RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31365, 10 May 1967, Page 42

RANDOM REMINDER

COMMUNITY OF INTEREST

There was a lesson to be learned, somewhere, in the incident which occurred in Cathedral Square two or three weeks ago. The Square has long been a battleground on which the guardians of the law, both those with helmets and those with leggings, have done their best to stem the tide of young ladies and young gentlemen with hair and clothing styles so unorthodox but so general as to become orthodox, and equally spectacular ideas of how to spend a Sunday afternoon or evening. The men in uniform are limited in numbers; the other side

seeing to have ample reinforcements and recruits. The mods and the rookers troop their queer colours in the centre of the city regularly at weekends, and win little affection from the old fuddyduddy bus-passenger citizens, or Square squares. But much u one mey loathe the racket the teenagers make as they roar their machines round and round, there io something to admire in the skill and ingenuity of the owners, who have coaxed into vigorous life vehicles which seem to have been culled from a motoring graveyard. Fuel and transmission systems may mean more to them than the

road code, but they are learned in the ways of the wayward motor-car.

It is, one must admit, a creative activity of a sort, and perhaps it could be developed on less irritating lines. In the Square, on. the day we have in mind, a new and splendid car owned by the City Council traffic department broke down. Up came the bonnet and up. too, came the long-haired gentry, and others. And the heads in the bonnet, making the scene rather like an anxious moment at Blair General Hospital, belonged to the uniformed officers, the mods and the rockers. All, for a moment at least, at peace with each other.