A Roads

Pre-easyJet they linked unlikely places –
Bodmin to Mansfield, via Tewkesbury;
meandering through England’s crowded spaces,
mementos of an age unused to hurry.

Perhaps it's all a myth - that RAC’s
roadside patrols saluted passers-by;
content inside their Hillmans, smiling families
sipped tea; lay-bys were litter-free, July

though blustery, always sunny. Now up-graded
to would-be motorways, sat-nav defined,
a two lane stretch comes as a shock. A faded
re-collection flashes though my mind:

A sunset I once glimpsed near Gravelly Hill-
Lost Highways? - No, but roads to freedom still.

This sonnet, written in early 2007, picks up where 'Re-reading Jack' left off. I began to get a bit obsessed about the development of the UK's trunk road system and its quirky numbering system, especially the secondary routes like the A49 (Bamber Bridge to Ross on Wye), the A34 (Salford to Winchester), and my favourite, whose winding byways are celebrated in the above paean, the A34 (Mansfield to Bodmin). The construction of the road network in the middle part of the last century is really every bit as socially and economically significant as the so called 'Railway Age' to the Nineteenth Century, however it is not perceived that way.

a two lane stretch comes as a shock....

The arrival of television in the 1950's is often cited as a key modernising influence in the post war era. However, for someone like myself, growing up in a working class household in the late 50's and early 60's, the purchase of the family car in 1962 probably broadened my mind more than any amount of 'Blue Peter'. Road transport is now seen primarilly as a problem; discission centres on environmental damage, congestion, safety and sustainability. Driving is not regarded as a leisure activity, apart for the odd balding accountant on his 1200cc Kawasaki. Of course cars still have kudos as status symbols  but driving them is presented, often rightly, as so stressful and frustrating that it leads to random outbursts of 'road rage'. Fifty or sixty years ago things were different the car was regarded as an enabler, part of the white heat of technology which would provide a springboard for Britain into a bright future of prosperity and plenty. Now such a notion seem as silly as 'the paperless office'.

My sonnet celebrates the age of family motoring and pokes gentle fun at the stereotypical images that surround it. The Hillman Minx was without doubt the car that the upwardly mobile family half a century ago would have aspired to.

That was certainly the car of my dad's dreams, but as a factory worker on piece-rate it was quite beyond the means of both he and hs neighbours. Windsor Gardens, the council estate where I grew-up, was a Minx free zone - Ford Populars and Morris Minors for proles. Gill's family made it though, as her father was promoted from clerk to manager they bought a house and in 1966 swapped their Morris for a secondhand Minx. This moment of motoring apotheosis is recorded for posterity.

What next? Well venturing abroad; in the Summer of 1968 the Eales family, circumventing Harold Wilson's much hated currency restrictions, headed in their doughty Minx to Bavaria. A somewhat grainy photo from the time records the triumphant invasion of a picnic spot in the Black Forest - Gill, her mum and the Minx!

The transition from the formality of the Fifties into the swinging Sixties brought about strange amalgams of tradition and modernity. When Watford Gap services opened on the newly built M1 motorway in 1960, in attempt to embrace a contemporary style and glamour that the post war traveller was thought to desire, 'hostesses' with uniforms based on BOAC cabin staff's greeted the weary motorist. However, a picture from just a few years earlier of an RAC patrolman harks back to the war, no glamour here, more Wehrmacht severity and military efficiency than mamby pamby notions of the glamorous. He does look as if he would salute passing members but also might shoot on sight anyone with the temerity to sport an AA badge.

Mind how you go....

It's true. as the poem says, I do recall a beautiful sunset over Gravelly Hill, just where the A38 is momentarilly engulfed by the famous 'spagetti junction' right here.....


simple at ground level.....

from above living up to its nick-name.

Over the past 20 years I reckon I've driven a car purely for pleasure well over 80,000 miles on the roads of Britain, Southern Europe, America and Australia - 'roads to freedom still'. I suppose, like everyone, I'm just a product of my time and the Ford Galaxy was our Hillman Minx......

Elba - waiting for the Piombino ferry, August 2004

Summer 2000, dawn in the Alps just over the French border  towards the end of a marathon 600 mile overnight drive from Losinj, Croatia - who forgot the Italian campsite book?  Me probably!

Gill says, 'Breakfast?' - 5am. kids flat out in the back.

8.30am, Albertville, Kids say 'Breakfast?' Family chorus - MACDONALDS!
(We're lovin it)

Later that morning, piching the overnight tents in Annecy, having just packed-up
the main frame tent, 22, sleepless hours previously on a bare rocky island in the Adriatic.

The effect on the 45 year old male.....dead beat Pete! I like the way I did not even bother to
to find a pillow, just grabbed a stack of tea towels and went, clunk!