I blame my parents. Raised on a steady diet of Lego, Capsela, Ikea furniture and construction sites, I grew up learning tools by osmosis while my architect Dad built every home we ever lived in. Early learnings were of drawing a straight line freehand with a square-edged carpenter’s pencil, later, finding the sweet spot of the nail with a hammer. Removing screws without burring the thread was non-negotiable, as was the end-of-day ritual of returning tools to exactly the place they had come from. Sweeping, too. Lots of sweeping, with the correct broom. Choice of three, not including the pan and brush. There were always cars too. Not fancy cars but cars we loved, and rarely straying too far from the Volkswagen logo – the Golf, the Passat, a Beetle for my brother, later a GTI and a Polo. Dad would never – not even to this day – allow me to use the ride-on lawnmower, but he would let me drive the red Passat while sitting on his lap, sharing the party-trick manoeuvre of steering the wheel with his knee. The first car I drove solo was in Denmark’s Legoland, circa 1980. Age four and suffering from an undiagnosed case of the mumps, I drove that Lego car around the track unassisted for a good thirty minutes, big mump-y grin ear to ear, and then smack into a thick hedge. I was rescued by a lanky teenager park attendant, kind and smiley. Despite his reassurance I clearly remember feeling annoyed I couldn’t wrangle reverse gear to retract the little Lego beastie from the hedge by myself. When I came to earn my real driver’s licence many years later, my parents found me my first car – a 1978 Golf GLS, five-door, manual transmission and a retrofitted sunroof that in equal measure flickered with the light of the expansive blue Australian sky above and dribbled rain on the blue velour seats like a teething toddler. She was named Daisy, simply because I loved those simple, happy white flowers, and this little German car made me happy, the happy you feel lying on the grass watching clouds drifting across the sky. My Mum taught me to drive – Dad found it way too stressful – but reverse parks were self-taught between Mum’s red Golf and a wheelie bin outside our house. Over and over again until it just flowed. I landed my driver’s licence on the first attempt, late on a Friday afternoon three days after my 17th birthday, and under the scrutiny of my hometown’s most feared driving test instructor Frank who, depending on which version of urban myth you subscribed to, had his own reasons for being known as Cranky Franky, failing potential young P-platers for no reason other than he could. Leaving Daisy to meet Frank, my driver’s door lock suddenly jammed and locked open. With just over ten minutes to the start of my test, I pulled a pen from my school bag and a hairclip out of my ponytail and after a lifetime of minutes, like some girl-Macgyver in school uniform, managed to trick the lock pins open. I still have no idea how it worked, but I made my driving test on time. Just. Later that evening, when I arrived home triumphant with driver’s licence, my Dad confiscated it from me, saying “You can have it back when you’ve shown me you can do a few things”. So after dinner, in the cold garage instead of meeting my friends as planned at school that morning, I proved I could change a tyre unassisted, change the oil, install an air filter.
A lesson in gratitude would be served almost a year later, on a dark night driving home from a friend’s party. Out the back of nowhere and in the dark rain nearing midnight, my little silver Golf suddenly died. Years before ‘mobile phones’ was an actual phrase, I was seriously stranded. Torch between teeth, I worked through all the bits under the bonnet, checking for leaks? connections broken? Clips slipped off or undone? The missing lead was returned to its rightful home in the dizzy cap and I got myself home, late but safe.
That moment, standing in the dark, torch in teeth, realising I was able to find and fix a problem I’d never even known before, that is when my love of the analogue car was born. And tonight, twenty two years later, after scrubbing transmission oil from my hands and stacking a fresh set of spark plugs on the shelf, I thank my parents.
spanners and sparks 