TASHY DID - A LIFE
Hey kids, grand-kids, and any other nosey people who are reading these pages, this is for you to read now or sometime in the future. It may tell you a little
about how life was 60 or so years ago and rather more about me. Why am I doing it?
In the years after my father's death, way back in 1981, I kept thinking of things I wished I'd talked to him about. After my mother's death, just over
thirteen years later, there was less of a knowledge-vacuum because mother talked more about her past.
Just recently, my daughter and I unearthed my mother's diaries which went back to 1929, when she was just 13 years old. This reminded me of the 1998
incident with my 6 year old and I decided to put down here the story of my life so my children and grandchildren could, if they wished, read about what I had done. I would use my
memory and those diaries to build a picture from 1949 to the present day and add some personal observations.
So, here we go. Each week we will have a new year with preceding weeks being archived. In the first few years, as I will have less to say, probably, I will
add some info about your grandparents and their parents.
1973
In this year I achieved two firsts. I travelled abroad for the first time and I started my rally driving career. Work was mundane and in July 1973 I finally gave up cricket. It had given me some of the most wonderful moments of my life and I had met, and played with, some great people. However, I could no longer afford to travel up so often. I also had jobs to do in my house. Somehow a local club held little appeal. In my last game I celebrated by hitting the only six of my career in making 28 not out which was also my highest ever score. What else could I do but quit?
Just to leave cricket with two more stories, one also connected to my batting prowess. In 1971 I shared in a stand of 87 in 25 minutes, of which I made one, and if first slip had dived I wouldn’t have got that one. I ran very fast and very often while my batting partner swiped the ball all over the place. Then one Saturday, while my car was being serviced, father took me to a game that was quite near where we lived and the he went home, arranging to come back and pick me up later. It was an all day game so started at 11.00, except it was pouring with rain at that time. We all retired to the bar, which they generously opened early. As I wasn’t driving, I allowed myself a few drinks. The umpires said that they couldn’t officially call the game off until 2pm so we had to wait till then. There were no windows in the bar and when at 1.55pm the umpires came in and said they were ready to start, we couldn’t believe it. Apparently it had stopped raining an hour or so before and the ground dried really quickly. We fielded first and several catches went down as our players couldn’t decide which of the two balls they saw they should catch. Bowling was easier and by the time we batted only one ball was visible and we won the game. There is a moral there somewhere but I have no idea what it is. It was fun.
When my wife and I knew we couldn’t afford a honeymoon, we decided to go abroad the following year and my wife’s two best friends, who were also a couple, would come with us. Spain was chosen as the destination and we would have two weeks in a villa in a place called Javea. They were going to fly down and hire a car but, at this stage in my life, I had no desire to put my life in someone else’s hands, 30,000 feet above solid land. Eventually we both decided to drive and take two cars. This also extended our holiday to three weeks as we were going to take a quiet drive down.
Two days before we due to leave, my wife’s sister rang me at work. Their mother was going into hospital to have an emergency operation. They didn’t want to spoil my wife’s holiday, mine was of lesser concern, so they didn’t want her told but could I keep in touch to find out how things were. It was agreed that the sister would keep my mum up-to-date with things and I would phone my mother to check. What I was supposed to do, and the reaction I would receive, if something went wrong, no one seemed to have thought through.
So, on day two of the holiday, I went off to find a phone to call my mother. Fortunately the operation was a success and my mother-in-law was making a slow recovery. When I got back to my wife and our friends, they spent some time making fun of the fact that I couldn’t be away from my mother for two days without having to call her. The fact is I might have done so anyway. I see nothing wrong with that. Unless she knew, she would worry, so why give her stress that a simple call could stop. However, the fact that I had done it for a different reason and couldn’t say anything, hurt an awful lot.
This then continued, probably every other day, for the whole fortnight and so did the ridicule. When we got back and my wife found out the true reason for my calls there was not one word of an apology and certainly no thanks. I had been subject to their laughter but also I had been under considerable strain wondering what should be done if, as a result of one call, matters had worsened. It appeared that the decision as to how to react would have been left to me.
One of the reasons that I had such a great relationship with my mother, and indeed my parents, was because I accepted them for who they were. Mother needed to know, for her own peace of mind, what was happening. My sister, on the other hand, I can only describe as being very deceitful and would go out of her way to keep much of her life secret. Mother was very hurt by many things that went on and would often be on the phone to me, in tears, asking why my sister was being so horrible. In truth, while she was most deceitful, she wasn't necessarily horrible. They each had their own way of behaving but neither considered the other.
Later on that holiday, the laugh was, however, on me. On the drive down and back each of us took it in turns to lead. The leader had maps and addresses of where we were staying for that night. On the first day of the drive back, from Javea to Barcelona, our friend had sped off first despite the fact that I was the designated leader. He intended, he said, to wait at the main road but he didn’t actually know which main road. We drove around a bit trying to find them but when we couldn’t, we just drove on to Barcelona and booked into our hotel. They knew we were going to Barcelona so did the same thing but had no idea which hotel and where it was. Eventually, we got a call from reception saying our friends were on the phone wanting to know where we were. How had they found the hotel? By phoning my mother because she was the only person who had wanted to know all places we were staying at in case she needed me.
I know my mother was over protective and a worrier but in many cases a simple call would put her mind at rest. I had no problem with it. The cries of “don’t be tied to her” hurt but wouldn’t change me. She was my mother and all of her concerns were there because she cared about me and loved me. I used to calm myself down when these criticisms were made by telling myself that I knew I had the best parents in the world. I accepted their strange behaviour as I knew it was built on love and I still think this to this day.
It was on this holiday that our friends decided to teach me to swim. They said the Mediterranean was particularly good for buoyancy. I wasn’t. I had swimming lessons at some schools but had never succeeded in managing this skill, horizontally anyway; vertical swimming was a bit of a speciality of mine. I wasn’t, as some are, frightened of the water, as long as it didn’t come above my head when standing. I just couldn’t do the swimming bit. Our friend suggested I should sit in the shallow water, to coin his phrase “bumsy on the ground, tootsies in the air”, and then wait for the tide to float me out. The Med isn’t very tidal anyway and so this failed. Later, on subsequent holidays, I tried in more tidal waters. Bravely adopting his preferred posture, I would wait for the waves to come in. Without fail, when they went out I was still “bumsy on the ground, tootsies in the air”, but spluttering quite a bit. If I did evolve from sea creatures, I had forgotten something about my evolutionary process or maybe just skipped that bit.
Returning to the honeymoon, if you can honeymoon with another couple, we stayed in a villa on a site in Javea. It was late September and the end of the holiday season. One night, in a very quiet bar, the barmen decided to make us free cocktails just to work on their skills in this area. We, in turn walked back to our villa later that night after consuming rather too many cocktails, walking alongside the pool, just to show our skills in that area. Our friend managed an angle of about 45° when walking alongside. We also spent a lovely evening at a brand new club, the Hacienda if you wish to see if it is still there. We arrived at 10pm and stayed for two hours in the company of the staff. No one else turned up. Now I know from my later clubbing life in Poland that some Europeans don’t go out till after midnight so maybe we misjudged the best hours or maybe it really was the end of the season.
One more story about mother concerns her driving ability. An aunt left her some money and as she now lived in the country she felt she needed her own car. She bought a brand new automatic Mini on 11 April 1973. On 12 April of the same year, I got a tearful call from mother saying she had parked it on the neighbour’s wall. I’m not sure, as I was at work, what I should do but there we are. It turns out that the car had an automatic choke and when she drove up her driveway and turned left on to the main road the car was running faster than it should and instead of a 90° left she had done 180° one. The car was prised off, the wall rebuilt and mother drove that car for another 20 years, although she did have a few more accidents. Needless to say this accident was father’s fault although I can’t remember why. By the way, mother spent her whole driving career with a full licence but having never taken a test as these were introduced for all people who had started driving after 1 April 1934; she began in September 1933.
Now to the rally driving. 16 years after I first decided I wanted to be a racing driver, I began my competition career in rallying. I had almost started in 1970 as my father had two rather wealthy friends who fancied doing the London to Mexico marathon. We were to use my car and they would meet all the costs. Sadly, one was a commercial pilot and couldn’t wangle enough time off work. This time it all came about because, and you will need to concentrate to follow this, my wife’s ex-boyfriend was still friends with her best friends. With it? He fancied rallying and the outcome was that we met, we hit it off and things began to happen. We would use my car so there was no way I wasn’t going to be the driver. He, though, was mechanically excellent. His job was to do anything mechanical that was needed and then to navigate us to victory.
First, we both needed a competition licence but that was pretty easy. Then we made some improvements to the car. We added full harness seat belts which made back seat passenger travel rather awkward as the mounting points for the shoulder straps were under the rear seat back and so came up through the rear seat, where today you will find the mounting point for a rear seat belt. Since the only person who travelled in the back was mother-in-law, we coped. We added another set of spotlights across the grille, a sump-guard and made some modifications to the engine but don’t ask me what. It performed better is all I knew. The extra spotlights caused a problem as, on our first rally, the battery nearly went flat. This resulted in another battery being fitted in the boot, working in series with the original one.
Over the next three years we competed regularly, probably every other weekend. We had two wins, a couple of seconds, some scary failures and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I think I also realised that, for several reasons, this was as far as I would go. Whether my navigator/mechanic enjoyed things quite so much I cannot say but he did have one major problem; he suffered from car sickness. In those days we competed in road rallies, surprisingly held on the road, and being mainly a test of navigation with a few selectives on private roads, and stage rallies, usually held in forests around the country. On the forest stages, his sickness was awkward but I could at least see where we were going next even if I had less warning than others. On road rallies, things were more difficult as I would sometimes have to read the map and drive. The scary bit was when, in 1974 on a stage rally and with sickness prevailing, during a night stage, we somehow found ourselves entering a control from the wrong direction and it was extremely lucky we had met no cars bombing along in the opposite direction. For anyone who would like to know how close they were to a disaster, this was the Crowsfoot Rally, held somewhere in Hampshire.
We eventually retired, I think, in 1976 when, on a road rally in the local area we were the first car to arrive at a very serious accident. Basically, we arrived at the same time as the police, to find a blazing car at the side of the road. We stopped but, the officer said there was nothing that could be done and he didn’t want the road blocked, so we drove on. I guess it was about midnight. The next day, in the local paper, I found out it was 4 teenagers who had been killed in that car. Initial thoughts probably went to them having had too many drinks after a party. Nothing could have been further from the truth. They had been hit and forced off the road, if my memory serves me, by a drunk who was driving his car on the wrong side with no lights on. The reason the police were there so quickly was that he had already hit a few other cars, less seriously, and they were looking for him.
When rallying at night on public roads, I always relied on being able to see other cars by spotting headlights well ahead of me. In this case, I suddenly realised, I would have seen nothing. I immediately phoned my friend, who lived in London, and told him I was quitting. By then, my daughter was 18 months old and I decided it was a risk too far. I have never driven competitively again, although I have taken part in, and organised, some car treasure hunts over the years.
In this year I achieved two firsts. I travelled abroad for the first time and I started my rally driving career. Work was mundane and in July 1973 I finally gave up cricket. It had given me some of the most wonderful moments of my life and I had met, and played with, some great people. However, I could no longer afford to travel up so often. I also had jobs to do in my house. Somehow a local club held little appeal. In my last game I celebrated by hitting the only six of my career in making 28 not out which was also my highest ever score. What else could I do but quit?
Just to leave cricket with two more stories, one also connected to my batting prowess. In 1971 I shared in a stand of 87 in 25 minutes, of which I made one, and if first slip had dived I wouldn’t have got that one. I ran very fast and very often while my batting partner swiped the ball all over the place. Then one Saturday, while my car was being serviced, father took me to a game that was quite near where we lived and the he went home, arranging to come back and pick me up later. It was an all day game so started at 11.00, except it was pouring with rain at that time. We all retired to the bar, which they generously opened early. As I wasn’t driving, I allowed myself a few drinks. The umpires said that they couldn’t officially call the game off until 2pm so we had to wait till then. There were no windows in the bar and when at 1.55pm the umpires came in and said they were ready to start, we couldn’t believe it. Apparently it had stopped raining an hour or so before and the ground dried really quickly. We fielded first and several catches went down as our players couldn’t decide which of the two balls they saw they should catch. Bowling was easier and by the time we batted only one ball was visible and we won the game. There is a moral there somewhere but I have no idea what it is. It was fun.
When my wife and I knew we couldn’t afford a honeymoon, we decided to go abroad the following year and my wife’s two best friends, who were also a couple, would come with us. Spain was chosen as the destination and we would have two weeks in a villa in a place called Javea. They were going to fly down and hire a car but, at this stage in my life, I had no desire to put my life in someone else’s hands, 30,000 feet above solid land. Eventually we both decided to drive and take two cars. This also extended our holiday to three weeks as we were going to take a quiet drive down.
Two days before we due to leave, my wife’s sister rang me at work. Their mother was going into hospital to have an emergency operation. They didn’t want to spoil my wife’s holiday, mine was of lesser concern, so they didn’t want her told but could I keep in touch to find out how things were. It was agreed that the sister would keep my mum up-to-date with things and I would phone my mother to check. What I was supposed to do, and the reaction I would receive, if something went wrong, no one seemed to have thought through.
So, on day two of the holiday, I went off to find a phone to call my mother. Fortunately the operation was a success and my mother-in-law was making a slow recovery. When I got back to my wife and our friends, they spent some time making fun of the fact that I couldn’t be away from my mother for two days without having to call her. The fact is I might have done so anyway. I see nothing wrong with that. Unless she knew, she would worry, so why give her stress that a simple call could stop. However, the fact that I had done it for a different reason and couldn’t say anything, hurt an awful lot.
This then continued, probably every other day, for the whole fortnight and so did the ridicule. When we got back and my wife found out the true reason for my calls there was not one word of an apology and certainly no thanks. I had been subject to their laughter but also I had been under considerable strain wondering what should be done if, as a result of one call, matters had worsened. It appeared that the decision as to how to react would have been left to me.
One of the reasons that I had such a great relationship with my mother, and indeed my parents, was because I accepted them for who they were. Mother needed to know, for her own peace of mind, what was happening. My sister, on the other hand, I can only describe as being very deceitful and would go out of her way to keep much of her life secret. Mother was very hurt by many things that went on and would often be on the phone to me, in tears, asking why my sister was being so horrible. In truth, while she was most deceitful, she wasn't necessarily horrible. They each had their own way of behaving but neither considered the other.
Later on that holiday, the laugh was, however, on me. On the drive down and back each of us took it in turns to lead. The leader had maps and addresses of where we were staying for that night. On the first day of the drive back, from Javea to Barcelona, our friend had sped off first despite the fact that I was the designated leader. He intended, he said, to wait at the main road but he didn’t actually know which main road. We drove around a bit trying to find them but when we couldn’t, we just drove on to Barcelona and booked into our hotel. They knew we were going to Barcelona so did the same thing but had no idea which hotel and where it was. Eventually, we got a call from reception saying our friends were on the phone wanting to know where we were. How had they found the hotel? By phoning my mother because she was the only person who had wanted to know all places we were staying at in case she needed me.
I know my mother was over protective and a worrier but in many cases a simple call would put her mind at rest. I had no problem with it. The cries of “don’t be tied to her” hurt but wouldn’t change me. She was my mother and all of her concerns were there because she cared about me and loved me. I used to calm myself down when these criticisms were made by telling myself that I knew I had the best parents in the world. I accepted their strange behaviour as I knew it was built on love and I still think this to this day.
It was on this holiday that our friends decided to teach me to swim. They said the Mediterranean was particularly good for buoyancy. I wasn’t. I had swimming lessons at some schools but had never succeeded in managing this skill, horizontally anyway; vertical swimming was a bit of a speciality of mine. I wasn’t, as some are, frightened of the water, as long as it didn’t come above my head when standing. I just couldn’t do the swimming bit. Our friend suggested I should sit in the shallow water, to coin his phrase “bumsy on the ground, tootsies in the air”, and then wait for the tide to float me out. The Med isn’t very tidal anyway and so this failed. Later, on subsequent holidays, I tried in more tidal waters. Bravely adopting his preferred posture, I would wait for the waves to come in. Without fail, when they went out I was still “bumsy on the ground, tootsies in the air”, but spluttering quite a bit. If I did evolve from sea creatures, I had forgotten something about my evolutionary process or maybe just skipped that bit.
Returning to the honeymoon, if you can honeymoon with another couple, we stayed in a villa on a site in Javea. It was late September and the end of the holiday season. One night, in a very quiet bar, the barmen decided to make us free cocktails just to work on their skills in this area. We, in turn walked back to our villa later that night after consuming rather too many cocktails, walking alongside the pool, just to show our skills in that area. Our friend managed an angle of about 45° when walking alongside. We also spent a lovely evening at a brand new club, the Hacienda if you wish to see if it is still there. We arrived at 10pm and stayed for two hours in the company of the staff. No one else turned up. Now I know from my later clubbing life in Poland that some Europeans don’t go out till after midnight so maybe we misjudged the best hours or maybe it really was the end of the season.
One more story about mother concerns her driving ability. An aunt left her some money and as she now lived in the country she felt she needed her own car. She bought a brand new automatic Mini on 11 April 1973. On 12 April of the same year, I got a tearful call from mother saying she had parked it on the neighbour’s wall. I’m not sure, as I was at work, what I should do but there we are. It turns out that the car had an automatic choke and when she drove up her driveway and turned left on to the main road the car was running faster than it should and instead of a 90° left she had done 180° one. The car was prised off, the wall rebuilt and mother drove that car for another 20 years, although she did have a few more accidents. Needless to say this accident was father’s fault although I can’t remember why. By the way, mother spent her whole driving career with a full licence but having never taken a test as these were introduced for all people who had started driving after 1 April 1934; she began in September 1933.
Now to the rally driving. 16 years after I first decided I wanted to be a racing driver, I began my competition career in rallying. I had almost started in 1970 as my father had two rather wealthy friends who fancied doing the London to Mexico marathon. We were to use my car and they would meet all the costs. Sadly, one was a commercial pilot and couldn’t wangle enough time off work. This time it all came about because, and you will need to concentrate to follow this, my wife’s ex-boyfriend was still friends with her best friends. With it? He fancied rallying and the outcome was that we met, we hit it off and things began to happen. We would use my car so there was no way I wasn’t going to be the driver. He, though, was mechanically excellent. His job was to do anything mechanical that was needed and then to navigate us to victory.
First, we both needed a competition licence but that was pretty easy. Then we made some improvements to the car. We added full harness seat belts which made back seat passenger travel rather awkward as the mounting points for the shoulder straps were under the rear seat back and so came up through the rear seat, where today you will find the mounting point for a rear seat belt. Since the only person who travelled in the back was mother-in-law, we coped. We added another set of spotlights across the grille, a sump-guard and made some modifications to the engine but don’t ask me what. It performed better is all I knew. The extra spotlights caused a problem as, on our first rally, the battery nearly went flat. This resulted in another battery being fitted in the boot, working in series with the original one.
Over the next three years we competed regularly, probably every other weekend. We had two wins, a couple of seconds, some scary failures and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I think I also realised that, for several reasons, this was as far as I would go. Whether my navigator/mechanic enjoyed things quite so much I cannot say but he did have one major problem; he suffered from car sickness. In those days we competed in road rallies, surprisingly held on the road, and being mainly a test of navigation with a few selectives on private roads, and stage rallies, usually held in forests around the country. On the forest stages, his sickness was awkward but I could at least see where we were going next even if I had less warning than others. On road rallies, things were more difficult as I would sometimes have to read the map and drive. The scary bit was when, in 1974 on a stage rally and with sickness prevailing, during a night stage, we somehow found ourselves entering a control from the wrong direction and it was extremely lucky we had met no cars bombing along in the opposite direction. For anyone who would like to know how close they were to a disaster, this was the Crowsfoot Rally, held somewhere in Hampshire.
We eventually retired, I think, in 1976 when, on a road rally in the local area we were the first car to arrive at a very serious accident. Basically, we arrived at the same time as the police, to find a blazing car at the side of the road. We stopped but, the officer said there was nothing that could be done and he didn’t want the road blocked, so we drove on. I guess it was about midnight. The next day, in the local paper, I found out it was 4 teenagers who had been killed in that car. Initial thoughts probably went to them having had too many drinks after a party. Nothing could have been further from the truth. They had been hit and forced off the road, if my memory serves me, by a drunk who was driving his car on the wrong side with no lights on. The reason the police were there so quickly was that he had already hit a few other cars, less seriously, and they were looking for him.
When rallying at night on public roads, I always relied on being able to see other cars by spotting headlights well ahead of me. In this case, I suddenly realised, I would have seen nothing. I immediately phoned my friend, who lived in London, and told him I was quitting. By then, my daughter was 18 months old and I decided it was a risk too far. I have never driven competitively again, although I have taken part in, and organised, some car treasure hunts over the years.
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