‘I was that unrestrained child, and can remember hitting my head on the windscreen of a Morris Traveller as it braked hard’
A few days ago, on the hottest day of the year, I was in a traffic snarl-up trying to exit a local steam fair. My Lancia Appia was handling it at all effortlessly, but progress was so glacial I thought I’d cut the engine, to save fuel as much as anything else.
The trouble was, the little V4 wouldn’t restart (because of some issue I’d forgotten with the starter motor) so I asked Mia, my wife, to take the wheel while I pushed for a bump-start. The Appia weighs next to nothing, so not a problem.
So I pushed and heaved and the Lancia rolled forward, but my spouse was seemingly making no attempt to select a gear. When I asked why she said she didn’t know where the gearlever was.
“It’s sticking out of the steering column.”
“You can’t expect me to know about things like that – and it doesn’t say where the gears are.”
“What do you think I’ve been doing with this?” I said, grabbing the foot-long chrome shaft that emerges from the right-hand side of the baby Lancia’s steering column.
It was all my fault, of course, but in the meantime the starter came back to life, so we were off, narrowly avoiding a major incident.
The column gearchange has officially gone the same way as trafficators, suicide doors and crossply tyres, if the sensibilities of the more-than-averagely car-conscious Mrs B are anything to go by. But it got me thinking about other features, fashions and habits of a motoring world long past that many middle-aged people – never mind youngsters – would regard as positively bizarre in 2022. For example, when was the last time you saw anyone ‘feed’ the wheel as they drove around a corner? Power steering killed this off, and there’s no longer the need to sit so close to the wheel to get the leverage.
A now-redundant winter ritual to get the heater to warm up faster was to put newspaper over the front grille. The viscous fan (never mind the electric thermostatic type) was by no means universal even in the early ’70s, so getting your engine up to temperature could be a drawn-out process. Today it feels as relevant as putting Vaseline on your battery terminals or allowing your offspring to travel unrestrained.
I was once that unrestrained child and can vividly recall hitting my head on the ’screen of a Morris Traveller (which had no belts, along with front seats that were free to tip forward) as it braked hard: in those da
