Routinely riding a motorcycle when I was in my teens, after a ‘near miss’ accident I decided to switch to cars. I didn’t get very far when the old jalopy I had bought more or less gave up the ghost. In fact I had to pay a not inconsiderable sum to have it towed to the wreckers. My chemistry laboratory job at the time was twenty miles from where I then lived in Northallerton, a small town in a rural area of North Yorkshire England. One of my co-workers lived in the same town and offered me a ride on his motorcycle until I could buy another car. He rode I was to discover very fast indeed. Having at the time fairly recently survived a ‘near miss’ motorcycle crash of my own making, I was thus rather hesitant to ride pillion * on someone else’s bike. This especially because I had a pillion passenger aboard in my accident. Fortunately and unlike me, he was unhurt. I wound up in hospital for a brief stay. However given there was no public transport available from where I had moved to anywhere close to the chemical factory where we worked, I decided to chance it, bite the bullet so to speak and ride pillion with him until, assuming I survived, I could afford a better car.
If the road was good and dry, my friend and work colleague it turned out and to my chagrin, made a habit of ‘doing the ton’ i.e 100 mph, at least once every trip all five work days each week and in both directions! He was particularly pleased one morning when he advised while we were stationary at a traffic light just after the ‘ton run’ on his favourite straight stretch of road for the purpose, that we had in fact just hit 105 mph! In the time it took for the traffic light to switch from red to green the front tire we discovered had gone totally flat! To say that I might not have been around and writing this is an understatement. Losing a motorbike rear tire’s pressure at a very high speed is bad enough, losing the front one is almost certainly likely to be curtains! The traffic light’s fortuitously long cycle along with the stationary front tire deflation had saved our bacon and with it quite possibly one or both of our lives.
My aged jalopy of a car having proven to be not worth the cost of repairing, I subsequently moved residence to within a short bus ride of my job! I concluded that living at home twenty miles from my work was ridiculous and given my friend’s routine 100 mph rides, far too dangerous. Aged nineteen at the time, it was the first time I had lived away from home. I worked as a laboratory assistant in a then very large chemical manufacturing factory, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) now long since defunct, where I was a laboratory assistant. Analytical chemistry and all that.
Renting an apartment proved to be too expensive given the minimalist ‘slave’ wage I was earning at ICI. Instead, as the Brits rather oddly described it, I rented a ‘bed sitting room’ in a very large if aged house. The room’s ‘furnishings’ were minimalist to say the least. A bed, a shared washroom, a table, an electric fireplace along with an electric cooking stove and a couple of chairs was about it. Winter had arrived in full on characteristic north of England storm bedevilled north sea oceanic force. The coastal town was Redcar in north eastern Yorkshire. It was a coastal resort town. A last resort as the Brit comedians of the time described it and others of the ilk and likely the current generation thereof now do. The ice cold winter winds rarely ceased, coming mostly off the notoriously shallow and hence rough north sea ** which was literally across the road. (I’m ‘talking’ 25 metres away at high tide.) To stay warm I had to keep on putting the UK’s coin money into an electricity meter more or less ad infinitum. However, I made a very fortunate discovery. If I went to the nearest pub just down the road which was of course heated and cosy, it was much cheaper to drink beer all night in concert with the vocal, friendly and generally beer drinking company, than it was to put money into the bed sitting room’s electric heater coin slot. Problem solved!
- See also on my website my story – ‘A Very Close Call. I Might Not Have Been Writing This’.
** The North Sea is relatively shallow which generally equates with rough surface conditions in high winds.
What is a jalopy?
A jalopy is an old car that isn’t working very well. One would never call a new, smooth-running car a jalopy. There are a lot of insulting words in English, mostly for people! This insult is for a car: a jalopy is essentially a run-down, beat-up, falling apart car that needs to go to the wreckers and be replaced.