Your True
Tales
May 2003 –
Page 8
Ghost in
the Machine
by G. H.
Twenty years ago, when I was a teenager, my mother bought a second-hand car to teach me to drive. It was a metallic gold Morris Marina HL, and only two years old. I was surprised to find this out as it looked decidedly unloved by its previous owner and was in need of some attention from a vacuum cleaner and a hose pipe, in the most desperate way. but was in all other respects a sound vehicle. I spent hours getting it to look like new and it was well worth the effort.
I started my first driving lesson with my mum, by driving on a country lane near our home. It was deep winter and the roads were covered in ice and snow. I was not concerned as my mother said that learning to "pull away on ice" would be good practice for me. This lesson passed quite without incident, as did many others into the summer months.
I was driving though a village (Hutton Rudby, North Yorkshire), which is near our home on another driving lesson, and climbing a steep bank to the top of the village. This crests blindly and into a 90 deg bend. As I reached the top of the bank, I saw an old man with a walking stick, long dark coat, trilby hat and brogue shoes waiting by the pavement to cross the road. He seemed to notice our car and waited. As I came almost level with him, he looked directly at me and stepped out right into the path of the car. I emergency braked to avoid him. My mother, who was in the passenger seat, shouted at me and wanted to know why I had braked violently. She had not seen a soul in front of the car.
On a late night trip home in the same car from a friends house, I had to pass over a stone bridge and make a sharp turn to the left up toward Seamer from the Tanton Road. As I came over the bridge. I realized that I was going too fast to make the turn and froze at the wheel. The car calmly made the turn and stayed on its side of the road. I actually felt the steering wheel turn against my hands.
On several occasions I felt the car do things, but they were always for the good - at least when I drove it.
During a driving lesson with an instructor, I had to make a right turn into a complicated junction (for a novice), and I started to pull the car up for the turn. It refused to stop where I wanted it to, and continued for several feet before pulling up gently and stopping. I realized that if it hadn't done this, I would have turned into the wrong lane and would have been heading toward the oncoming traffic! Not only that, but the car (a manual transmission), once it pulled up, sat there ticking over with the clutch fully engaged, and pulled away when it was clear as if nothing was wrong.
The same car used to slow down and refuse to pick up speed sometimes. I learned that if I accepted this and braked, every single time I would come across a situation, either around a bend or on a main road, that if I had not already started to brake I would have ended up in an accident.
Many times I saw the old man again, but always in different places and he never walked out in front of the car more than twice. Nobody with me ever saw him when I could plainly see him either.
The car refused to start for my mother one morning. She was afraid she would be late for work (she was a Nursing Sister), so a neighbor offered to try for her. The car steadfastly refused to start, but turned over freely. I told the neighbor I could get it going. He just ignored me. In the end he said to me, "Go on then, if you know so much." I got in to the driving seat, turned the key and she fired up straight away. He was annoyed.
My brother used to drive the car, too, and he said that it "used to fight him" when he was driving, making him clip roundabouts and curbs, just not responding properly.
When I was out in it with him, I saw what he meant. As we headed toward Middlesbrough on the main road, we saw about six dogs loose on the road running toward us. My brother braked, trying to avoid running them down. The car did not slow up and ran down two of them; a third we saw running up the road with a broken front leg, only to be run down by a following motorist. A man parked by the side of the road had let them out deliberately after a row with his wife.
I always felt safe and secure in that car - "looked after," if you like. Everyone else, except my mother, who never noticed anything odd about it, hated it. My driving instructor once drove it, after he just said that he would never drive it again. "There was something not right about it," but he would never say why he felt like this.
I must admit, though, that one summer night after I had washed it down, I was stood in front of it, holding a cup of coffee, admiring my polishing job. I can't really explain it, and it sounds silly, but I suddenly got the impression I was being looked back at - nothing unusual to see or hear, just a very strong impression that for that moment the car was looking back at me, instead of just being an inanimate object.
I would think by now she will be in a scrap yard, but you can look out for her - a metallic gold Morris Marina HL.
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