As the camera zoomed in on a car wrapped around a thick, wooden lamppost in the middle of an intersection, Canahan jumped out of his seat and pointed at the TV screen, excitedly shouting, “See!  

See!   That’s exactly what it did to me!”

During its life time Canahan parked the VW lorry in the back yard at night.

One morning he got up early to go to work and the lorry simply refused to go anymore.   So, rather than waste money having it towed away, he merely left the lorry where it was and it became the first corpse in a large auto graveyard which he built-up behind his house over the next decade or more.

After the demise of the lorry, he purchased a long succession of second-hand Volkswagons.   There’s nothing wrong with this, since VW make good, sturdy cars.   However, what made it strange was that Canahan had come back battle scarred from the Second World War, with a paranoid hatred of the

Germans and all things German.

“Then why do you drive nothing but German cars?” his wife Carmal would tease him, after Canahan delivered one of his lengthy lectures upon the evil of Germany.

“The Volkswagon is not a German car!” Canahan would insist, flushing red-faced from indignation at the very idea.   “It’s a British car!”

Despite the laughter which greeted this remark, for twenty years Canahan steadfastly refused to admit the Volkswagon was German.   Right up until the day, to Canahan’s horror, the almost legendary Beetle was finally put out of production.   After this he stopped driving Volkswagons and conceded that perhaps they were German cars after all.   Since who but the country that produced Adolf Hitler would be fiendish enough to put the beloved Beetle into mothballs.

“But Hitler was Austrian, not German,” Carmal would tease him.

Canahan would seethe with anger, insisting, “German, Austrian, European…It’s all the same difference!”

By the time Canahan had driven his last Volkswagon, he was notorious throughout North Williamstown for the auto graveyard which filled the back yard of his house and had started to encroach upon the side driveway as well.   Over the next ten years, Canahan purchased more than fifteen used autos, most of which he paid only a few hundred dollars each for.   He would drive each bomb until it refused to go any more, then simply added it to the graveyard.

Canahan’s passion for used autos might have gone on until his dying day.   Except that one August, after a particularly zealous year buying bombs, he received a notice from the Victorian Department of Motor Registration, informing him that if he purchased one more second-hand car before the New Year, he would qualify as a used-car dealer.   And would then have to purchase a used-car dealers’ licence, costing $12,000.

Since in those days a new small car only cost around $7,000, it was much more practical to purchase a new car than to buy the licence.   So wisely that was what Canahan chose to do.

Fortunately the new car lasted him the rest of his life, so that the legend of Canahan and his cars was able to slowly die out…Well almost.

THE END