♦
At the end of 1923 Herr Weiss reads in his morning paper, and reads with great pleasure, that Adolf Hitler has been gaoled following an attempted putsch against the Weimar government.
‘The best place for him,’ he says to his wife.
Hitler is imprisoned in Schloss Landberg, but is allowed considerable freedom, receives many visitors and has access to any reading and writing materials he needs.
He particularly enjoys reading My Life and Work by Henry Ford, and he begins work on a book of his own, called My Struggle.
Two
Ishmael’s Ten Prerequisites for a traveller.
A good heart — yes, it’s that simple.
A few clean pairs of underpants. (What if he had an accident?)
One of those polystyrene cooler things in which you put a little plastic container that’s been in a freezer overnight, that keeps things cool for up to twelve hours. (Actually, he soon realized this was not one of his better ideas since you’re seldom in a position to put the little plastic container in a freezer when you spend most of your nights sleeping in lay-bys.)
Canned goods. Fruit cocktail, corned beef, smoked mussels, steak and kidney pudding, guavas, baked beans with miniature pork sausages, artichoke hearts, Royal Game soup, cling peaches, mandarin segments, Irish stew, and many others.
A tin-opener. (He thought of everything.)
A blue leather motorcycle suit. (This wasn’t strictly a prerequisite, but he felt it added to his image and it was in a sale at Lewis Leathers. So far he hadn’t had the nerve to wear it.)
A copy of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive — A Manual of Step-by-step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot. This is the most thoroughly ‘right-on’ car manual the world has ever seen, its good advice includes tying back your long hair before tampering with the fan-belt. (Ishmael couldn’t understand it.)
A vibrator with four interchangeable heads — three of which he couldn’t envisage any possible use for, but perhaps he would encounter some warm and wonderful soulmate with whom to explore the possibilities.
A copy of Ian Fleming’s The Man with the Golden Gun. (He knew that it would have been more appropriate to have had some Herman Hesse but it was the only book on the rack at the Watford Gap Services that he liked the look of.)
A mind that listens. And a mind that hears. (OK, eleven prerequisites.)
Renata Caswell is writing the editorial for next month’s Cult Car magazine.
‘Why me?’ she has already protested. ‘Isn’t the editor supposed to be in charge of writing the editorial? Or am I being too pedantic?’
‘You’re being too pedantic,’ says Terry, the editor.
She slides a new sheet of paper into her manual typewriter and tries again.
We here at Cult Car believe we cater for the true motoring enthusiast, the true car lover, and we set no hard and fast rules about what kind of car you’re allowed to love. Oh, sure, it’s easy to love your Jensen, your Austin-Healey, your E-Type, and we’ve run articles on all those models; but we know that our readers are just as likely to be enthusiastic about Austin A40s, Morris Travellers, even 2CVs. We aim to satisfy those readers too. What we care about is cars with style, cars with soul. Why, take this issue…
§
And then she stops. It isn’t easy to take this issue. The freelancers haven’t come up with the goods yet. They’ve been promised one article about a man in Cumbria who has spent several years’ wages restoring a Vauxhall Velox to showroom condition and beyond. They’re hoping for three thousand words on a Coventry man who claims to have put a Rover V8 into a Datsun Cherry. Those who work on Cult Car and who are of a technical frame of mind have variously claimed that this is madness, suicide and impossible. So maybe the three thousand words will never appear. There is a whisper that a Lamborghini Countach is to be delivered so that Cult Car can take it for a test-drive, but this is the kind of magazine where nobody ever believes whispers. Then they’ve been promised a definitive piece on the Ford Edsel, but Terry swears the Edsel is old hat. Renata is not so particular. She is only the ‘staff writer’ after all. She is paid an hourly rate. She seems to spend most of her working life turning press releases into copy, sometimes improving the grammar, but most often her creative effort comes to no more than retyping.
♦
Nineteen thirty-three, Berlin, Dr Ferdinand Porsche arrives for his four o’clock appointment with Adolf Hitler. He knows that they will be discussing ‘motoring topics’ and that Herr Hitler has a special interest in small car engineering, a thing that Porsche has worked at desultorily throughout his career. What surprises Dr Porsche is just how specific Herr Hitler’s ideas are.
Hitler is not interested in theory. He wants a car designed, or rather he has designed it himself, in his head, and now he just needs someone to concern themselves with the dreary practicalities of production.
The car is to appeal to the German working-class family man, must therefore be able to carry two adults and three children, must be capable of forty miles to the gallon, must be able to sustain high speeds for long periods on the autobahnen, and since the working man will have no garage facilities it must be easy to maintain and must be air-cooled to withstand the rigours of the German winter.
All this Dr Porsche can do, but at a price. Adolf Hitler names his price: one thousand Marks — about fifty pounds.
♦
Ishmael woke up in a lay-by. He had slept on the back seat of the Beetle. The windows were steamed up. He had twinges in various remote parts of his body. His feet were hot and sticky in his shoes. He had four days’ growth of beard and a mouth like a holy man’s loincloth.
Still, he thought, it was good to be alive.
What he needed to set himself up was a good English breakfast — bacon, sausages, eggs, mushrooms, fried bread, all moving around in a sea of grease.
He drove back to the motorway. The next services were twelve miles away.
Enlightenment ate up the miles with all the eagerness he would soon be applying to his breakfast. He arrived at the services and parked. He went in through the swing doors. It was early, yet already there were kids playing on the electronic games in the foyer.
Ishmael was saddened.
♦
Dr Porsche, and for that matter the rest of the German motor industry, know that Hitler’s plan is more or less impossible. In England William Morris has managed to produce a highly austere and denuded Morris Minor, but even that costs £100.
Porsche must have been aware that even in 1933 one did not tell Adolf Hitler that he was crazy, but he may also have enjoyed the challenge of the impossible, perhaps it may even have been that Porsche and Hitler genuinely shared a benevolent dream of mass mobility and freedom.
♦
‘You know another reason why the Edsel was such a failure?’ asks Terry.
‘Surprise me,’ Renata replies.
‘Because the automatic didn’t have a gear-lever. It had bloody push buttons. Men and women, they all like to get something thick and meaty in their hand.’
Renata knows she does. She is thirty-five, still willing in flesh and spirit, still single, still an enthusiast for fast cars and fast men; and still, though who knows for how much longer, the owner of a driving licence. It has been endorsed a couple of times, which hasn’t stopped her driving very fast and occasionally very dangerously, and she does have a clever mouth that runs away from her when talking to fuzz. Her brain is telling her to use her charm while her mouth is calling the nice policeman a stunted fascist.