CA MARCHE BIEN
By P. F. JENNINGS
WHEN the people at the garage in which Harblow's car seems to spend most of its time said that they couldn't provide him soon enough with a reconditioned engine or a back axle or whatever it was this time it was rather a judgement on him. We had originally planned to go to France in his car—or, rather, in France, since the ability to go across water is one of the few attributes he has never claimed for it—because Harblow said, " If we go in UB the French will laugh at us." (UB is the name of my car, which was made in 1926.) It was useless to point out to him that the only cars worth having these days are those made before 1930 or after 1946, because the ones in between have the benefit neither of the divine simplicity of UB, with its wire cable brakes, gravity petrol feed, unadorned dashboard and high sidescreens, nor of the one-year period of grace which elapses before the extraordinary and, to my mind, retrogressive complications on the modern car bring it to a standstill. Harblow's car was made in 1935, an absolutely fatal year when they were just beginning to build all those baroque bulbous-looking things round the carburettor, but he still goes round telling everyone with foolish pride what a good year it was.
So we went in UB after all. From the practically deserted quay- side at Newhaven, with its silent electric cranes, their grabs disdain- fully shortened to cope with UB after the S.S.s and Daimlers, the boat took us slap into the middle of Dieppe on what appeared to be market-day. The majority of the passengers were French, and they were being met by an average of five relatives each. Before this vast assembly the cars were being lifted out by the noisiest and most insecure-looking steam crane I have ever seen. I don't suppose it was insecure really, any more than those incredible wire railways in the Alps on which people go on not getting killed year after year. But since childhood, when I observed that the best model steam engines were the ones with horizontal boilers, I have always dis- trusted the ones with the boiler standing on its end. (For one thing, the fire can't heat so much of the water, can it?) The piston, which was only about a foot long, whizzed round at an enormous speed when the crane was making a wobbly turn on its axis or the thing was out of gear, but whenever it picked up a car it emitted a sort of slowing-down, groaning noise which suggested that it could only just make it.
The crane seized UB with obvious relief after a long row of shiny new cars labelled "Export. Sportcar A.G. Zurich," and deposited it with a flourish in the midst of the cheering spectators. The French did not exactly laugh at UB. I think they were too amazed. But they did shake my faith in their famous logic. Harblow had already remarked on the extraordinary number of French cars on the roads ; many of these, it is true, were modern cars with bumpers and, delightful phrase, avertisseurs sonores. (UB's advertiser, one of those ancient klaxons which seem to go through a couple of gears before they reach a steady note, we had left behind because age had so reduced its sonority as to make it practically inaudible.) But there were also a considerable number of what I can only call jalopies, even-older than UB—strange jalopies with bodies like boats, only with the sharp end at the back ; old high jalopies with vertical steer- ing columns ; and we even saw one jalopy with solid tyres. I do not think the arrival of UB seriously lowered the average age of cars in France. Yet, for some reason, it was greeted on the quayside and wherever we went with cries of "le petit tank anglais ! " except for one wonderful moment in a dark garage when a man said, "Qu'est- ce-que c'est que vous avez lci? C'est un jeep, hein ?" Almost every time we went into a garage the man would slap it casually and say, " Cinq chevaux, hein ?" and my reply, "Non, monsieur, sept-point- neuf. Presque huit," always produced a sensation. The economical French would make any engine with 8 chevaux power a car about 15 feet long (and, by a quaint reversal, carry about 4o hommes).
It was just after Chamonix, as I now tell my 1935 friends casually, that UB suddenly and unaccountably began to boil after every kilo- metre and shed glorious light on one of my two pieces of exotic French. I suppose everyone keeps a few outlandish words in addi- tion to his basic vocabulary. Thus, just as I know that the German for accelerator is Geschwindigkeitsumschaltungshebel, I also know that the French for a swarm of bees is un nid d'abeilles. When we went into a garage and explained that l'eau bouillit toujours the micanicien (mechanic) looked at the radiateur (radiator) and shook his tete, saying, "Ah, c'est un vieux nid d'abeilles" (an old nest of bees). 1935 motorists like Harblow have never heard of honeycomb radiators, and it took me some time to convince him that this was not just a quaint Gallic oath.
The mecanicien was very thorough. He replaced the lozenge in the cylinder head which we had blown out with the steam. He tested the ignition, the oil pressure, the gearbox and the brakes. He blew up the tyres, and came out for a ride with us (or with me anyway, as there wasn't room for Harblow as well) to see the water boil for himself, which it did with a fierce glub-glubbing noise before we had even got out of the town. He didn't do anything to the old nest of bees or in fact to any part of the actual water system, content- ing himself with telling us that the radiateur was blocked up, and he gave us some pastilles (pastilles) which he said would debaucher it. We took this to mean that they would dissolve the rust and other blockages in the water.
'For the next two days we amazed the inhabitants of the Jura mountains by driving through their villages with a huge bulging red rubber bag dangling at the back of UB. It was a groundsheet filled with about two gallons of water and tied up, after stupendous efforts, with rope. Every five kilometres or so we stopped. There was no sound except the water glub-glubbing away and the tinkle- tonkle of the mountain cow-bells. We waited for the glub-glubbing to cease (the tinkle-tonkle never ceased, not even at two in the morn- ing. I had no idea cows were so restless) and then we filled a very ornate jug, which Harblow had bought in Chamonix, from this great bladder without undoing the rope. It's quite easy if you don't mind it going up your sleeve. We stuffed pastilles into the radiateur until it was full of a thick brown liquid and we were afraid that any more would dissolve the radiateur itself. Slowly and patiently we increased our range before boiling to six, seven, ten kilometres.
Just outside Dijon we discovered what was wrong. The rubber tube from the radiateur to the engine (moteur. They would !) was absolutely solid. It had perished inside. In a rash moment I passed on to Harblow my other piece of exotic French—caoutchouc. As anybody in the Fourth Form will corroborate, this fantastic word actually means rubber. (Where did they get it from? To my mind anything, even snerl, or pingleboob, sounds more like rubber than caoutchouc.) When Harblow rushed into a nearby garage and informed it that "le caoutchouc est mart dedans " it was one of the occasions when they did laugh.
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