My Saab life.
I engaged first with a Saab when a 99 combi coupe lost her clutch en-route to my sister’s wedding up the Great North Road. A lost photo: the car, caramel cum biscuit colour and my girl standing by, her arms wrapped round herself in a purply red hairy jumper. Riding high above the milling guests we arrive on a tow truck as gaudy with logos as a circus van. My girl has slipped into gold platforms.
What is a memoir but a series, willed or not, of ommissions connected by a tissue of recall and perforated by dark craters of forgot what did — the embroidery of the edges of which is the chief joy? I am sorry for my North American readers since geography must be meaningless in terms of names. I should somehow make up for that — I will try. The period is 1983–1994.
One year later she (the car) lost the new clutch coming up from London, where I may well have been to visit mother on the south bank of the great river or to visit Adrian Frost in an artist colony of squats and pre-fabs over up in the north east quarter. I was in the middle of nowhere. My tow-u subscription had run out. I borrowed the rail fare north from local firemen who quizzed me about breathing apparatus to be sure I was the real thing. Time passed. I renewed my tow subscription, walked out from the rail head. She was nowhere to be seen. I reported her missing and straight after I got back north the police rang: someone had hid her for safety. I go back down again. The tow-u man comes out, cheery and willing. Chug chug chug up the Great North Road. I can’t remember where the Saab dealer in town is. Night falls, we jerk round closed down mill streets. Tow-u dumps me saying, “… that’s it, you’ve had your money’s worth…” She got scrapped within the month. I wasn’t going to have that again. When I moved to a stuck out on a limb north eastern port city I bought a cream 99 combi coupe with a two litre twincarb engine and a three speed Borg Warner automatic box. Proud as punch. Like a tractor on skis, the long power swoops leaping over the solid clunk of the change.
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I had to vacate my studio all of a sudden. I loaded all my gear for a trip to tiny islands in the north, half way to the arctic circle. I took my girl and she miscarried after a Scots pal’s Thai cookery. It was a shocking shame. She was well sick in the open boat over to what used to be called Rolf’s Isle where I’d got hold of a cottage by pulling a family string. The art lover’s stone heap place was straight back to the nineteen forties: subtle greys, careful portraits. Ruined cottages everywhere from the clearances when the lairds ran sheep not people. At fifty yards the sea crashed on rocks where mornings the seals came. It rained, boy did it rain.
I was impotent all that month and runny inks made printmaking hit and miss, or rather hit and run, except a neat quartet of monoprints, destroyed by fire at East Yorkshire Aluminium one year later. During the vernissage in the pier head gallery of the chief town the aurora borealis sucked out my audience tho I sold a lovely big one to a Norwegian second-homer, Gunni Moberg.
My girl got the call for jury service so creamy Saab did a non-stop into orange lamp-lit south land, five hundred miles down to the Metrop. Somewhere that Saab died too. I moved south to deep country, the bit of England that sticks out like a bum at the right hand side and picked by magic the same model but green. This was my cruise the lanes motor with every now and again some hell bent longer run, pick up the rag rug lady for example and bring her down through the rolling hills just back of the east coast. You can just make out in the snap I’d lost a window mechanism. That the window is covered with plastic tells me it wasn’t fixed straightaway. What was the hold up? Detaching the panel? Fixing the mechanism? Somewhere an old history stirs in my mind where you start with a small problem and find soon you have a whole broken car on your hands.
Before the fan trained morrello cherry to the left had fruited I was carless. A year and a half without a motor — an enormous new time/space universe: shoe leather, bike, bus. Going to town to shop took all day. I looked up Roman villa sites, figured out old dead lanes to ancient river crossings. My Saab 99 were behind me, they’d done me well — with their plumped out, snubby lines, something of the dolphin — scandinavian sea-rover skills.
