by Rosie Thomas
The traffic built up. We had been warned that the Turks were mad motorists, but after the experiences of the Indian subcontinent they seemed to drive like Postman Pat by comparison. We came to the outskirts of Istanbul and then, glinting in the distance, we saw the Bosphorus Bridge. I had imagined breezing across it, the scent of Europe strengthening in my nostrils all the way, but what we encountered in fact was a giant, exhaust-fuming traffic jam. We inched wearily forward in the gridlock of metal, cheek to cheek with the Rover belonging to a man called Jonathan Lux. His co-driver had had to fly home sick, and he now had Lord Montagu ensconced as his navigator. Judging by the set of their profiles, both of them were rather fed up.
The queue to cross the bridge seemed not to be moving. From having plenty of time to reach the control in the hotel on the European side, we began to worry that we would be late. The car started to overheat, and Phil turned on the heater to help it out. We grew hotter and thirstier as the minutes ticked past. Later we heard that a rally car had broken down on the bridge and then caught fire, thus holding up the traffic on two continents.
At last, we crept over the wide neck of water. Anticlimactically, we were back in Europe. We made it to the control just within our time.
On a rest day in Istanbul, with fantasy Phil at my side, there would have been a boat ride on the Bosphorus and lunch at one of the little floating restaurants, and then as the strong sunshine faded towards evening, a trip to the Blue Mosque. I had done all these things before and had no need to repeat them for myself, but I would have liked to share them with him.
Real Phil was as monofocal as ever. The car was booked in for a major service, and whilst most drivers would have been happy to hand over the keys for once, Phil wanted to be in on it.
Tony Barrett had made the arrangements from London, in his own quirky way. Instead of asking Volvo for an introduction to their local agent, he had gone to the Turkish owners of the greasy spoon café around the corner from the arches, where Phil and I had had so many of our starry-eyed pre-rally planning meetings. They had given him the name and address of a mechanic, and it was these details on a scrap of paper that I showed to the Turkish facilitator at the rally desk. The man made a phone call, and it was arranged that the café connection should come to the hotel to meet us and look at the Amazon. An hour or so later he duly showed up, a good looking man with a shy smile who did not speak a word of English. Even so, he and Phil were immediately the best of friends, with a cheeky hotel bellboy acting as interpreter.
It was agreed that they would take the car off to the inspection pit and strengthen their pair bonding over the socket set. There was clearly no role for me in this scenario.
'I'll be back later,' Phil called over his shoulder. 'We'll go and look at the Blue Mosque.'
I wandered over to look at the rally notice board.
Idly, I read the order list. All the cars in the running ahead of us were serious contenders – the Willys jeep men, the Peykans, the Catts and the other rallyists. The two white Ford coupes were there, and Kurt Dichtl in his Silver Dawn, and Jon and Adam, the Dangerfields and sure and steady Murray Kayll, and Thomas and Maria. It would take a major upheaval to shake any of these out of position and now, according to RO, the competition was more or less over. If we could keep the car going we would reach Paris and win our gold medal, but Phil and I had resigned ourselves to climbing no higher than twenty-first place. Just cruelly short of our target.
I read the list again.
It put us in twentieth place.
Which name was missing from the familiar sequence ahead of us?
It took me two more minutes to work out that it was Chris and Howard. Inexplicably, they were now six places behind us. I was deeply pleased to be in the top twenty again at last, but that it should be at the expense of the Camaro boys took the shine off it somewhat.
For a solo celebration I called a taxi and went to the Istanbul shopping mall. It wasn't noticeably different from Brent Cross, and I spent a therapeutic hour at the Clinique counter as well as mumsily stocking up on fresh supplies of socks and underpants for real Phil. I was at the hotel in good time to go sightseeing, but a series of telephone messages from the garage kept putting the departure hour back and back. Phil was as happy as the dog with two choc-ices again, becoming meta-friends with half the mechanics in Turkey. They had changed the ignition, he told me. If there should be a snap scrutineering in an attempt to catch out some of the more blatant rule-breakers, we would have nothing to hide. Instead of visiting the sights I had tea with the Aan de Stegges and their Citroen mechanic. And at last, feeling for the first time since Palandoken that I could look at a real drink again, I went to the HQ hotel to see who I could find.
Colin was at the bar. We had one of those long, inclusive talks that stuck out for me like isolated and precious signposts along the rally road. He told me that he and Melissa's father had been friends since boyhood. A series of tragedies had befallen Melissa's uncles, and a spiritualist told the family that the gods were angry with them. As soon as Melissa was born her parents went through the ceremony of handing the baby over to Colin, who was to divert the attention of the gods by becoming her father. He had helped to look after her ever since, and he had taught her to ride a bicycle and scuba dive and taken her on camping trips.
'Her parents are not outdoor people,' he smiled, 'so I did that for her.'
I thought how lucky Melissa was to have him. In turn I told him about Charlie and Flora, and my own share of good luck.
When Phil finally came back it was too late for sightseeing, but we were in good time for dinner.
The organisers had advised us that the evening's pro-gramme would be a formal dinner in the HQ hotel followed by an interim prizegiving. We were all to attend, decently dressed. Accordingly the bad crowd went out to dinner elsewhere, dressed as we pleased. Colin and Melissa had arranged it, and after a taxi ride up and down the switchback hills of Istanbul's side streets we found ourselves in an elegant riverboat restaurant right under the great piers of the Bosphorus Bridge. Trev and jingers were with us, and Chris and Howard, and Carolyn with her husband who had flown out to meet her – bringing with him a sharp navy-blue brass-buttoned blazer for Howard. Wearing it, Howard looked suddenly citified. There were some women relatives of Melissa's too, and the presence of these new faces made a schizophrenic vibration for all of us between the time-warp of the rally and the reality of civilisation.
We sat around a big, white-clothed round table with the Bosphorus waters glinting alongside us – we were just tethered to the flank of Europe. Waiters in evening dress brought fish soup and pan-fried seabass and bottles of champagne, and it was like balancing on the lip of two different worlds. It was almost all over. Soon we would all be back in our metaphorical navy-blue blazers. Except for Phil, perhaps. I hoped that Phil would go on adventuring, and carrying the cargo of our deferred fantasies with him.
I sat between Howard and Trev. On the one side Howard and Carolyn and the others talked about money and sex and mobile phones, and we might have been at any dinner party in Chelsea or Gloucestershire, and on the other Trev chatted engagingly about crews and cars and bike racing, just as we had been doing all the way from China. It was a bit of a conversational balancing act, but I enjoyed it. Once in a while, I caught Phil's eye across the table.
'What happened yesterday?' I asked Chris, as soon as I had a chance. He was at his most Eeyorish.
'Time control,' he said lugubriously. 'Missed the stamp at the morning one. Thought it had been changed to a passage control, not the afternoon one.'
Just for this, they had incurred a 240-minute penalty and lost their gold medal.
'Haven't quite worked out who was to blame. We agreed on both of us.'
I thought this was democratic behaviour. Just to contemplate what would have happened if I had made a similar mistake made me shiver and reach quickly for my drink.
There had been some other disasters too. David and Andrew's land crab
had broken down two days out of Istanbul. They put it on a truck, with directions that it was to be driven to Istanbul to meet them, and gloomily travelled onwards by bus. When I bumped into him at the hotel on the first night, Andrew was gloomier still. The car and the truck had both vanished.
David Arrigo and Willem Caruana had had endless set backs in the Allard, but they had refused to give up. They had accompanied it on and off trucks and in and out of repair shops, they had slept at the roadside and in huts, and they finally caught up with the rally once more in Istanbul. They were ready to drive on into Greece.
The land crab and the truck did materialise in the end. David Wilks spent the Turkish rest day repairing his damaged engine, and was also ready to move on with the rest of the rally.
Sixty-six cars left Istanbul still in the main Challenge, and sixteen in the touring category.
I thought back to the prediction RO and the mechanics had made in China, that just twenty-nine cars would reach the Place de la Concorde.
All the organisers and officials were surprised by the powers of endurance of the cars and the tenacity of so many of the competitors. We would hear that this car or that one had blown its engine, holed a piston or suffered complete electrical failure, and was definitely out for good. Then two days later it would reappear, restored and still running, with its crew exhausted but triumphant. In Istanbul I also saw Adèle Cohen, who with her husband had entered in the Stutz that had had to pull out before Lanzhou. Now she told me that they had been so determined not to miss the end of the rally that they had driven one of their other vintage cars, this one a Bentley, out to Istanbul and would be accompanying the field onwards to Paris. RO had forbidden them to sport their rally plates on the replacement car.
The gossip went that RO had only had five gold medals made for presentation at the prizegiving. It seemed now that he would need five times that many. Phil and I were sure that one of them would be ours. And we were going to hold on to our 20th place, come what may.
Europe seemed very small. And very beautiful.
We left Istanbul in the dark, at 6.30 in the morning, and drove to the Greek border. We were subject to European speed limits now, and to police who wouldn't necessarily wave us past with a blind-eye salute. The pace seemed much slower; it was as if we suddenly found ourselves on a motoring holiday after struggling so far.
Inside Greece we stopped for lunch at a roadside bar, with JD and Dan and Melissa and Colin. There were scarlet geraniums in blue-painted tin cans ranged along the top of the wall, and a table under a vine pergola and feta salad to eat. It felt like an imposition to have to buckle myself into the car seat again afterwards, to zero the trip and open the route notes, instead of heading for the beach. We drove onwards in convoy, around the curve of the Aegean and through Kaválla to Thessaloníki, and even Phil was feeling mellow enough to accept the leisurely pace. Melissa was fast asleep in the navigator's seat of the Porsche with her headphones clamped over her ears. Colin found his way by following the Amazons. The stages were easy, no one lost any time.
At Thessaloníki we found a huge, rectangular summer-holiday hotel looking out over the harbour. It was one of those places where each room opened on to a little box of a balcony furnished with a white plastic table and two white plastic chairs. From our high balcony I leaned down to look at the cars lining up all over again, this time with the olive-green harbour water behind them. Gulls were dipping over the rubbish lapping against the sea wall, and the salt moisture in the air flattened and muffled the roar of engines turning over.
I could see Phil, running oily hands through his hair, and even at this distance I could tell he was doing the face thing.
'What's wrong?' I made myself ask when I went down to join him.
'It's the rear wheel bearing.'
'Show me?'
'I'm not going to take it apart now. But look, there's a lot of play. And this grumbling noise.'
He rolled the wheel and I laughed at first, remembering how Dan had told me that he had run out of words to describe the cacophony of different noises their car was emitting. A mere grumbling sound didn't seem to come very high up the scale.
'Have we got a spare?'
'One bearing, and a half-shaft. No bearing cap. And I've never replaced a bearing before. I know it's a big job.'
I wondered, very briefly, how it was that he and Mr Mechanic had managed to spend a whole expensive day at the garage yesterday, exchanging little presents and taking photographs of each other in front of the car, without getting round to checking the wheel bearings.
'Well. What shall we do?'
Phil looked unhappy. 'I think we'll have to run on tomorrow, and see how much worse it gets.'
It appeared that we didn't have any choice in the matter, as usual.
I knew that somewhere in Thessaloníki there would be the little fantasy restaurant. There was even the right scent in the air of salt and diesel fumes and fresh fish. But the boys were getting fidgety. England was playing Italy in the World Cup qualifier, and it was becoming essential to find a bar with a television tuned to the sports channel.
I left them to their pleasures and ate a solitary picnic in the hotel bedroom with a copy of Elle belonging to Melissa. I hadn't had a book to read since I had jettisoned them all to save weight, long, long ago in Golmud. The only one I held on to was a little Faber paperback of The Waste Land, and I had given that as a present to Melissa. I missed it in the desert. (Come in under the shadow of this red rock. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Fear everywhere, but exhilaration also. That was the balancing act, to be able to set one successfully against the other – managing real life's Rally Syndrome.)
The last weeks were the longest time I had ever spent without reading matter. On the walk to Everest I had carried Wives and Daughters in my rucksack. In the real world I was careful about never, ever running out of books to choose from, and I dreaded a tube journey or a doctor's waiting room without a novel to see me through.
When I was a little girl there weren't very many books at home and only the glass-fronted cupboard in the big room of my primary school, where the Everest book lived, had stood between me and the dry canyons of fictionless boredom. Books were a shelter rather than a resource in those days and I read blindly and utterly indiscriminately – Enid Blyton, Tarka the Otter, Angel Pavement and Reader's Digest. The County Library visited once a month, with flaking hardbacks piled in big metal-cornered wooden boxes that were fastened with a padlock on a hasp, like the treasure chests they were. Later there was the Travelling Library, a big van that stopped on the village square once a fortnight and offered library editions of Ian Fleming and Hammond Innes and later still, at boarding school, every book that we owned had to be inspected and initialled as suitable by a member of staff. Bad books – I was able to discriminate by then – were accepted as readily as good ones. Suitable, I suppose, was defined as containing no sex or swearing. By the same token we were only allowed to have the Third Programme on the radio on Sundays, and never any pop records with vocals.
I was a scholarship girl, on a free place. When new textbooks were handed out at the beginning of the year, I could always tell which one was mine in the pile by the missing jacket and shredded spine, just as the free uniform with which I was provided was always in the style that had recently been replaced by something more attractive. (Attractive being a relative term, of course.) This treatment, instead of teaching me humility and the unimportance of material goods, gave me a raging desire for designer clothes as well as a passion for the shine and scent of an unbroken hardback novel.
Yet on this trip I had hardly missed the tottering piles of books beside my bed. My mind was already over-stuffed with images and impressions, and mental as well as physical exhaustion dumbed and flattened me. But now, tonight, I longed for a book. Magazine journalese was thin and unnourishing. It was another indication that this disturbing adventure was coming to an end. In a week, exactly, we would be at the prizegiving Ball in
Paris. I was counting the hours, but I was also trying to imagine how it would feel to be summarily cut off from all these people and their cars and concerns and vanities, which had become so familiar, as well as from the daily business of distances and minutes and mechanical stress.
A week to go, and 2,500 kilometres to cover. If the wheel bearings held out.
There had been some rumours that the next day, from Thessaloníki past Mount Olympus and over some of the old Acropolis Rally routes to the little seaside resort of Kamena Vourla, was going to be a tough one. The marshals had made amendments to the route notes, bringing forward time controls and shortening the time allowances, so it seemed that they were pushing us a little harder and hoping for a shake-up in the order. Phil was quietly worried about the bearings, but after checking them at the end of the first stage he announced that there seemed to be no significant deterioration.
We had a full hour to spare before our time came up, on a long slope of empty hillside. It was a windy, silvery morning with a cold bite in the air. Adam and Jon pulled in alongside us.
'There's a bar back down in the village. Come and have a coffee.'
We climbed up on the back of the Bentley and Adam accelerated away down the hill. Rally cars coming to meet us flashed their lights and hooted. Holding on tight, looking down over Jon's head as the wind forced laughter up out of my chest and peeled my eyes, I saw the plain old dials of the Jaeger instruments, and the dark-green leather curves of the seats. I wanted to stroke them. I was fond of the old Amazon, but it never stirred my admiration the way that this car did. That was something I had learned, which had seemed incomprehensible on the day at Brooklands – it was possible to fall in love with a car. Phil loved our Volvo, too. Technically it was mine, I suppose, because I had bought it and paid for it to be prepared and it was my name in the logbook and on the insurance papers, but it was Phil who had devoted so many months of his time and attention to it.
