Women, Cars and Mechanics

The first car we had was a Hillman Imp. Imp was a good name for it. It constantly played tricks on us. It was green as well, which is supposed to be unlucky, so I guess we were asking for trouble. At least it taught my husband a lot about the inside of a car. He had to service it every week.

At one point we were living in the same converted property as a colleague of mine. It stood to reason that we should have a care every day to travel. On one particular journey, with Linda as my witness, the car stalled every time I slowed down. And yes, I was putting my foot down properly on the clutch.

“That car,” I hissed at my husband, Martin, “it’s playing up again.”

He drove it up the road to the local corner shop.

“It was perfect,” he said. “No problem at all.

I dashed ups upstairs and knocked on my colleague’s door.

“Come and tell him” I said. “He doesn’t believe me.”

“It’s true,” said Linda. “It stalled every time we slowed down.”

He sighed. “All right,” he said, “I’ll go and have a look at it.”

Twenty minutes later he came back.

“Well I did find a piece of grass next to the carburettor,” he said. “I wonder if it had been stuck in there and the effort of driving up over the pavement shook it out?”

I shrugged.

Thankfully, it worked fine the next day.

A few weeks later I found myself doing very long elegant gear changes. Something seemed to have come adrift in the gear box. Any driving instructor would have been proud of me. I’d thought I’d been using all four gears. (Yes we only had four in those days.) It turns out I’d only used first and second.

You know we women aren’t as daft as we seem about cars. The Imp at least illustrated that.

When we first had it it seemed to use more oil than petrol. We were forever getting an oil warning light coming on. We had no end of repairs done to it.

“I’m sure the must be something blocking one of the tubes,” I said.

“No,” said Martin. “They’ve checked everything.”

We paid out for yet another repair, and then set off from Birmingham to Wales. Sure enough, just a few minutes before we arrived at my parent-in-laws place, the oil warning light came on.

We eventually entrusted it to my father-in-law’s local trusted mechanic.

“I found the problem,” he said gleefully when we went to pick up the car. “There was part of an old oil-filter blocking the tube.”

Ha!

“See,” I said.

Martin shrugged his shoulders.

It was also in Wales that Martin decided to change the bulb on the rear light. It wasn’t a difficult job and he decided to test that everything was working all right. But it wasn’t! Every time he used the indicator, the rear light winked.

I wonder whether he need to put the cover back to make it work properly, I thought.

Martin and his father puzzled over it, tutted and frowned.

“I’ll put the cover back on and run it up to the garage tomorrow,” he said.

He did just that and then gave it one last try. It worked perfectly.

“I think the screw in the cover was part of the circuit,” said Martin.

I could have told you that, I thought. Don’t you underestimate what we women know about cars.