Short fiction: Don't Let Your World Be Grey

A portrait on a summer terrace

My phone rang when I was on the loo.

“I’m working for The Guardian,” he announced.

Well good for you, I thought.

“Yes?” I asked. I had noticed the toilet roll was used up and was wondering whether I dared call my wife for assistance.

“I am calling about your uncle’s obituary,” he said.

“He is not dead,” I replied.

He let out the most appalling laugh, the sort of loud, fluting sound one might hear from malign bird in a malarial swamp somewhere. “No, no, you misunderstand,” he said. “We have a file of obituaries ready for press, just in case. Naturally we get them down off the shelf and dust them off a little now and then, to make sure they’re ready to use if we need them.”

My uncle was in fact frail, but I doubted if he knew that. “I don’t think there is much to add,” I said. “He stopped painting quite suddenly when he was a young man and told no-one why, as you will know. He went to teach in a secondary modern in the North-East. Frankly he did nothing of note thereafter.”

Albert_Edelfelt (1854-1905), The Parisienne (Virginie),1883

“I understand.” He paused a moment. “I should say that I do also write, now and then, on art. I have therefore been able to add certain details, and it may be wise if they’re checked. Besides, obituary apart, one should love to know why things ended as they did.”

“He’s told no-one in 60 years,” I said, “and I doubt he will tell me now. But if you wish you may send me a text with your name, in case that should change.” I thought for a moment. “Perhaps you would email me a copy of the obituary you have?” I asked. “It will be fastest for me simply to check it, and update it if necessary.”

“I shall. Thank you,” he said, and emitted another avian shriek. Any man with a laugh like that, I thought, must surely dismember small mammals in the night.

He rang off. I heard my wife’s footsteps in the kitchen outside.

“Jane, darling!” I called.

“In the cupboard above you,” she said wearily.

*

He did send the draft obituary and I sat down at my desk to read it. The main facts of Uncle Tom’s life were known to me, of course. Birth in postwar austerity, in a coastal coal village in the North-East  where the seams went out under the sea. (“It was a shithole,” he told me once, when I was in my teens. “But the people were OK, weren’t they, Uncle Tom?” I asked, almost anxious. “It was a shithole,” he repeated.) The father whose chest was weak, and took what work he could; the mother who’d borne three boys before him, all three of whom worked in the mine like the rest of the village and did not live to be old. Then the art master who saw something he did not expect. The scholarship to art college. The loan of a King’s Road studio. The shock of The Dying God, which was still in the Museum of Modern Art, though they rarely hung it. The summer in Tuscany with the Contessa Clara della Rovercella, whose portrait he was to have painted, but did not. The…

“What?” said Jane. She came into my study, wiping glue off her hands; she had been mending a teacup.

“Who,” I asked, “was, or is, the Contessa Clara della Rovercella?”

“I have heard that name.” She sat down on the edge of the sofa, avoiding the books and papers strewn there. “Wasn’t she some fashionable socialite back in the 1960s? Often seen in the art world, I think.”

“According to this, he was to have painted her. But didn’t.”

“Why don’t you search her?”

I did. A string of results came up, but most were old newspaper headlines, some in Italian or German. The Wikipedia item was only two or three paragraphs; it confirmed that she had been a noted socialite and added that she was a patron and collector of modern art. The faded news pictures suggested that she had been quite lovely. The birth date was uncertain.

“It seems Uncle Tom spent a summer in Tuscany with her,” I said. “And she was rather beautiful.”

“My goodness. She was, wasn’t she,” said Jane, looking over my shoulder.“ Is she still alive?”

“No.” A brief obituary had appeared in The Times about 30 years earlier.

“Well, fancy the crafty old sod not mentioning her,” I said. “I’m going to see him on Saturday. I shall ask him about it.”

“Are you sure you should?” she asked.

*

I never liked visiting Uncle Tom; but that was not his fault. He had been kind to me when I was a child. I remembered sitting on his knee and daubing the rough grey paper he always put on his easel so that I could play. In later years he said little, but always welcomed me, and later Jane too, when we passed through the North-East on our way to Scotland. Even now he greeted me warmly. But he said less than ever, and the care home depressed me; a converted Edwardian businessman’s home, large, detached, extended, in its own grounds, yet somehow lacking in warmth. The staff were kind but busy. When he had moved at last from his cottage, some well-meaning soul found an old easel in it, and brought it down to stand in his room; but at first the staff stood it in front of the window, where it blocked off his light until I moved it. Now that he could no longer easily get out of bed, a nurse would come to help him to the toilet – a quick, clinical process that I felt must depress him though he gave no sign of it. I blessed the older nurse who, as she helped him, always talked to him about something else; the weather, the World Cup, a volcano lately erupted in Indonesia. He knew why she did it and she knew he knew but that was not the point and he liked her for it, and so did I.

I parked, and picked up the The Economist, which I always brought for him though I was unsure if he still read it, and a recent detective novel whose author he had said he liked. I went into the hall, signed my name and my time of arrival and jotted down my number plate. In his room, I found him lying back on the pillows; lately he had begun to sleep more in the day, but today he was wide awake.

“Thought you’d come today,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s raining. You can’t work in the garden, can you? And Jane can’t drag you out shopping. So you come round here.”

“Still a Northerner, aren’t you, Uncle Tom,” I said.

“How is she, all right?”

“She’s good,” I said.

“She’s not good. She’s well,” he said. “Silly modern language.”

 “All the same in the end, isn’t it,” I said.

“I know that. But that’s me, isn’t it. When I finally bugger off, they’ll all say what a grumpy old man I was,” he said. “Right to the end.”

“That’s it. Grumpy Old Sod Dies at 110, it’ll say on your obit,” I said.

“Obit of me! No bugger’s going to bother, I’ll tell you that now,” he said.

“You’d be surprised,” I said. “Matter of fact I meant to tell you. I got this call from a man at The Guardian on Thursday. He was a little odd.”

“Well, he would be, from The Guardian, wouldn’t he. What did a bloke from the papers want with you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “He was interested in you.”

“Oh.”

He looked at me, and there was a sudden caution.

“He was updating your obituary,” I said.

“I’m not dead yet, the cheeky sod.”

”I did tell him that. But they update and fact-check them now and then.”

“So I suppose it was all about how I was born in a blast furnace and sent down the mine when I were nine years old and made to torture pit ponies,” he said.

“Didn’t know about the ponies. I’ll tell him.” I took out the printout of the draft obit. “One thing I meant to ask you. Who was the Contessa della Rovercella?”

He looked at me again but said nothing, and his face was like thunder. Then he looked away, and his face seemed to soften and split into many parts.

“She was,” he said, “beautiful.”

*

“it was the year I painted The Dying God. Roddy Miles-Brett had lent me his studio in the King’s Road. He hadn’t been painting much that spring. I had told him I wanted to paint this allegory, of a God disintegrating – into artefacts… Cogs and nuts and suchlike and a TV. But you’ve seen it, haven’t you? It was that April it came to me. It was the famous Time  cover that month. Is God Dead? it said, in stark red letters on a black background. Its articles asked, had Nietzsche been right? Had the selfish nature of Man destroyed God? Did we now seek a theology without religion? The cover, and the issue, was a scandal at the time.

“In any case, I was finishing the piece. It was a late afternoon in May; we had had cold weather that spring, but that day was warm and there was that very clean light, so unlike the summer in London then, and it was streaming through the skylight, although it was coated in grime; the air was dirty then. I was in a good mood as the work was nearly done. I caught a feminine scent on the air, and turned round. Roddy was standing there, in his brown tweed herringbone jacket and his green tie, his hair just a little too long. And with him was a slim woman of about thirty in a white summer dress, her hair a thick, glossy chestnut, her eyes a deep blue, her face split by a challenging, brilliant smile; and there was a delicacy, a compelling femininity about her. My heart flew, and I at once felt like a clumsy hulk in her presence; a Caliban, or Grendel.

“’Thomas,’ said Roddy, ‘this is the Contessa Maria Clara della Rovercella.’

“’Really, Roddy,’ she said, smiling, ‘Chiara will do.’ Her voice was low and smooth. And I swear my bowels turned to water.”

He stopped for a moment then, and his head relaxed back onto the pillow; I wondered if he had lost the thread. I was about to prompt him, but he continued:

“’What on earth is that painting about?’ she asked, and I replied, ‘It’s called The Dying God.’ Her eyes opened wide. ‘Oh, my goodness me,’ she said, and crossed herself.

“Clara is a good Catholic girl,’ said Roddy.

“‘Oh, do shut up, Roddy,’ she said, and hit his arm with her glove; but she started laughing. Then she stopped, and turned to me. ‘Will you tell me about it?’ she asked. ‘If you wish. If you do not insist – as some do? – that a piece speak for itself.’

“So I began to explain – about Nietzsche’s phrase, about what he had meant by it and what he did not, that he did not propose a literal death of God. And I talked about the recent Time cover, and where theology could go in a world where the spiritual dimension was being ripped away. She seemed to follow me closely, asking a question or prompting briefly here or there. After some time Roddy tried to interrupt, fearful I think that she would be bored; but she shushed him gently. I felt the entire object of her attention; I would find that she could do that, and you would reveal to her your very soul.

“In the weeks that followed I saw her now and then, at exhibitions, or at picnics on the river, or garden parties with other former students. Roddy I saw less and less. Then one day I received two notes. The first was a brief – very brief – note from Roddy; he required the return of his studio at an early date. I was puzzled, but moved my belongings to a friend’s bedsit in a nearby mansion block.

“The other note was in a lavender envelope, and I fancied I caught her scent. She would return to her home in the Apennines for the summer, she said; but would I consider joining her after a week or two, and perhaps – if I wished to – paint an informal portrait of two of her? Her husband had wanted it done for some time. I wrote at once and assured her I would come. Two days later, a man arrived from a Kensington travel agent, bearing an envelope with a ticket for Rome. I was taken aback to see that it was by air.” He looked at me. “This was 60 years ago, remember. Only the wealthy flew, unless on business.

“The day before I was to go, I ran into Roddy outside the Crown in Dovehouse Street. It was early evening but he was rather drunk. ‘I hear you are going to Clara’s,’ he said. His voice was thick with alcohol, and was not friendly. I explained that her husband wanted her portrait done. ‘Her husband?’ he said, and laughed – not pleasantly. ‘He spends his time in Tangier.’ I asked what he would be doing in Tangier. ‘Looking for lithe young boys to bugger,’ he replied. I must have looked a bit shocked. I began to reply, but he said: ‘Oh, go away.’ And he went into the bar.

“The next day I went to the West London Air Terminal to catch the BEA flight to Rome. As I sat on the bus from the Terminal out to London Airport, I happened to look at my ticket. It was in an envelope from the travel agent’s, and on the outside the name Roddy Miles-Brett had been crossed out and replaced with mine. I thought nothing of it.

“And at Rome her driver met me in a blue Lancia saloon.”

He was quiet for a while and this time I did prompt him. “So what happened, Uncle Tom?”

“What happened? A beautiful summer.” He looked out at the grey dusk beyond the window; it was wet and blustery, and there were branches moving in the wind. “It was warm,” he said. “We ate on the terrace that night, then drank limoncello as the sun went down over the valley below, sending shafts of late light onto the walls and lighting them with warm tones. I thought of the grey stone at home, and summer drizzle. Later her maidservant, I suppose that’s what you’d call her, took me to my room, a large square chamber with a ceiling of wood beams, and paintings of saints and rural scenes on the wall, not by expert hands, but oddly beautiful; I judged from the paint that they were 18th century. In the next few days we sat together on that magic terrace, drinking what she called limoncello artigianale, made she said by relatives in Campania. In the evening we would have a simple pasta dish; it was always good. And we talked. Of art, of course; and books – I read a lot then. I cannot even remember much of what we said; I can hear only her voice, low and smooth, he constantly changing expressions, her deep sparkling eyes, her lustrous hair framing her oval face against the backdrop of the valley and the cypresses, and one night the westering sun moved round behind her and lit her hair gold and I said, ‘This is how I shall paint you.’ And she smiled and said, ‘Bene; così farai; so you shall.’ And I did.”

“So everyone was wrong, Uncle Tom? There was a painting!”

He did not answer, but looked first at me and then at the window again; a gust of wind had blown a filigree of spray against the pane.

“I posed her for two nights,” he said. “She sat straight-backed, but with her legs swung round to her left; she wore a white evening gown but her feet were bare, and she had arranged a fine silver chain around her ankle. On the third night she reached to the gown with her fingers and eased it apart, revealing her breasts; she covered one of them with her fingertips and left the other bare. Then she watched me as I worked. She could see that I fought to concentrate. But she knew exactly what she was doing. At length the light was gone, and I could do no more. Then she stood, her gown loose across her chest, and took me by the hand and led me to her rooms.”

We stayed silent for a while.

“It ended,” he said, his voice quiet and rather weary. “For a month or two we were happy. Then she said – quite out of the blue – that we were spent; that she must welcome others.”

“But you were in love,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And she made you go?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Not long afterwards she was joined by a wealthy collector from New York. But I found that out later. The day before she was to go, her chauffeur brought me my ticket back to London. The painting, he said, was to remain on its easel in my room.”

“And you left.”

“Yes.”

“And no-one ever saw the painting,” I said. I suppose she wasn’t satisfied with it.”

“It’s toad-in-the-hole tonight!” A cheerful face looked round the doorway. “You ready, Tom? You keep saying like it’s your favourite!”

“Well, I must admit it is.” He looked up and suddenly he was smiling.

“Good. And we got some of that HP Sauce you like,” she said.

“Right.” He pointed at me. “Just let me get rid of this tosser and I’m all yours.”

She chuckled and went off to the trolleys in the corridor.

“It doesn’t matter now, you know,” he said to me. “Maybe it never did. I came home. I got messages from galleries and art reporters and that, but I’d been patronised enough; and I never did answer them. In time they stopped coming. And I went off back north and taught art to schoolboys. Snot-nosed little sods. But thing is, I knew who they were, do you see? And I knew who I was too.”

He thought for a moment. The cheerful nurse was wheeling the meal trolley towards us; I could hear the wheels rumbling in the corridor. Another gust of rain blew across the window; it was nearly dark.

“I was just some raggedy-arsed clod from a mining village,” he said. He spoke quite slowly now. “There was nothing there. I’ve told you before. It was just a shithole.”

“Yes,” I said.

“The place were as ugly as sin and the weather stank and there was no beauty; no love even; my mum and dad meant well enough but where’s love when every day’s a struggle. And then suddenly people were looking at me. And this beautiful creature came wafting into my life. And the cypresses and the golden light. I was defenceless. Don’t let your world be grey, or you’ll fall to the first ray of colour that enters it.”

I nodded.

The toad-in-the-hole had arrived, with a bottle of HP Sauce and a bowl of chips.

“I’ll bugger off now then,” I said.

“Thanks for coming, lad,” he said. “I do like it when you come.”

I drove home through the rain. Jane had made a spaghetti sauce. She wanted to watch the figure skating, so we sat and ate together in front of the TV. At about 10pm my phone buzzed. I wondered if I could be bothered to answer, but at length swiped it. There was a message to call the nursing home. Somehow I knew why at once.

*

Two days later I collected Uncle Tom’s belongings, such as they’d been; he hadn’t kept much when he’d moved in there. The older nurse he had liked gave me a trunk with his clothes, his books – there weren’t many, but he’d still liked to read – some letters he had not yet answered, and an a cardboard box five or six inches deep and about four feet square. The latter mystified me. “He was adamant,” said the nurse. “He kept it under his bed. He said as it was to go to you and your lady wife. Don’t let the lawyers snarl it up, he said. It’s theirs in the will, anyway.” I put everything in the boot, except the box, which I put on the rear passenger seat. Then I passed quickly round the floor where his room had been, thanking the staff and shaking hands; they were kind but busy and it did not take long.

The following afternoon Jane and I went through them together. The clothes could go to the Oxfam shop. There were a few keepsakes that we would not want to throw away, though I was not sure what we would do with them. And there was the cardboard box. “I’ll get a knife,” I said.

She frowned.

“I think,” she said, “that we should open it very carefully.”

The canvas slid slowly out of the box. I breathed in sharply. Jane took it and stood it on a chair at the end of the room. The autumn sun streamed in through the window and lit it with a gentle gold.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

“He must have taken it when he left Italy,” I said. “And kept it in this box. I wonder if he ever looked at it.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think anyone’s seen it for sixty years.” She sniffed. “Oh, God. She was beautiful. Beautiful,” and I saw her eyes glistening.

I took her hand.

“Don’t let your world be grey,” I said.

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

We knelt together in front of the portrait as the November sun sank slowly, and it fell into shadow.

________________________________

More short fiction from Mike Robbins

The Key It's more than a key to Fleur
Sport is Character-Forming A migration through a muddy river
It Turns on a Sixpence The CEO has a rotten day
The Man Who Lost the Plot When the character you write is cardboard
The Long Road from the Black Death A history lecturer retires
Who Killed Walter Williams? Don't ask, even now
A Difficult Life When the world dislikes your birth
Come and See the Chickens A rather English love story
In Search of a Plot  Be careful. Elspeth may put you in a bacon slicer
A Question of Character Pity the nation...
The End A gun on a brownstone roof
The Last Time A figure skater leaves the ice
After the Flood An end? Or a beginning?
Remembered Time The past is a dangerous place
A Train Journey One's sister comes to visit
Time After Time When you have to warn the children
Fashion Wokeness and subversion. With style
A Time of Darkness History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes
Another Time A tear in the fabric
Evolution The world is turning
When Time Stands Still A hurricane lashes Pershing Square
Parallel Worlds Heat pumps and lentils. And a nice glass of Marsala
A Man for All Seasons Net zero. The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip
A History Lesson Why do we study it? So we can spot it happening
The Creatives Meeting a tech bro
Cold Everything is cold here
Homecoming A sort of love story
Solitude A Cold War memory
Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography
Hiraeth A yearning…
Strange Places A spirit in the sky 
A Sideways Journey Things might have been different
Displaced Encounter on E94th Street
Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.
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America by Meteor

For a year of my childhood, a huge 1966 Meteor sedan was my window on a continent. A journey through 1960s America

It was enormous. Because North American cars were, then. Folks liked their cars big, with engines to match – great lazy V8s that would not look out of place in a small freighter. Today, many Americans are quite happy with European-size cars, and even the big ones are not really that big anymore. Fifty years ago it was different. The befinned extravaganzas of the late 1950s had gone, but many quite ordinary cars were still land yachts so vast that the driver peered out over a massive forward flight deck the size of a small African republic. The other day I passed an ancient Chrysler in the street. It startled me. 

I am surprised my father bought a land yacht. We had lived in North America before, in the late 1950s, and he had owned a quite modest Plymouth station wagon. He was unusual in this. There was the odd Beetle around, of course, and in the 1950s Americans could even buy a Morris Minor, though I don’t think many did. But most disapproved of such un-American devices. A few even had bumper stickers that read “Stamp Out Small Cars”. (A friend of my father’s, very unusually, had an Isetta bubble car. It had a sticker reading “Stamp Out Large Dogs”.) Still, the modest Plymouth had carried us from Columbus to Colorado and to Miami and back, although a wheel came off somewhere in Georgia. I do not remember that. I was only two and must have slept through it. Then in 1968 we returned to the Americas, this time to the Canadian capital, Ottawa. My father again bought a car. But this time he decided to go large.

An identical car (Wikimedia Commons/dave_7 Lethbridge)

His new aircraft carrier on wheels was Canadian, and was almost certainly built at the Ford plant in Oakville, Ontario. Ford had built cars in Canada since as early as 1904. It still does. The car was a two-year-old Meteor Rideau 500 Sedan, a 1966 model that had Ford Galaxie underpinnings but got its front and rear styling from the US-market Mercury S-55, also introduced that year. There were three engines, starting with a 4-litre inline six. This had 150 HP (148 BHP) – not bad for 1966, but it must still have struggled in a car that size. Most Canadians will have chosen a V8; either the 4.7-litre small-block V8 with around 200 BHP, or – at the top of the range – a completely different V8 lifted from the Ford Thunderbird, which was just over 7 litres and produced about 340 BHP. As my father intended to drive us all over North America, he will have chosen a V8. I don’t know which.

He was clear why he’d chosen a Meteor, however. US-market cars were not only enormous; they were very softly sprung, and in corners they wallowed like whales. Canadians, it seems, liked stiffer suspension and better handling. They also liked subtler colours than their southern neighbours. Ours was a discreet mid-blue metallic. The interior was blue too, and – a novelty for me – it had a radio. There was a metallic feel to the upholstery, and a metallic smell – not unpleasant. (Actually all cars have a distinctive natural scent inside. If you blindfolded me and sat me in a 1950s Morris Oxford or Minor, I would know at once from the warm smell of the carpets and upholstery. Old estate cars used to smell of wet labrador. All smelled of cigarette smoke. Modern cars have an anodyne, chemical odour.)

Within a week or two, the Meteor took us south into New York State to see the fall colours. And almost every weekend that winter, it carried us across the Ottawa River to Quebec, past the francophone city of Hull and into the Gatineau Hills, where we would ski – sometimes downhill, but more often on trails. In the week, it took my father to his office in Ottawa. At night it sat in a communal garage, partly underground, where an electric flex ran from the wall to each car to keep the engine warm. It was easy to see why. In midwinter the temperature could drop to minus 6 deg F (about minus 14 deg C). You did not want to wait for a huge 7-litre V8 to warm up before the heater started working.

Then in spring it was time to drive further.

*

That car was my window on a continent. We travelled south through New York State and Pennsylvania, the rain beating down on the huge flat hood almost all the way until we arrived in Washington DC in a burst of sunshine. We would stay for a week in Arlington, Virginia with a friend of my father’s who worked for NASA. They would go to the office together and talk endlessly of remote sensing and photogrammetry. And the rest of us would sight-see. It was April 1969. We swept past the Tidal Basin with its cherry blossoms and onto the Arlington Memorial Bridge, the entrance to Arlington Cemetery ahead. As we crossed the bridge, my father made the sort of slight grunt he made which meant he was about to say something important and we should all shut up.

“This is a country at war,” he said. He paused, then added: “It is proving hard for them, and your opinions on the war are not needed here. Do you understand?”

I suppose I did, and I know my sister, who was older, will have done. In 1969 the United States was as deeply embroiled in Vietnam as it ever would be; the bodies were coming home and the war was deeply divisive. It had already done for Lyndon Johnson, who had ended his bid for re-election the previous year after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary. Richard Nixon had become President in January.

In that strange year of war and Woodstock, crew cuts and dope, Cold War and counterculture, a country drifted past beyond the Meteor’s windows; clapboard houses and white picket fences, small towns, great cities, country roads, Interstates. There were Holiday Inns – posh then – and quiet motels, basic but friendly; breakfast and lunch in diners bright with chrome and Formica and red plastic seating; my favourite drink (7 Up) and fries. Very rarely, a McDonald’s. My parents did not approve of McDonald’s. Aged 11, I adored them. I am sure they tasted better then, and the restaurants themselves were always classic roadside ones, complete with big Golden Arches. But the best fries we had were in Canada, in a remote roadhouse in British Columbia; a great wooden bowl of crisp fresh fries, washed down with Coke as the mist and rain cloaked the green wooded hills outside.

Near Cambridge, Massachusetts, we stopped at another friend of my father’s. (He worked closely with Americans for over 30 years. There were many such friends.) They had a 100-acre farm. We spent a wonderful day during which I was taught how to shoot a .45 that deafened me, and slammed back into my shoulder. We blasted away at Budweiser cans. The kids had a 1956 Buick Eight they had bought, as scrap, for a dollar. They let me drive it. Aged 11, I craned my neck to see over the rim of the steering wheel and bumped around a large field at 20 miles an hour.

We went to Vermont to visit the Baroness Maria von Trapp. Well, to stay at her ski lodge near Stowe. She was warm and welcoming but looked nothing like Julie Andrews, being rotund and rather jolly. My sister came in red and flushed after a day’s skiing. “My dear, you look very mountainous today,” boomed the Baroness. She found out it was my sister’s birthday and bore a big cake with 16 candles into the dining room, preceded by her sons in lederhosen. The trail skiing was wonderful. One night at dusk we skied around the Baron’s grave, a peaceful place on a forest path.

*

But the Meteor blotted its copybook. The old-fashioned automatic choke failed and my father spent some minutes in the snow outside the von Trapp lodge, holding it open with his finger so that the engine could warm up. It was not the first or last time. A week or so after he bought the car, it suffered some malady and went back to the dealer. (They gave him a rather smart new green Mercury coupe in the meantime.) One spring day as we cruised up the New Jersey Turnpike, the muffler (silencer) fell off with a nasty clatter; it was still attached at the manifold end. A New Jersey mechanic assured us he could fix it, then found that Mercury parts did not fit Meteors. “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do; it’s Canadian,” he said mournfully. “I understand,” said my father, sounding as if he did. The muffler was tied back on with electric flex. Of course this burned through. The next garage fixed it with a wire hanger from the closet. This bodge got us back across the border. Meanwhile I had constantly to keep my legs away from the back of the front bench seat, as there was a wire that stuck out at knee level.

The Meteor’s various mechanical diseases frustrated my father. Yet it cannot have been that bad, for in early summer we hit the road again, and went further than ever – to the far west. For the first leg, the long journey across Ontario, the car was loaded onto a Canadian National train and we took berths with it, to be unloaded in Winnipeg in a warm summer midnight. The next day we drove south to the border and west into the Dakotas, across the Badlands, and tried to find a motel in a small town off the Interstate where the only option had swinging Western-style doors. The road signs on the way back to the Interstate were peppered with bullet holes; clearly target practice from a moving vehicle was the chief recreation here. On to Billings, Montana, and an overnight stay in a Holiday Inn.

The Beartooth Pass (Wikimedia Commons/Phil Armitage)

The next day was a magical one that is still in my mind over 50 years later. Billings is on the plain. Actually most of Montana is, despite the name. But as we left the town, a line of silver appeared on the horizon, and drew slowly clearer as we passed through gently rising land, the Great Plains turning to orchards and farms. In due course we reached the foot of the mountains, and started the steep climb to the 11,000ft Beartooth Pass. The ground dropped away to the right of the car, the road twisting this way and that as it reached for the sky. Some time after leaving the hot summer plain below, we came out on the summit to find people skiing in June. Then the road dropped slightly and we came into Yellowstone, and a world of bears. We stopped and sat awhile above the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, forty miles long, a thousand feet deep; a spectacle dwarfed only by the Grand Canyon itself. After that, on to the Grand Tetons, one of the most beautiful places in the Americas. Then on across Wyoming, its great grassy plains dotted by nodding donkeys; there was oil here – and finally to Boulder, Colorado, where my father had business. Then back north through nameless small towns of white fences and flags, to Glacier National Park.

Day after day the swaying of the enormous car, the burbling of the big engine, the tangy smell of the upholstery, the endless horizons beyond the bonnet and the towns and hills and plains through the window became the rhythm of my life. One day we drove north through Idaho. The towns and villages were smaller and poorer here, the houses a little unkempt; elderly cars stood in the front yards, sometimes on bricks. Then we crossed the Canadian frontier near Grand Forks, British Columbia, and suddenly there were narrow roads and high hedges and green fields and a woman in Wellington boots driving a herd of cattle to milking down a country lane, as she might in Devon – from which, indeed, she might have come. We turned left and drove for a day and reached the Pacific. Then we turned back to Penticton in the Okanagan Valley, with its semi-arid climate and its cherry orchards.

Later the Meteor carried us across the Rockies as far as Banff Springs, where we met relatives staying at the palatial Banff Springs Hotel. Some time in the afternoon of July 20, I walked through the lounge, where many people were watching TV, despite the sunshine outside. Suddenly there was a flurry of applause. A dim, ghostly figure in a space suit moved on the screen, planting the Stars and Stripes on the surface of the Moon.

*

The Meteor’s last task was to take us back to Ottawa, where my parents would arrange their affairs before returning to England; my father’s work in Canada was done. On this last, longest journey from Banff to Ottawa, we thrummed steadily for what seemed like days across the Great Plains, passing Regina and Winnipeg, stopping but briefly in roadside motels – I remember little of them. At last we left Manitoba and crossed into Ontario, leaving the plains behind for endless pines, skirting north of the Great Lakes, a long journey that made one understand what Siberia might be like. The scenery continued to move past, but now it was monotonous. We were on the Trans-Canada Highway, over 4,800 miles of road. In 1969 it was not quite all sealed yet; around Sault Ste. Marie we ran for miles over gravel, at a steady 15-20 MPH, following other cars at a wary distance to avoid the plumes of dust. Around there I remember noticing an odd Canadian habit: on a long journey, younger children would sleep on a sedan’s parcel shelf. We crossed north-east to the mining city of Sudbury, with its enormous monumental nickel coin on a plinth; and finally we arrived at Ottawa.

I do not remember when I last saw the Meteor. Some time in mid-August my sister, mother and I left for Montreal, where we boarded the Empress of England for the voyage home. My father, who hated ships, followed us a week or so later by air. During that week he must have disposed of the car; perhaps he took it back to the Mercury dealer. I can’t imagine that I expected to see it again.

The voyage home was rough and I was as sick as a dog. We tied up in Liverpool’s Gladstone Dock in the pouring rain. A few weeks later I was back at school, and there were no more turnpikes and towns, cities or shacks, mountains, plains, bears, nodding donkeys, deep gorges, huge trucks, mile-long trains or McDonald’s, all seen from a huge blue car. There was only the family Vauxhall Victor and a smaller, meaner world.

*

I suppose I had a restlessness instilled in me by those journeys; the voyages across the Atlantic (I described them here) and the long hours in the back of the great blue car watching a continent speed past me. As a young man I did a number of media jobs in London, but never really settled. I wanted to be out in the world. In 1987, aged 30, I became a development volunteer in Sudan. But this is not the place to write of that. Save, that is, for one incident.

In August 1988 I and five colleagues made the eight-hour run from our base near Gedaref to Khartoum. It was the wet season, but the rains no longer reached Khartoum. That night would prove an exception. An hour from the city it was raining so heavily that we saw cars abandoned, at least one slewed off the road completely. The beefy diesel Land Cruiser managed all right as the water reached its sills; the exhaust was routed above the driver so that it did not get blocked in mud or floods. By the time we reached Khartoum we were bumper-deep; a long bow-wave came from the few cars left moving. One came towards us on the wrong side of the road. Our driver honked angrily, then we realised there was no-one in it; it was being swept away.

We reached our destination. But over the next week or two it was hard to get around in the aftermath of the floods, which had left a million homeless. Buses were always uncertain anyway; by the time the bus to town reached my lodgings it would be so full that I had to hang on outside the door, my rear exposed to any passing lamppost that came too close. Now they were more packed than ever, and all vehicles had to skirt the enormous puddles left by the floods. The Blue Nile was rising, and it was thought it might burst its banks, causing a further disaster. Every night I would go, alone or with a friend, to the May Gardens near the confluence of the Blue and White Niles and look at the water level. Day by day a small cargo boat moored there would rise and rise, and the water was just below the bank.

One day I hitched a lift to town on the back of a small pickup, the sort that carried everything from groceries to sheep. There were many people in the open rear, and I balanced precariously on the tailgate. We hit a bump and I grasped the metal hard to steady myself. As I did so, a very large metallic blue car crossed the junction ahead of us. It seemed unmistakeable.

For a moment I was taken aback, then told myself to be silly; the Meteor would now be over 20 years old and had certainly died, in Canada, a long time ago.

The driver's office (Wikimedia Commons/dave_7 Lethbridge)

That night, after dark, we went to the May Gardens as we normally did. The air was hot and close, and there was the usual smell of dust in the air. Several cars were parked beside the park. One of them was a metallic blue Meteor Rideau 500. It was too much of a coincidence. Even in Canada, they had been rare, sold in that exact style for only a year; I could remember seeing only one other, a pale green one – it had passed us in Montana and when we saw each other’s Ontario plates, we honked and waved. I never saw another blue one. I peered inside. Was it my imagination, or was there a wire sticking out of the front seat? I think there was.

Of course I can’t be sure. The car had been rare even in Canada, but it wasn’t unique. One of the pictures I have posted here shows an identical vehicle, albeit looking a little rough. But we’d never seen another quite like it that year; and it had been sold in Ottawa, the capital, where it could perhaps have been bought by a Sudanese diplomat and brought home to Khartoum. I have always believed that it was the same car. I wonder if it still exists. I doubt it; it would be 54 years old now. But it is possible. Ten years later I lived in Aleppo, Syria, where high import duty meant that cars were almost literally never scrapped, and the streets were full of beautifully kept Buicks and Dodges and Packards from the 1950s and late 1940s. A friend had a Studebaker from 1955. So I think the Meteor might still be alive, in a hot dusty land, far from home.

At that moment, anyway, I was convinced. I stepped back. The big car stood there in the half-light, its bodywork gleaming dully. Just for a moment I remembered the billowing Great Plains, the endless pine trees of Ontario, the Tidal Basin passing to our left with its cherry blossoms, Beartooth Pass with its vertiginous road, the snowy peaks of the Grand Tetons and the journey down to the Pacific. I looked at it for a moment or two, and then turned away. I never saw the car again.

Mike is now also on Substack at https://mikerobbinswrites.substack.com/

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.

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