Category: Flashback

I must have been around about 14 years old when I experienced my first taste of driving a car. Countless times beforehand crazy Uncle John had let me sit in his car and pretend to drive, but the ignition had never been on and I was always under strict instructions not to touch the hand brake.

When it finally happened it was Aunty Mary who suggested that I could have a drive of her old style Mini. The car was miniscule compared to the company cars she would drive a few years later – she could have kept a spare Mini in the rear of one of her more modern tanks if she had wanted, rather than a spare tyre.

Mary had told cousin Iain and I, on a trip to some forestry place, that she loved her Mini “because it goes like a wee bomb!” But to this day I cannot see the attraction of the things. They might be cute and toy-like, but being in an accident in one must be terrifiying. Would they even bother cutting you out? I used to wonder – it would be quicker just to bury the car if the worst happened.

Still, Aunty Mary was right – it did “go like a wee bomb” and on that memorable summers evening on the private roads of Inchinnan Industrial Estate, I kangarooed my way towards second gear as she nervously glanced behind us, in front of us and down at what my clumsy feet were doing. Once I was in second gear it was a piece of cake – the little Mini engine would emmit it’s strained, mid-pitch tone and all I had to do was steer.

The brief 20 minutes of my “lesson” seemed to be over all too quickly, and for the most part those minutes were filled with Mary shrieking because I was going too fast, or worrying that some dot on the horizon was a police car! In the excitement of it all I don’t think I realised I was actually driving until we were on the way back to the house, where a bemused uncle Peter gave a wry smile as Mary recanted the adventure.

Long before Uncle John became known as Crazy uncle John, he did some pretty crazy things.

Casting my minds eye back to my childhood, I can remember such delights as him placing a pillow on top of a slightly ajar door so that it would fall onto the next person to enter the room. In this case it was my mother, carrying a plate of spaghetti bolognese, which received the pillow and got uncle John a telling off of great magnitude.

Childhood, or at least my childhood, was pretty good fun with uncle John around. He showed me stuff like how to ink dots onto the page of paperback books so that when you flicked through it looked like the dot was moving. He told me all about the Gemini and Apollo missions with all the intensity that I believed he had been there to witness each blast off. Add to that launching water/air propelled rockets in the park across the road and we have one cool uncle. Into the bargain, he also showed me how to make Hydrogen with a couple of bits of copper wire and a Scalectrix transformer at some point along the way. Not your conventional slippers and pipe uncle by any means.

The particular incident from the title came one lazy afternoon when I had stolen myself away in the attic to read uncle John’s collection of Mad magazines. Whether he still has them or not, I don’t know, but the collection was awesome and although I didn’t always get the gags, I appreciated the way they were put together and the crazy stuff between the covers. Each issue would end with a folding scene on the back cover – most of which had only been partially folded and I was so worried about ruining uncle John’s magazines that I would carefully push the folding points together, trying not to let them crease, before taking a best guess at the odd scene it was depicting. But I digress.

There I am, up the loft, when uncle John comes up to work on some stuff. Not sure what, but I think he was moving boxes around or something – tidying up. After a while of my inane 8 or 9 year old style chatter, uncle John produced a glass cylinder from one of the boxes he was moving around.

Time had slowed to the point where a bird flying nearby seemed suspended in mid air and the sound of the nearby traffic became a low pitched drone. Those few seconds are etched in my minds eye in a way that is so vivid I can almost move the scene around in bullet time – a technique which would become a firm favorite of movie directors some fifteen years later in depicting action scenes and stand-off’s not dissimilar to this one.

My thoughts, although racing, were amazingly clear at the time. I can still hear my heart beat quicken as I made the decision and reached the point of no return – if you’re going to pull a gun on someone you cant exactly change your mind and put it back again. Even after that point, amid the panic and the shouting, even with the instant realization that I’d done the wrong thing, my thoughts were coherent.

“Holey shit was this a mistake.” I said to myself as the two boys, both three years older than myself, backed away holding up their hands. Their faces, I’ll never forget, were masks of disbelief and surprize, with a hint of shock thrown in at how the tables had turned so quickly.

Heck, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t enjoyed the short power trip. Only moments before these two hard men had pounced on my younger friend and I – told us that we were trespassing and that we had to follow them to the office where they would call the police. We had been playing on an abandoned barge which was rusting away to nothing on the boundaries of a yard belonging to a small boat building and maintaining firm. The 16 or 17 year old boys claimed their father owned the boat building yard and that we were in serious trouble for being on the barge.

I suggested we leave – that we would go and not ever come near the barge again. The two boys had smirked and said “No – you’re in deep shit, you’re coming with us.” with the kind of grin that let us know they were savoring every moment of our panic.