And the time we ran over Philip Schofield in my Fiat 126.
8 PHILIP SCHOFIELD IS DEFINITELY NOT A CHICKEN: THE FIAT 126
My first experience of driving on four wheels came on a tractor. My dad had a big old Ferguson and he used to put me on his knee and let me steer; he would do the gears and the pedals. I was about eight at the time so my feet couldn’t reach. When I was ten I started driving it for real. It was a massive old thing and the steering was really heavy so I couldn’t drive it very far because it was such hard work. I’d drive it around the farm, but no more than maybe 400 yards before turning it round and coming back again. It was a proper old-fashioned model, with the tall exhaust pipe on the front, a flap on the top and tons of smoke belching out. Point is, by the time I got my first car, a little Fiat 126, at the age of twelve, I was already a pretty experienced motorist.
My dad figured that buying that car was cheaper than driving lessons, and he was right. He bought it off one of the staff at work for £40. It was completely knackered, they just wanted to get rid of it, and always being one for a bargain my dad jumped at it. It really was unfit for the roads, but it was great for whizzing around the farm. And because we lived in the middle of nowhere, my dad was always looking for ways to keep us, or more specifically me, entertained. After bikes and trikes, a car was the natural progression. (Well, it was either that or get a bigger bike, and the only thing to get after a Honda ATV70 trike would have been a Suzuki scrambler, which were quick little things – they’d do 90 miles an hour easy – and bound to get me into exactly the kind of trouble he was hoping to avoid.) He thought that if he didn’t focus my attention on an exciting piece of machinery I was going to go off and do all the stuff the other kids did, like, say, nicking things from empty farmhouses, being led astray by girls in uniforms, and messing about with air rifles. All the things I wouldn’t dream of doing. Never. Not me. Getting me a cheap banger was by far the safest option. More fool him.
The 126 was a tiny thing, just a bit bigger than the classic Fiat 500s, which I still love (I’ve actually got an original Abarth race model at home). It was dark blue with brown cloth interior – my childhood seems to have been cursed with brown cloth interiors – and it had a manual five-speed gearbox, no radio and a heater you couldn’t use because it reeked of something toxic, probably exhaust fumes, which made your eyes burn every time you turned it on. It was great. My dad taught me how to drive it in the courtyard round the back of the house, this time more successfully than his trike masterclass, and within minutes I was tearing around the fields. That thing provided me with hours and hours of fun.
And of course, once I’d mastered the five-speed gearbox, the clutch and driving in tractor ruts, all I needed to do was make it my own with a little customisation. So out came the masking tape and a couple of cans of yellow and red spray paint from Halfords and before you could say ‘pimp my ride’ my dark blue Fiat 126 had an unbelievably cool set of red and yellow flames coming off the front wheel arches and all the way down the side. Then, instead of a glass windscreen, it had chicken wire, which along with the blacked-out side windows (which you couldn’t actually see out of because I’d painted them with black spray paint – smart move) made it look like a proper rally car.
At least that was the official reason I gave for why the car suddenly had a chicken wire windscreen. The truth has been a closely guarded secret until now. My Fiat 126’s windscreen lost its glass when we ran over Philip Schofield (no, not that Philip Schofield!) in a game of chicken.
The rules of the game were simple, the same as all the hundreds of other games of chicken we’d played on our motorbikes and trikes over the years, the same as every game of chicken ever. One person stands in the middle of a field (in this case Philip) while someone else (in this case me and the rest of our mates in the car) drives at them. The person who bottles it and moves first is the chicken. Philip didn’t move. I’ve no idea why not, he just didn’t. There were four of us whizzing across that field in the Fiat, really hoofing it, doing a good 30 miles an hour. We were all looking at him, waiting for him to jump out of the way, and he was looking at us, waiting for us to swerve. We were looking at him and he was looking at us and the next thing, BANG!, we hit him. He hit the windscreen and went straight over the top. The 126 had a cloth sunroof which was open at the time, and I swear we all watched in horror as poor Philip flew over our heads. I remember his legs appeared to go past in slow motion. I looked in the rear-view mirror to see if I could see him, more importantly to see if I could see him moving. Everyone else in the car was shouting, ‘You’ve killed him, you’ve killed him!’ I did a handbrake turn and spun the car round just as Philip was getting up. I couldn’t believe it. Not only was he alive, he was in one piece. I seriously thought I’d ended his life.
The new priority suddenly became keeping him quiet. I couldn’t afford to have my mother finding out or that would have been it, we wouldn’t have had the car any more. In the end I made a pact with Philip. I told him that if he didn’t tell anyone we’d run him over I’d let him drive the car when he came round, which was a pretty big deal because I wouldn’t let anyone drive my car, so it seemed like fair compensation for running him over. Philip agreed and became the only person I ever allowed to drive that Fiat 126, although he could only drive it at certain times and in certain places as I didn’t want my mum or dad to see him at the wheel because they would have known straight away that something wasn’t quite right.
The windscreen wasn’t quite as easy to fix. The glass had cracked side to side where he’d hit it. One look at that and my mum would have wanted to know what we’d been up to, so I kicked the windscreen out, got some chicken wire from the farm and added ‘rally windows’ to my list of modifications.
Even after that, and with no windscreen, I used to drive that car like a lunatic over the fields. Just over the fields though, nowhere else. It was brilliant.
Not long after that my dad started taking me to Tockwith Aerodrome to teach me to drive properly. Tockwith was a disused old airfield near where we lived where parents would take their kids to learn the basics before going out on the road. It cost something like a fiver a go and you could drive round there all afternoon. Fittingly it’s now an approved go-karting school. Everyone else learning there was 17 or 18; I was there with my dad teaching me to mirror, signal, manoeuvre when I was 13.
We used to go over there in his Audi. We’d swap seats and he’d be straight back in advanced police driving instructor mode, telling me how to do it properly, and I mean properly. It wasn’t just all about the three-point turns and the reverse parking. He taught me to anticipate, to control my speed and brake with the gears, to go sideways, the lot. He must have been doing something right because I passed my test first time after only one hour-long lesson. I had intended to have more lessons, but I applied for my test as soon as I got my provisional licence; I had after all already been driving for five years by then. I got someone else’s cancellation, so one lesson immediately before my test was all there was time for. I turned 17 on 30 June and I passed my test on 7 July. So you see, my dad was right: at £40 my little Fiat 126 really was cheaper than driving lessons.