Austin 7, more adventures and irreverence!

I had quite a few e-mails about the last post – and a couple of comments too; first of all the car I used in the photo was not meant to be a picture of the actual car we used; that was just something to decorate the page.

The actual car was the same make as the one above which, as you can see, is in really good condition, and the state of the car itself would be more like this one but with wheels.

Those poor old cars and look how they end up – in a ditch. Someone's pride and joy full of chickens.

How did we get the grass into the tyres? Well have a look at the car above and look at the wheels. These were tubed tyres as I don't think tubeless tyres had been invented by then; so the puncture would be a puncture to the inner tube and Pete stuffed the grass in there.

Lots of kids of our age would buy these cars for a few pounds and drive them till they crashed; another time I went with another group of youths, I was a youth myself, into another car and they had put their money together to buy a similar car – maybe about five pounds – and we went for a drive.

This time the driver was less respectful of the car – now don't attack me on this as I can't remember but we managed to get to the side of a railway embankment and drove along the side so we were driving along a 45 degree angle; it was okay for a while but the inevitable happened and we just turned over.

We would have rolled more but a wall stopped us. One of the kids had his arm out of the window so he had a slight injury but apart from that it was a wonderful thrill – a bit like a roller coaster.

We had to get out the one side then we upped and left the car there – on its side.

One of the kids moaned that he had paid money for some petrol but that was it – we didn't know what happened to the car and I don't remember a train coming but we were kids and we were going to live forever.

This was pre-Beatles Britain when the working classes were still touching their forelock to their so called betters; it was during the years of the 13 years of Tory misrule, as Harold Wilson called it, when politicians called their interviewers by their surname only as if they were squaddies in the army and the word 'bloody' was thought of as a shocking thing to say on television and if it was used at all on TV it was reported in the newspapers the next day and people would say what is the world coming to? and we all know that they were right.

People would leave school, in those days, at the age of 15 and were fodder for the factories, the shops or the farms, and the big wide world would swallow them up and keep them there till movies like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, with the wonderful opening lines, said in voice over, don't let the bastards grind you down; the rest is propaganda and people started to realise that they didn't need to take 'that shit.'

It's a great coincidence that the first generation after the call up produced The Beatles and the angry young men led by John Lennon, John Osborne and John Braine; the three Johns, and Alan Sillitoe.

The working classes really didn't get to see John Osborne's Look Back in Anger; we saw Albert Finney in Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and John Braine's Room at the Top and that's where we got our influences from whilst the clever sods got it from Osborne – but we all came together under The Beatles and it lasted till disco and it's audio-orgazmatron bass line dominated things till the punks ended it.

So in a matter of 20 years the UK went from the Victorian values to the sex pistols on the Bill Grundy show and then on to Thatcher's Britain . . . there we are again back with Thatcher's Britain; why does it always end up with her?