Passing Pageant

Radio Record, Volume XII, Issue 36, 17 February 1939, Page 10

Passing

Pageant

utor Passing Pageant has ever had. And it’s mone other than NELLE SCANLAN, famous New Zealand moveltst, who 1s spending a holiday im this country. [Reacl what she has to say... To-day Trevor Lane is proud to present the first guest comtribho a

N THE subject of motoring, I speak with the authority of one who has been sorely tried. I had spent my motoring life in the back seat of other people’s cars, going when they wished and where they liked, and often dropped ‘at the corner, to walk the last stretch home: That last stretch made a motorist of . me. te BAD come to recognise chauffeurs as a race of ‘men who revelled in traffic jams, and had a genius for finding them. They regard a Picturesque detour as a weak evasion. Give them the main road every time, and the more buses and bikes, lorries and lights, the better they like it. For them, motoring is a business, not a pleasure, and as a conscientious class, they shirk nothing. If you want to look ait scenery you must drive yourself. If you want to explore remote villages, or climb ancient ruins, no self-respect-

ing chauffeur will ever find the way. I have witnessed much silent wrath in the back seat when a stubborn chauffeur held the wheel, and bluebells or blackberries were the object of the drive, and the baskets came home empiy. But I'll be fair, and admit that there are exceptions. N VERY year the traffie of London becomes more and more congested. There are so

many cars, buses, lorries, vans and what-nots, so many things a motorist must not do, so many rules to follow, codes to learn, signals to give and lights to obey, that I felt if ever I was to drive a car, I must begin soon, or the task would be beyond me. Even a course of Pelmanism would not enable me to memorise it all, and that ‘last stretch’? was ever before me. So I bought.a baby ear, and set out to beeome a motorist. ° * HEN If asked the lad from the garage who had been my tutor, if he encountered many worse pupils, he replied quite candidly: ""Not many.’’ It was humaliating, but not discouraging. However, I had escaped the worst indignity, the wearing of a large red L (indicating learner) by beating the new law by a nose. Ilitherto, all you had to do was to buy a car, take it on the road and drive it. | [OTORISTS, like dogs, were given one free bite. You ean’t prove that a dog is dangerous until it has bitten someone, and the motorist was permitted one accident to prove he eouldn’t drive. The daily slaughter on the roads, however, eventually settled that, and a compulsory test of knowledge and skill came into foree. Dogs still have their free bite. New Zealand has set a test for

drivers long years ago, so we do lead old England sometimes. w RQUIPPED with a drivirg licence, I was free to roam. I% is said there is only one way to learn to write-by writing. And there is certinly only one way to become a motorisi-by moioring. There is much on the road that is not in the book, and ten volumes could not warn you of all the emer-

gencies you are to encounter in that first thousand miles. At first I kept to the kerb, and everything on the road overtook me except the coalcarts, but these horses, I found, had lost their pride. There are few one-way streets in London that I did not get into at the wrong end, and have to back out. But I was not quite so bad as the woman who was stopped by a policeman and told shea was in a one-way street. "Well, I’m only going one way,’’ she replied coldly. I was ignominiously pushed out of Oxford Cireus by a policeman, who put his broad shoulder to the car, when I forgot to get into gear when the lights went green, and wondered why she wouldn’t start. And all the honking behind me could not teil me which knob to turn. I stalled at city eross-roads, and was jeered at by small boys, but the great British Publie is tolerant of fools. O NE soon develops a motoring philosophy, and I began to classify the drivers I met. First on the danger list I put the van-drivers. They had goods to deliver and a time to keep, probably a girl to take to the pictures that night, so I got-out of their way. It was no use signalling to them; they never saw you. Next came the noisy little sports car, driven by hatless youth, with the patinum girlfriend beside him. The weekend world was theirs, and

there is much J still want to do. TIEN came the honking, hooting, get-to-blazes-out-of-my-way high-powered car, that made 30 miles an hour look like standing still. Here discretion guided my course, but did not silence me. liondon taxi-dvivers are a kindly crowd, and I pay my tri; bute of gratitude for a turn of the starter when the battery had

run down, and a ‘* You go first’’ wave of the hand in a sticky patch of traffic. [HE bus drivers, too, regard with a kindly if contemptuous eye the temerity of the baby car which. disputes their right of way.. It is the man who smokes a pipe, who is the gallant of the road. Why? I can’t tell you, but that pipe has become, for me at least, a symbol of road courtesy. W N England there are three million eyelists, and on weekends and Sundays, the whole three million appear to take the road in a solid body. They belong to eycling clubs, and the more there are together, the happier they seem. In boy-and-girl pairs, dressed alike in brown or green or blue, they set off in processions, w obbling their way over England’s ereen and pleasant land, claiming equal right to the middle of the road under some law of 1066 and all that. And even when eyele tracks are provided, as in the case of the new by-pass roads, they refuse to use them. The hospital’s weekly harvest is appalling, but they would rather die than surrender their rights. In the New Forest, it is only the pigs and ponics which have right of way, and motorists must yield to them, as I was obliged to once, when a large sow and her litter slept off their heavy meal in the middle of the road. That privilege does go back to William the Conqueror, as there were pigs and ponies in his day, but no cyclists.

One car, or even two, you may overtake with a fiendish burst of speed, but a procession of cyclists, a million strong, ean: defy even the super charged miracles which make advertising a pleasure. SR N W Londen, I garaged my car where, at any hour of the day or night, I might ring up and have it collected or delivered, a service which cost me only 5/- a week. That’s

London for you. Young Bly (she was Bly 957 on her English number-plate, and Bly she remains) was respectably brought up in that gay old city, but now she has joined the thousands of homeless cars, which nightly stand, unlighted, at the kerb. She has grown a vagrant air, her complexion dimmed by wind and weather, but I’m giad it is such a reputable part of the town, where she will learn no evil habits, we I PREFER the English system ~ of numbering cars-three letters, often making a syllable, and three figures. They are easier to memorise than six figures, unless you have the memory of a bridge player. After the 999 Blys had been registered, we moved on to Blz, and after that to Bma (no rela-~ tion to the orthodox in medi-.. cine), and so on. But the authorities, with true British delicacy, skipped a few letters here and there, as they might have embarrassed the more sensitive drivers if rude small boys had spotted them. Ww N the English summer, fF loved to wander off without any fixed plan, knowing © that roof and refreshment for woman and car were available every few miles. I wanted to find out about English villages: if beyond Much aden there was More Haden; uhy Great Gaddesden was smaller than Little Gaddesden; if Nether Wallop was really — lower than Upper Wallop (i was by an inch or two) and

whether battles or butchery had given their name to Upper Slaughter and Lower Slaughter. So I travelled in that haphazard way, secure _ in the knowledge that bed and board were waiting for me somewhere. **You can’t do that in New Zealand,’’ 1 was told. *"Can’t 1?’ Well, T did, but it was very different travelling. VW ILAVE just covered 1500 miles in the South Island, but alas, of that distance, only 60 miles was bitumen. The deep vrooves made by coach and lorry could not be spauned by a little car, and it was between Blenheim and Christchurch that I first encountered the corduroy roads. In England it had been ‘not ‘froses all the way,’’ but bitumen all the way, and Young Bly had never had her tyres on gravel. But for fifty miles around Kaikoura, we jittered over hard

ridges-ridges so even, so perfect in alignment, that I felt sure they had been stamped out by some new and modern roadmaking machine, a first-cousin of the Bulldozer. ¥* HEN I made the acquaintance of the Road Grader. ‘*Oaution ! Grader at work!’’ became a nightmare warning, for I knew that ahead of me I should find that strip of loose gravel, a foot deep, in the middle of the road, or a bit to one side, and if one wheel was not skidding along in it, while the other bounced the ‘ridges, poor Bly was getting gravelrash on the stomach. When at last I came to a stretch of bitumen, I wanted to get out and kiss it. 4 ¥ T was hot and dusty on the Canterbury side, as I drove her on to a long truck at Springfield, and shipped her through the Otira Gorge, which, with unnatural candour, the garage man informed me was ‘‘a bit rough.’’ Having learnt what they considered a good road, I heeded his warning. I was just learning how to ride the ridges, when we plunged through the Alps into the West Coast, and came out into rain, hail, thunder, lightning, eales and floods. T-had to start learning all over again, after two huge engines, one electric and one steam, had juggled the truck with Young Bly perched on it, into the proper siding."

IIERE is base deception about potholes. It is not until you are upon them that you realise that the muddy pool is not solid earth, and in you go with a splash. Here I learnt the Corkscrew Drive, swinging and swaying in quick turns, like . cavalry officcrs in a musical ride. We forded streams with a rush to avoid trouble, having been coached in the art by the boy at the garage. They are full of wisdom, these lads. Several times we had to press hard against the cliff in. some eagle’s aerie that had been turned into a road, and

wait till the gale abated, or we would have been dashed to pieces on the rocks hundreds of feet below. And on one stretch of road bordering the sea, the spume blown in by the. thundering surf was two feet deep, and Bly was spattered with yellow foam as she ploughed her way through, just escaping the wash of the waves by a hatr’s breadth. [HERE is one thing I will say, there is nothing monotonous about motoring in New Zealand. Ij; is not like England, where the smooth ribbon of road goes on and on, having a mesmeric effect, like drawing a chalkline in front of a hen. You may still meet people who dread the Paekakariki hill, a mere 800 feet high, I am told. But down South we thought nothing of taking a couple of 2000-foot ranges in our stride between breakfast and lunch, and some of them seemed like goattracks, making Paekakariki appear but a pleasant undulation, ¥ QNCE I dared to mention that the road was bad, and the man who was filling my tyres, paused in his task to glare at nie. "Bad! The roads are excellent now. The grader hag just been over them.’’ That’s what I meant, but I hadn’t the courage to say so. ' T’know they are doing a’ lot

Fy of good work on the roads just now. I counted 999 hairpin bends on one road, and they had just cut off nine of them, for which I’m grateful. But I wish they would buy more bulidozers and fewer graders. LI wouldn’t have minded those extra nine bends, if only the surface had been less like a river-bed. 24 not really complaining. I know this is a young country. If anyone doesn’t know that fact, he must be deaf. And I realise it is a large country, and it

takes money to make good roads, and a much larger population than we have at present to justify the expense of my beloved bitumen over every mile of it. I kept telling myself that variety is the spice of life, and I was having quantities of it. My chief complaint is that the scenery is magnificent, but the driver can’t see it. There is little chance of looking sideways or skywards when you are mountaineering on wheels, and the grader is about. 9 HAT one bad moment was in the Buller Gorge, when the car suddenly lurched, stayed tilted an instant, and then, with a ripping of metal like the end of the world, she sank back to earth. I had visions of finding most of her in’ards on the ground, and grovelling on all-fours in the mud, I looked at this unfamiliar worm’s-eye view, but I could see no jagged ends; no dangling entrails. Then I discovered a two-foot bar of iron sticking up through the front mudguard. I pulled it out and looked inquiringly, but I had never seen its like before. I decided to try the car, and see if she would go, and gently, in low gear, I crawled along. She went. I took courage, and moved faster, and nothing untoward happened. At the nearest garage I produced my trophy. * «YOUR front tyre picked it up in a groove, and pushed it upwards through the mudguard,’’? the learned garage youth informed me. ‘‘It’s off

a bigger car than yours,"’ he added. ‘*Could it,’’ I asked, ‘‘could it possibly be off a grader?"’ ‘"*A grader? Why??’’ **T just hoped it might. . for spite,’’ I admitted. Once more [I filled up with petrol, and as the bowser pinged off each gallon, I asked: ‘‘Ts the road very bad ahead ?’’ "‘Bad!"’ he repeated. ‘‘It’s in splendid order, the grader has just been over it.’’ I guessed as much, but I did not argue. I would hate te wake a hopeless discontent in such heroic souls,