1960s PRIVATE LIFE
0171 Move to the North
Before we could move to the North from Chalvey we first had to sell our house – for the asking price of £5,200! We tried all the estate agents, but to no avail, so we advertised in the local papers. At the first attempt we had only one (Indian) gentleman, who offered £5,000. We thought long and hard about it, but decided we couldn’t accept. Fortunately, at the next attempt, we had several offers - one of which met the full asking price. A few days later the Indian gentleman knocked on our door and asked if we were now willing to take his £5,000 offer. When we told him we had got the full price he then said that he would now take it at full price. He claimed that we had offered it to him at that price – which was true – but forgot that he had turned that down. He simply couldn’t understand that we were not contracted to sell it to him. With the house already sold, I hugely enjoyed the (pseudo) negotiation with him! Usually it is the buyers who have the whip hand.
By the time I left the job at Gallahers I had spent almost a decade in the south of England, in Greater London. With the move to Cussons I returned to the north. This was more dramatic than I had thought, since the house we chose in Knutsford wasn't complete and we had to live with my parents for three months. This was problematic, since my parents only really had a two-bedroom bungalow; the two children had to slot into the study. Never mind, we managed it!
This also meant that I had to commute to Manchester each day, through the Mersey tunnel and out along East Lancs road to Salford. It wasn't too bad in fact; only just over an hour. I had a new car, of course. It was a Ford Zephyr.
It was an unusual car at the time, probably for almost all-time! It was absolutely enormous. In particular it seemed it must have been about eight feet wide since I could easily seat three people breast. The problem wasn't the size, though it was rather like driving an ocean going tanker; in that you had to start turning the steering wheel long before the car started to respond! The real problem was that the engine wasn't up to it. It was a small engine for a massive car. Accordingly I also had to decide long before overtaking that I wanted to do this, and build up speed gradually. Moreover, the engine was particularly unreliable. It had one of the first automatic chokes and this was always going wrong; to the extent that I always carried a spare carburettor with me.
Mind you it wasn't as bad as that of my brand manager Roger, whose car, a rear-engined Renault, was once pulled over by the police since it was steering rather erratically. He carefully explained it was the engine in front. The police, who had seen the television shows where this sort of joke had been set up, didn't believe him and insisted they be shown. He opened the boot in the front; to show them he was carrying not merely a carburettor but a whole spare engine!
Eventually we moved into our new house in Knutsford. Even then the journey was not negligible, because of the traffic around Manchester. I had to set out almost as early as I had done in London and travel a considerably greater distance. With the size of the car this also meant that my travel bills were much higher; and this almost took away the whole of my £1,000 increase in salary!
In the morning it was much easier to travel in along the M6 and then along the East Lancs road. In the evening I used to come back part way through the motorway system to Altrincham and then down the dual carriageway. It still took nearly an hour, much the same as it took into Gallahers -- but it took far more miles and petrol.
It was also rather more risky. One morning, when approaching the East Lancs road junction on the M6, I saw this service vehicle - with its yellow lights flashing and its headlights blazing - driving down the middle reservation, with the driver waving at everyone. Other drivers waved back, but I immediately slammed my car into the inner lane and, as we rounded the corner, I saw a wall of fog; and I slammed onto the hard shoulder. A lorry came shuddering to a halt alongside where I would have been had I stayed in the inside lane. After a long delay we were able make our way through all the crashed cars, with ambulances and bodies everywhere. Miraculously no one was killed, but that was very good lesson for driving carefully.
Driving the family in the new Zephyr from London to my parents was not too much of a hassle. At least the Zephyr was well set up for constant high-speed travel on the motorway. When I later bought a mini, second-hand, in London the journey - this time to Knutsford -- was nowhere near as comfortable. It really was a fun car, we had two of them over time; but they were not built for long-distance driving!
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