MOTORING
Holiday-Wise It seems quite unbelievable in these sophisticated days that anyone should ask anyone else's advice about holiday motor- touring. In a year or so it will hardly be possible to drive from the Bay of Biscay to the Black Sea in August without finding half the hotels on the way booked up. This very week I hear that if you want to take your car across the Channel you must either go round by Hamburg or wait until September, unless you get somebody's returned car- space, like a stall at a successful play. You would have thought that there was nothing to learn about the game, yet I have had half a dozen letters within the last month asking for advice on every imaginable point.
For the Blue In the matter of the car's needs there is no longer very much to say. A decent modern car can very well go off into the blue without more than the barest spares—the blue being any place that may still exist 5o miles from help. None the less, knowing or rather never knowing what may happen to the best-found cars made on the most civilised roads, I would urge upon these correspondents the wisdom of setting out with new tyres ; of carrying a couple of spare valves ; of taking the best and latest maps available. Having before now suffered acutely from the lack of them, these three have impressed themselves upon me more than anything else in a good many years of British and continental travelling.
Travel Very Light Naturally you will start off with your engine and everything else newly cleaned and tuned up, the whole car as fit as you can make it. Only the real novice needs to be told that, but what more people seem to need to be told every year, no matter how bitter or how numerous the lessons they have already learnt, is the immense importance, in an ordinary- sized car, of keeping the weight down as much as possible. If you are going to climb mountain ranges of any great height, leave as much as possible behind. I forget what the exact figure is, but roughly speaking every pound weight becomes two at over a certain altitude.
Last year it fell to me to burden my unfortunate and ancient car with enough luggage-weight for two of her power and, bulging and creaking, the springs flat, the engine always pressed to its utmost, to drive her over the highest passes in the Pyrenees and Alps in five countries. Nothing broke, but that was just a miracle. What I chiefly remember is having to climb so many of these passes on bottom gear and the unendurable shame of being overtaken on the steepest stretches by insignificances. Also, the petrol consumption was at least 5o per cent. above normal. Take the minimum of clothes. Laundries abound from sea to sea.
The British C.imate Body I have lately driven on trial a car with a body which is, for this country, the first to compete seriously with the type that has been familiar on the roads of the Continent for some years. The 25-h.p. Wolseley drophead four-seater coupe is a very fast car with a new development of the sort of body we need for all the weathers of Britain. Frankly up to now I do not think we can congratulate ourselves on the progress of the home-designed drophead (particularly of the four- seater), which is, beyond dispute, the general carriage of the • immediate future. Its hood is too cumbrous, as a rule, and too complicated in operation; it is apt to rattle abomin- ably ; it is nearly always draughty, with the needle-point draughts that are so infinitely sharper than the hearty gales of the open tourer ; and, stupidest mistake of all, they are tco small behind.
The Wolseley Drophead The new Wolseley avoids all these faults and for that reason takes rank as an innovation. I could criticise several points in this clever design, but in the end I should have to admit that most of my complaints were trivial. It is a thoroughly successful design, and they should almost certainly improve upon it next time. You have here a car that will carry four large people in reasonable comfort—not so common as you might think. The hood is weathertight as a saloon, and it is really easy to put up and down. It did not rattle during my trial and there were no draughts when it was up. It really had the advantages of the open and the closed car. All it wanted in my view was deeper seating, which is easy to correct.
For the rest, it is an exhilarated edition of the normal 25-h.p. model on a shorter wheelbase. It will do more than oo miles an hour in convenient circumstances, and it is one of the very few cars of its power that will do so at the price, £498. That feature, however, is not nearly so inter- esting in this country as the coachwork.
A Gloucestershire Valley To the best of my belief and strictly according to the evidence of the map the river that creates the valley has no name. It is no more than a brook, and its length is less than five miles from source to disappearance—for that is what it does—it disappears, somewhere near Woodchester. It crawls past the monastery and then is no more seen. As a river, then, its existence is beneath ordinary notice, but very few real streams can boast of so much pleasant country, village, wood, valley and common land, in so short a span. Above it, to the north, lies Minchinhampton Common, that breezy expanse from whose wind-clipped turf you can see so clearly over the Severn Valley and into Wales. Minchinhampton Common can lay no claim to the exclusiveness of the unfre- quented. Many people play golf on it, particularly on Saturdays and Sundays, and it is known by name hundreds of miles away. Yet it contrives to remain one of the minor open spaces of the West, and if you go there at any time but summer, you will find it empty most days of the week.
A Hillside Village Just under the western edge of the common you slide down into Amberley, a village of centuries-old houses rashly perched on the side of the hill, all built of Cotswold stone, all arranged as if on a predetermined plan. The school-house is hideous, as are most of them, and the church serves well to emphasise the contrasting suitability of every °the,- building, including the newest inn, but nearly all the other houses that compose the picture you see as you come down off the edge of the common are as they should be. It is nearly impossible to walk or drive anywhere without climbing or going down a hill, all of them steep and pretty long.
English Woodland There is the one that drops you like a stone into the valley at Woodchester, the other that delivers you with hot brakes into Stroud, and the third, the " W " which behaves in a most Alpine manner, with hairpins and sweeps, before you get off it on to the level at Nailsworth. And this one brings you to the second half of the valley of the nameless brook. The road runs to Avening under the immense dusky spread of ancient beech trees, a miniature of English woodland scenery. On the other side of this absurd stream there is a lake and sloping meadows which are dazzling white in spring with the thorn that is so famous hereabouts. A very sharp bend to the left outside Avening village brings you back to Amberley over the common. The whole thing takes you no more than seven miles, but it is one of the best corners of [Note.—Readers' requests for advice from our Motoring Correspondent on the choice of new cars should be accompanied by a stamped and addressed envelope. The highest price payable must be given, as well as the type of body required. No advice can be given on the purchase, sale or exchange of used cars.]
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