We All Bumped Our Heads

A Memory of Cowley.

At sixteen I owned a three wheeler convertible that with a bit of bending of the law sixteen year olds were allowed to drive. Plus the fact that the coppers didn't know how the law stood exactly. The car was a Powerdrive, coming towards you it looked like a sports car, going away it looked and sounded like a motor boat. It had a twin two stroke engine, chain driven and was too heavy. It should have been called the Under Powerdrive, but it looked good for a sixteen year old to be driving anyway. To make it legal for me to drive it, the car had to weigh under 8 cwt. I took every thing I could of the car, like the spare wheel, bumpers and the bench seat. I drove onto the weigh bridge at Brentford with an empty petrol tank, but it was still over 8 cwt. I explained my predicament to the young feller operating the weigh bridge whose boss was at lunch. No problem he said and moved the arm along and stamped out the card. It was official a government department said so. My Powerdrive weighed less than eight cwt. The other requirement was that it should not had a reverse gear, it did but the gear shift ran through a slot on the dash board. I screwed in a metal block to shut off the revers slot, but could easily be removed when needed. Did it make it legal, probably note, but as I said the police were not too sure about it any way. What they were sure of is that the learner driver had to be accompanied with a qualified driver at all time. That and the lack of a current tax disk was something they never tired of nicking me for. What with paying off my fines I could never catch up with buying the next tax disk. Eventually I lost my license for six months, this was for allowing a mate to drive the car and he didn't have insurance. We never thought of it, he had a motor bike with insurance , but that didn't count.

I sold the car and spent the next six months working, never going out and saving every penny for a proper car. Once I got my license back I would be over seventeen, I also read the highway code daily.  
I wasn't going to buy a car until I had past my test, so I needed to pass first time. I booked a test for a week after I got my license back. I also booked into the West Drayton driving school at a pound an hour and told him I'd have as many lessons as needed in that week. We went out for two hours the first night, had another two hours a couple of days later and then it was the day of the test. The test was at Isleworth, a testing station my instructor had never been to before. I spent a hour driving round the streets of Islworth and then it was time for the test. Six pound and six hours and I'd passed why hadn't I done this in the fist place.

I brought a 1954 Vauxhall Velox that I had my eye on and I asked a girl out from work that I had my eye on too. That Saturday night the girl, my mate and his girl were in the Velox driving from Langley down Iver Lane. This car was not under powered, I put my foot down and we were spinning along. We went over the first river bridge and I new we had to slow down, before I new it we were going over the canal bridge at the Shovel Pub. This bridge had more of a hump. All four wheels left the ground, when the car came down all four inside were still going up. We all hit our heads on the inside roof of the car. I managed to keep the car on the road, not easy as there as slight right bend on the far side of the bridge. This incident reminded me that driving is not a game and has to be taken seriously.