Al Capone’s Hearse

 

 

I remember the moment very clearly. It was a bright afternoon in May 1964 and as we pulled up outside the driving test centre the examiner turned towards me, tore off a page from his pad in one theatrical flurry and held it out enticingly; clearly enjoying the agony of suspense he must have recognised on my face. His few seconds of mischievous linger felt like an eternity, before he finally smiled broadly and uttered the word, 'congratulations' . The test was over and as my new best friend climbed out of the car, I beat the steering wheel with the palms of both hands and uttered a cry of unbridled joy. The world was now my oyster.

 

I leapt from the black Morris Minor and set about removing the L plates that I'd attached some forty-five minutes earlier, more than eager to remove any embarrassing evidence of inexperience. The escorted nursery slopes were now a thing of the past. The powers that be had determined that I was now fit to go it alone, to venture forth whenever the fancy took me along the highways and byways of the world. I climbed back behind the wheel and sat there, blissfully unaware of exactly where this new found freedom would take me across my lifetime.

 

The reliable old Morris had been borrowed for the occasion from my best school mate, John. He'd bowed out of sixth form and taken a job with a construction company and was making good money; enough to own and run his own car after just a few weeks. My driving experience to date had been entirely with him and Bessie, the affectionate name he'd christened his pride and joy. With limited opportunity and some diligent scrutiny of the Highway Code, I'd passed my test first time and was now overflowing with a new found sense of liberation. There was just one problem though, I didn't have a car.

 

It was called Honest Sam's Motors and it sat forlornly opposite the Nuttall's Mintoes factory. A parking lot ring fenced with plastic coated wire netting strung limply between decaying concrete posts. In one corner stood a care-worn wooden office, not much more substantial than my grandad's allotment lean-to, and every other vacant square foot of pot-holed tarmac was occupied by assorted second hand cars. I'd passed it every day when cycling to school and paid it little interest, but now, with a brand new licence in my pocket desperately demanding action, I was on the lookout for an affordable conveyance of my own.

 

Every one of the cars had a purchase price whitewashed across its windscreen, making life easier for those of limited budget. Finance was out of the question for a jobless youth, so anything with more than two digits after the pound sign could be quickly dismissed. Hillman Minx, Vauxhall Cresta, Austin A40, Ford Zephyr and Morris Oxford were all way beyond my means, but I'd spotted something hidden right at the back, something alien and very, very different.

 

It looked as if it had been used for decades to ferry bootleg booze across the Canadian border to the speakeasies of Chicago and was now on the run from the Feds. It was a large 1936 Armstrong Siddeley saloon with jet black paintwork and it had much of the night about it. There were curtains in the rear window and running boards and huge headlamps clearly capable of illuminating road blocks with ease. It had a Sphinx on the bonnet and I'd never seen anything like it before and my quirky imagination immediately labelled it Al Capone's hearse. It was out of time, out of place and out of luck, but joy of joys, it had £15 whitewashed across the windscreen.

 

I found the proprietor in his hut, engrossed in a well thumbed copy of Esquire magazine. There were exotic foreign number plates pinned to one wall and assorted hub caps along another, overlapped Viking Longship style, as if newly returned from plundering foreign car parks. A large metal filing cabinet stood behind his desk with partially opened drawers offering alluring glimpses of Honest Sam's bona fides and beside that a calendar promoting Noilly Prat vermouth, with the capital N scratched out. The man himself, balding and Brylcreemed, was wearing a well worn pin striped demob suit and sat blinking away the smoke from his Woodbine. He was the archetypal spiv.

 

The look of utter surprise on his face as I expressed an interest in his fugitive clearly had me labelled as mug of the week, and within seconds he'd whisked me back across the yard, ignition keys in hand, for his well rehearsed sales pitch. But he was preaching to the converted as I slid onto the leather bench seat and began familiarising myself with the controls and gauges. I ran my fingers along the polished walnut dashboard and the car and I immediately imprinted. It was kismet.

 

I handed him a fiver deposit to secure the purchase and agreed payment of the balance by the end of the week. Hurrying homewards with my head spinning, I was fired with a new determination to discover everything there was to know about the Armstrong Siddeley, its I'd-never-heard-of-it-before preselector gear box and the art of cashing-in birthday gifted Premium Bonds.

 

I like to think that it was the first time in history that anyone had ever delivered the Sunday papers in a 1936 Armstrong Siddeley. I was waiting to start college later that year and had taken on any task that would earn a few bob, including a paper round every Sunday morning. The car and I were inseparable. I was totally enamoured with it and the opportunity that it offered, so even a paper round couldn't separate us. I would park it at the end of each street as I progressed, much to the amusement of passers-by, and the thought that I was spending more on petrol than I was actually earning had been deliberately suppressed. The only consolation at the time being that petrol was only 4/6d (22.5p) per gallon.

 

Nine was the highest number it ever carried during my tenure. Once word was out that Al Capone's hearse was in my possession, I became the school-mate of choice for Summer evening excursions to some outlying pub or other, and on this one memorable occasion nine of us disgorged into the car park at the Ivanhoe hotel. I can't tell you how the other eight occupied the space available, because I was totally focussed on getting us there without being stopped by plod, but I can remember much ribaldry and one or two distinctly strange odours.

 

When the due college date finally arrived, I loaded Al's hearse with my worldly possessions and all the books and equipment prescribed, and set out on a three year adventure. My chosen alma mater was based around an eighteenth century Georgian mansion set in hundreds of acres or Capability Brown parkland and the stately 1936 Armstrong Siddeley looked immediately at home there. On arrival I swept down the imposing main driveway, pulling up with aplomb in front of the main entrance to the mansion. As I sat there absorbing my new surroundings a tall and learned looking man in frameless spectacles appeared through the front doors and approached the car with evident purpose. I wound the window down in anticipation.

 

'Are you someone of significance?' he enquired, scanning the car as if it were a bar code. The question caught me off guard and the split second it took to respond told him all he needed to know.

'Only to myself and a small number of others,' I replied spiritedly. But the game was up. He was, it transpired, the deputy principal of the college and he'd quickly concluded that I was not main drive or front door material.

'You will find space to park this museum piece in the student car park behind the old stable block,' he said triumphantly, as his gaze focussed on the Sphinx emblem on the bonnet. 'Ah! I see this was once part of Queen Cleopatra's fleet.' he quipped, 'you'll find all the feed it requires in the hay racks.'

With this he strode back from whence he came and left me to do exactly the same.

 

Al's hearse eventually found its rightful place in the car park behind the old stable block and for many months it became a recognisable feature of student life in the college. In its now familiar role as resident shuttle bus, it ferried large numbers between college and local hostelries with unfailing reliability, never once being stopped by plod for impersonating a bus. Mr Capone's hearse and I had settled into an idyllic student life that seemed like it would never end; until three days before its test certificate expired that is.

 

I drove into the MOT bay that morning bristling with confidence and watched from a safe distance as the mechanic pressed the big green button on the hydraulic lift. The 1936 Armstrong Siddeley rose with etherial grace towards the corrugated iron roof, before coming to a halt with its mysterious underbelly shockingly exposed to all. He stepped beneath and began tapping things with a small hammer and as he did so, quantities of flakey substance fell to the ground around him like rusting May blossom. After a while the blossom became shrapnel and grew in dimension and density and was occasionally accompanied by utterances such as 'good grief' and 'wow' and even the occasional 'Jesus'. At this point I began to feel a sense of foreboding as I instinctively knew that the occasion turning religious did not auger well. I was right.

 

The failure certificate ran into two pages and through my watery gaze resembled the libretto for Wagner's Götterdämmerung. The garage floor around the hoist was a miniature snapshot of no-mans-land at Passchendaele, as a young apprentice swept pounds of oxidised Armstrong Siddeley into a number of substantial piles. Al Capone’s hearse had run into its last road block.

 

As a comforting gesture, the mechanic informed me that it would have been possible for a team of specialist bees' wing welders to get the car back to something resembling safe, but such a long term and expensive project would probably be well beyond my means. My jeans and Che Guevara tee shirt had obviously provided him with all the information he required to compose his eulogy.

 

The following morning I drove to a scrap yard alongside a railway line, where three very oily men were sitting on an old leather chesterfield outside a Nissen hut, drinking tea from flasks. The senior of the three gave Al's hearse a peremptory glance from distance, told me he'd not seen one of those for a long time and offered me a tenner without a flicker of further interest. As this was two thirds of what I'd paid for it, I accepted immediately. My brief, but glorious ownership of a 1936 Armstrong Siddeley was over and without looking back I trudged up onto the road in search of a bus stop, with tears in my eyes. We had been together less than a year, but our journey had been one I have never forgotten; and all at the cost of a fiver.

 

 

 

 

 Photograph courtesy of Les Andrew on Flickr