Long life
A taste for speed
Nigel Nicolson
Icannot claim much in common with the brilliant Mansell except a Christian name, but there are few of us who have not expe- rienced from time to time the joy he feels in driving fast. The design of modern cars contributes to it, the virtual infallibility of tyres and engines if well maintained, and the extraordinary vision with which we are endowed, that enables every amateur driv-
er to pass without thought another car approaching at 70 mph only feet away. Then there's our modern road system which permits speeding in safety and opens to view some of the loveliest countryside in England, like the M25 through Surrey or the M40 in Oxfordshire. I need not go on. This is all familiar, if usually unacknowl- edged.
The penalty is accident. Only once have I come near death on the roads, and the memory of it still governs my motoring ardour today. It was in Sicily in 1972. I was writing the biography of Field Marshal Alexander who, 30 years before, had con- quered the island in six weeks. Rounding a bend near the village of Bronte (from which Nelson took his title), I confronted a car driving fast on the wrong side of the road. There was only one way to escape a head-on collision: to plunge over the retaining wall, ten-foot high, into an olive grove. My car turned over twice, hit a tree, remained upright. I crawled out, apparently Intact, and for 20 minutes sat beside the wreckage awaiting help. Etna and I smoked in mutual commiseration.
In fact three of my ribs had been broken by the seat-belt which saved my life, but I did not know this until the local carabiniere took me to the cottage hospital where I was X-rayed. I spent the next two weeks there in the men's ward, sharing it with the Mafia and their victims and a man who had been bitten by his donkey. It was one of the most enjoyable fortnights in my life. None of us was seriously injured, the hospital was run by gentle nuns, and the food was delicious, the conversation incessant. A boy of eight, Alfredo, adopted me, and would bring me ice-cream from the village, the newspapers and bunches of wild flowers. When I was mended enough to travel again, I gave him a bicycle. Never, never have I given so much pleasure at so little cost. Alfredo must now be 28, lost to me, and I imagine the rusting frame of the bicycle filling a gap in some dusty Sicilian hedge. But his delight made my accident almost worth- while.
I have still not lost the taste for speed. I dream sometimes that I am the owner of an open-top Mercedes sports car, pillar-box red like Princess Di's. But I would look foolish, would I not, a septuagenarian flaunting his virility? Instead I shall be driv- ing my Renault 21 to Winchester next week, and in September to France, choos- ing now the broad ribbons of the motor- ways, now the vermicelli of the lanes, delighting in the skills that nature and practice have given me and the world that the motor car reveals to those who do not treat it simply as a means of conveyance. I exult like Virginia Woolf on obtaining her first Singer in 1927: We flash through Sussex almost daily; visit ruins; muse by retired moats; surprise Colonels. It's a perfect invention. What we did without it passes my comprehension.
So it does mine.
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