RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32801, 29 December 1971, Page 15

RANDOM REMINDER

LOVE IS .

The thrill of pride at ownership of a first motor-car is seldom receptured in the years which follow. Most of us simply accept the fact that at our disposal there is a machine which gets -us from A' to B much more quickly than, and usually just as safely, as if we walked. But there are a few for whom the motorcar is a thing of genuine beauty; and no-one we have met has such enthusiasm for her car as a North Canterbury lady with whom we have been in correspondence. Mind you, she has something to be proud about she owns an Armstrong-Sid-deley, and her letter was inspired by an invitation she had received to join the Armstrong Siddeley Car Club in New Zealand. She has had the A.S. a good many years, and clearly looks on it as having the characteristics of one of the better forms of life. For some time, she said, it led the life of a lady: house to shops to dental clinics to church fetes- to school . . . and she was a queen. But she had a larger role to play in life. “She had beauty of line, of performance, of sound. But she was perhaps a mite frustrated. She was never fully extended—and I’m not talking about speed. There’s a stretch of road on the way to Hanmer Springs where it was ME who finally "chickened." I won’t say at what speed, but it was well over the ton.” The A.S. became a worker when they bought

ponies for the children. The float weighs 14cwt. Each pony weighs about Bcwt. There are often several hundredweight of assorted objects in the load bales of hay, buckets, chaff, saddles, bridles, parkas, gumboots, spare horse covers. “On a straight pull, this is nothing of course to our “working Queen,” but it’s the hills that (if they could speak) would proclaim her potency. It’s not hard for me, with my imagination, to envisage her tackling the Kilrnog, as she did when we were on our way to the Royal Show in Invercargill. A light of battle in her eye as she approaches, ears flattening back against her mudguards, lips drawn back from her grill to bare her perfect teeth, a smile that could almost be described as a snarl, as she calls on her adrenals to pour surging power into her powerful and perfectly integrated body. The weight behind her becomes dead weight, but with a slight twitch of derision in her ritzy backside, she goes where she is pointed. Forward and up!” “Imagine how my heart ached for her not so long ago. I climbed into "her, switched her on, pressed the starter (she has always started first pop) and an almightly roaring, gnashing, screeching noise was the result—as if she had a most frightful bilious attack. Nervously I tried again. Same result, but to my loving and imaginative ear, it sounded as if all her abdominal works were locked in deadly combat. I rushed to the phone and

rang her private surgeon at the garage. Tow her in,’ he sadly said. “There was no way of disguising from her, that she was shortly to experience, for the first time in her life, humiliation. With the utmost reverence she was hitched to my husband’s Daimler and the 18-mile journey began. But I needn’t have worried. Friends who witnessed the extraordinary phenomenon of HER being towed by IT, tell me that to all appearances, SHE was pushing the Daimler by a rope! Such is her dignity and queenly presence. "The worried surgeon diagnosed a little dampness in her distributor— a

very minor ailment, and in no time she nosed her way graciously from the garage, and proceeded homewards.

The lady with the A.S. had a worse experience more recently. Her husband’s accounting firm does the registrations and she telephoned to get her chassis and engine numbers for the A.S., which is one of a considerable collection of vehicles they own. The little office girl said helpfully “The Armstrong Siddeley? That’s the little van-like one, isn’t it?” The owner was able to tell her, icily, that it was almost identical with a Rolls Royce. She ended her essay on the beauty and virtues of the A.S. by saying she had just been called by her husband. Their tractor has to be pulled, in gear, before the engine will respond. “And guess who tows the tractor?" she wrote “The toffee-nosed Daimler? Guess again." That’s love, that is.