble was, I hadn’t passed my driving test yet, but I was dying to drive somewhere far away. It would be an adventure. My dad was working overtime that weekend, so I could slip off my learner plates and bugger off. Croft was at least thirty-five miles away. Wow! That meant putting more than one gallon in the car. I’d never done that before, so we had a whip-round. We woke to black skies, which is normal up there in the Geordie foothills. I picked up George and Ronnie. We filled up the tank with three gallons of gas—I’d never seen a guy pump for that long. (They didn’t have self-service pumps then.) The gas gauge was up to half-full—something else I’d never seen before. Right, lads, check food.
George: “I’ve got two teacakes with jam and a stottie cake with ham and pease pudding.”
Ronnie: “I’ve got cheese and onion, and one and a half mince pies, because I’ve already eaten a bit. Oh, and a flask of tea.”
This was going brilliant. I had six of my mother’s famous homemade doughnuts and a couple of Spam-and-beetroot sandwiches, because my ma was Italian and couldn’t quite figure out what went with what. (Rhubarb and corned beef was a particular favorite of mine.)
“Who’s got the map?” I asked. The look on their faces was like one of those Japanese red-arse monkeys when they’re sitting in the hot springs—or Roger Moore showing “anger” in a Bond movie. It told me we didn’t have one. “It’s near Middlesborough, or Darlington. Or Catterick or something,” said the Swaddle. Not so brilliant. Here we were on our first real trip, with no idea how to get there. Ronnie ran back into the house and asked his dad, and came out with directions and off we went.
The names of some of the villages and hamlets we passed through are just great: Middleton Tyas, Yafforth, Snape, Kirkbymoorside, and, my personal favorite, Ainderby Quemhow. Yup, it exists. It’s on the B6267, right next to Berryhills. None of them beats the daddy of them all, in Northumbria. It’s called Once Brewed and it’s about half a mile down the road from Twice Brewed, named by a Cromwellian general. He wanted his beer brewed twice so he moved his headquarters from Once Brewed. No, I’m not taking the piss. It’s true! Christ, I’m off on a tangerine again—back to the story.
As we headed south, it started to rain, good old-fashioned sideways-windy stuff. The Ford Popular had only one windscreen wiper (the deluxe model, the Prefect, had two), which worked on a kind of vacuum power off the thingy in the carb stuff. The thing is, the more power you needed, the more you put your foot on the accelerator, the slower the wiper moved. I couldn’t see much of anything. We suddenly went over a rather large bump about the size of a dinosaur’s arse.
“What the hell was that?” I said.
George looked out the back window. “You’ve just driven over a roundabout.”
Oh my God, I hadn’t even seen it coming. This driving stuff wasn’t as easy as I’d thought. The rain was still lashing down and we were lost—I mean “you couldn’t find your dick in ten degrees below” kind of lost.
There were no signs for Croft Autodrome. No arrows to point the way. Nothing to get you there until we spotted some old hangars and drove down this old concrete road to where a soaked woman was selling tickets to get in. But there was nothing to get into, just vast swathes of grass and concrete runways. We could have driven ’round ourselves. There were no pits, just oil drums to denote the corners. This was not what we’d had in mind.
Five cars started the race, all MG TCs, and they weren’t very fast or noisy. They would pass us, then we’d stand there wet and miserable for a few minutes, and then they’d pass us again. It was like watching snails shag. We decided to head for home, if we could find it, before my dad got home from work.
We got back into the “Pop” and the windows misted up. I mean, it looked like a heavy fog, and no amount of wiping did any good. “We’ll have to drive with the windows open to let the air in.” Well, with the wiper doing its impersonation of Errol Flynn’s dick, we moved cautiously forward, my head out the window, like the pilot of a Sopwith Camel coming in to land. Shit! We’ll never get home at this speed. My dad’s gonna kill me if he finds out I’ve been out without a qualified driver in the car. My goose’ll be cooked, my sausage sliced, my provisional license lost forever. We got back at seven thirty, the six-volt headlights hardly making a dent in the rain and gloom. I dropped off the lads and headed for the retribution waiting at home. When I got there, I knocked on the front door, because I still didn’t have a key. My old man opened it.
“Where you been?” he asked.
I looked him in the eye and said, “I’ve been at George’s house all day listening to music, Dad.”
He looked over my shoulder at the car, which was covered in mud from the track, and said, “Did you learn ya lesson?”
I looked down and sighed. “Yes, Dad.”
“Go on, get a cup of tea.”
He was a cool dude.