The engine. That totally unforeseen thing that DeLorean had said in the wake of the election was all that could knock the production schedule off course.
Bill Collins had designed the car with a Wankel rotary in mind – no piston engine came close in terms of simplicity and reliability. DeLorean had seemed to concur, even though as things stood there was no realistic prospect of its running on lead-free gas, an ambition carried over from the Safety Vehicle days. As the months passed, though, and the trials progressed, he began to have concerns too about the Wankel’s poor fuel economy. It was bad enough not delivering on one of their promises, a car that was kinder to the planet, but not delivering on a second of them by producing a car that hit owners in the pocket as well...?
An engine like the V6, on the other hand, would not only be adaptable down the line to lead-free, but would have the double advantage in the present of being cheaper for the consumer and for the company, which could buy them ready-made from Peugeot. Collins was quick to point out the obvious disadvantage, present and future: weight. The V6 was heavier by far than the Wankel, on which all the calculations up to now had been based. He had put it through its paces at the workshop DeLorean had established in Coventry, England, while the Dunmurry factory was being built and reported back: it wasn’t going to work, their Elastic Reservoir Moulded frame wouldn’t be able to carry the V6. They were going to have to revert to the Wankel or find another alternative.
Well, something was going to have to be rethought, DeLorean said, that was for certain sure.
The words ‘Lotus’ and ‘Colin Chapman’, which had already been in the air for some time – since the days of Geneva and GPD – began to crop up now with ever greater frequency in meetings and memos.
His name might not have been so obviously displayed – a tangle of initials on the company crest was all – but Lotus was as much Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman (to account for those initials in full) as DMC was John DeLorean. He had built his first car single-handedly in a garage in London at the tail end of the forties – while DeLorean was still playing clarinet in the Lawrence Tech band – and graduated from there, a class of one, to selling kits to other enthusiasts, and from there in a handful of years to managing his own Formula 1 racing team. Lotus was not just a company, it was a lifestyle. There were Lotus umbrellas, Lotus jackets and hats, and who knew what else. James Bond had driven a Lotus in his most recent movie – a fact that DeLorean had repeated several times to Randall. ‘That’s what you would want: your car in a movie. Can you imagine the sales from that? You couldn’t build enough of them.’
Randall had met Chapman not long after the announcement of the Dunmurry factory, by chance, or so it had seemed at the time, just coming into a first-class lounge at Heathrow as Randall and DeLorean left the side room they had booked for a meeting, DeLorean’s schedule on that occasion not allowing him to come as far as Belfast.
The man could not have been more English if he had come in kit form himself (albeit a little scaled down – DeLorean was a good ten inches taller): Michael Caine hair, David Niven moustache, BBC-newsreader accent, an air, if not quite of entitlement then at least of expectation that all things in time could be bent to his will. He had a big house – a ‘Hall’, Ketteringham – in Norfolk: five hundred years old, by all accounts. There were workshops in the stables and outbuildings, a superstitious nod perhaps to his kit-car origins, although the main assembly these days was done a couple of miles away at Hethel, on the site of a decommissioned American airbase (something of a theme it seemed with start-up auto manufacturers).
All this Randall learned from DeLorean who visited Ketteringham, and Hethel, with Bill Collins, a few weeks after that Heathrow encounter, Chapman himself piloting the helicopter that picked them up from central London.
‘You have to hand it to the Brits,’ he told Randall on his stopover in Belfast the following afternoon. ‘They know how to do these things properly.’
Lotuses were the cars DeLorean would have built if he had been born in Richmond, Surrey, instead of Detroit, Michigan.
Collins had said little then, even less when the Geneva company was set up with a view to funding a joint research and development unit, housed ‘for the time being’ in Hethel. It was from that quarter that the suggestion came to abandon the Elastic Reservoir Moulded frame in favour of a solid steel chassis strong enough to cope with the V6 engine. Something like the Lotus Esprit’s chassis, say.
DeLorean said they were bound to give the matter proper consideration. Modifications would have to be made, of course, a new prototype built, which would inevitably lead to delays in the production schedule, but if it meant savings in the long term then to dismiss it out of hand would be beyond foolish, it would be ‘asinine’. (The word was a new favourite.) Collins remained silent.
When, however, a short time after that Chapman again floated the idea of ditching the remaining ERM elements and using instead a body moulding system that he had patented – Vacuum Assisted Resin Injection – Collins finally flipped. At the rate things were going all that would be left soon of their original concept was the stainless steel panels and the gull-wing doors. ‘I love the Esprit,’ was the line that fed back to Randall from the showdown in the offices on Park Lane, ‘but I didn’t join DeLorean Motor Cars to build Lotuses in drag.’
And with that ended the relationship that had started the whole ball rolling. But on the ball rolled anyway.
More and more the focus shifted to Norfolk. Chuck was serving four days of his seven-day-a-week sentence there. If he could have figured out a way to conjure up an eighth day, Randall didn’t doubt he would have spent it there too.
The new secretary of state was, according to Jennings, Not Best Pleased by this change of direction. Randall could all too easily imagine it. Humphrey Atkins sighed rather in the way that a bagpipe droned. (At least he did in the presence of DMC representatives, which was all Randall had to go on.) It was the base note on which his voice was an elaboration.
‘Look, Edmund,’ said DeLorean, ‘the secretary of state is a businessman, isn’t he?’ Randall had it from Jennings that Atkins had married into a linoleum manufacturing family. DeLorean seemed to set rather more store by this than Jennings had perhaps intended. ‘He wouldn’t need it explained to him: this way we simplify the supply line.’
‘Which will ultimately keep the price down?’
‘Which will ultimately keep the price from rising too high.’
‘What about the letters of offer we have sitting here waiting to go out?’ Randall asked.
‘Send them. Get the people in and start training them.’
*
The letter did not arrive until a full two weeks after the interview, long enough for Liz to think that she had handled the interview all wrong – would it really have hurt her to humour that fella a bit more? – and for Robert to have conceded magnanimously that right enough the extra few pounds coming in might have been handy.
She sat at the table in the dinette for most of the afternoon, turning the page over and over to make sure that she had not misread it. Only when she heard the boys come barging in the front door and charge up the stairs to their room did she shake herself and get the potatoes peeled and the leeks washed and chopped. Then she sat down with the letter again, her eye drawn back time and again to the starting salary: the starting salary.
Her last pay packet, from the Water Office, had been eight pounds nine and eleven, after deductions. She had started in there as a trainee clerk-typist three weeks after her final O level, had her photo taken for the school magazine, standing in front of the assembly hall with another girl, Paula, who had got a job in the Electricity Board. The utilities – they had been taught it since they were old enough to spell it – were second only to banks in the jobs-for-life stakes. Or jobs for as much of your life as you cared to work.
Robert had been in the Water Office a couple of years already, one of a group of young lads who used to come into the canteen together a
t lunchtime and carry on with the women behind the counter – ‘Put a few more chips on there for me, Myrtle. Ah, go on, I’m a growing boy.’
‘He’s a fat bastard, he means.’
‘Language now, ladies present.’
‘Are you kidding? Myrtle could teach us words. Couldn’t you, Myrtle?’
‘I’ll teach you a lot more than words.’
And so on.
Liz knew pretty much from the get-go that he had his eye on her – because you do know, don’t you? You just know – and tell you the truth she wouldn’t have been a bit shy about saying in those days that she was a worthwhile place for an eye to linger. They were married a fortnight after her twentieth birthday, and two months before her twenty-first – one month before the birth of her eldest – she took home her last eight pounds nine and eleven.
The Water Office closed in 1973, its functions taken over by the Department of the Environment and a third of its workers handed their cards. Robert was straight down to the dole office the next morning and within the week had started in the City Hospital’s Purchasing and Procurement department. Less money than he had been getting in Water, but he was in somewhere, that was the main thing. A few of those no longer young lads he chummed around with found themselves all of a sudden out in the cold.
He worked, Robert. Whatever else you might have thought of him you couldn’t deny that: he worked.
She did not know he was home until he was standing in the kitchen doorway, an expression on his face she could not read. She stood up from the table, letter still in her hand.
‘Guess what?’
‘You got the job,’ he said, flat as you like. ‘Good for you.’
He threw the evening paper down on the countertop and spun it round with his hand so that the headline was towards her. Her stomach turned over. Body Found is German Industrialist.
‘Now tell me,’ he said. ‘Why would anyone want to set up a factory here except to make a fast buck and get out?’
*
Randall had been walking along a corridor in the old carpet factory when he caught the name coming from a transistor on one of the secretaries’ desks.
He doubled back, put his head round the door. The secretary – her name was June – switched the radio off. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I just put it on to hear were there any traffic hold-ups before I headed home.’
‘No, turn it on again.’
She was trying to put the radio back into her drawer. ‘It’s all right, I’ve heard what I need to hear, thanks.’
‘Please.’
June did as he asked, though her sideways glance at Sandra who sat at the desk next to hers left him in no doubt: he was acting strangely.
The news of course was over, the next programme begun, blandly.
‘That story that was on a minute ago, the German man...’ He clicked his fingers as though he could conjure it up again.
‘Niedermayer?’ Now she understood. ‘Poor man.’
‘Poor wife. Poor kids.’ This from Sandra, who was opening the front of her typewriter to get at the ribbon.
‘They found him?’ Randall asked.
‘His remains,’ June said and Sandra shuddered.
‘Over the border?’ That’s where they take them all, the security man at the Conway had said.
June blinked. ‘No, in Colin Glen.’ Randall had seen the name on maps of the area around the factory: a narrow strip of forest park between the housing estates running back from the west towards the city. ‘All this time,’ June said, ‘he was just up the road.’
Just up the road and, Randall discovered later, reading the newspaper at the table set for one in Warren House, buried face down. Seems as though the men who had beaten him around the head with their guns wanted to make sure that even if he did regain consciousness he never found his way out of the hole they had dug for him.
7
The eighteen months were up on 3 February 1980. The cow pasture was long gone. They had a factory with two gates in and out. They had a workforce of getting on for a thousand to enter and leave by them in almost equal proportion. They had, instead of a car in production, a new prototype to ponder.
DeLorean marked the occasion by requesting a further £15 million of credit from the British government.
Which refused, of course, in no uncertain terms. Until Kimmerly drew to its lawyers’ attention a clause in the initial letter of agreement that bound the Labour government and its successors not to let the enterprise fail, as fail it undoubtedly would if more time – and therefore money – were not committed to the development work at Lotus.
Besides, the British were getting a $370 cut on the first ninety thousand cars produced: thirty-three and a bit millions. (Dollars, not pounds, but still, thirty-three and a bit million of them.) And what about the other jobs that DMCL’s presence was attracting? Not a single cent of US investment in the previous seven years and all of a sudden there were thirty companies lined up. LearAvia was already in, north of the city, with – lest anyone forget – fifty million dollars of new, Conservative government grants and loans to make components for its Lear Fan executive jet.
Jennings, who needless to say could not let the day pass, or rather, 3 February being a Sunday, let the day after it pass without paying a call was more rueful than raging at finding himself, and the government whose bidding he did, over a barrel.
‘You can rest assured that there will be no such clause in the revised letter that accompanies this loan. As for Lear Fan, by the way, there is no comparison. It brought rather more of its own money to the table and it won’t see a penny of ours unless it gets a plane in the air before the end of this year, which’ – not quite under his breath – ‘might have been a sensible condition to apply in this instance too.’
Maybe he thought those really were gull’s wings.
He had walked with Randall around the assembly shop (still sparsely enough fitted out that Randall had broken up a full-scale lunch-hour soccer game only two days before), nodding with what at moments and in another person might almost have been taken for approval. Well, if you did have £65 million of public money to spend this would not be the worst way to spend it...
His parting shot, though, was a reversion to type. ‘The problem with making unrealistic promises is that even though people know they are unrealistic they are inclined to hold you to them. Until this point the clock has been ticking down. From here on it is ticking away. You know the principle of the away rule, don’t you? Everything against you counts double.’
Randall had not the first idea about the away rule, but he understood the import of the metaphor.
To replace it with one of his own: the longer the delay the deeper the shit they were likely to find themselves in.
The only thing he could do was to help keep the preparations here on track, be ready.
*
The way it was explained to Liz and her co-workers, they had to be familiar with every stage of the assembly process so that in the event of an emergency – ‘Armageddon’ was the word Mr Bennington had used, and coming from him you could well imagine it – any one of them could stand in for any other, all the others, and finish the cars single-handed. (‘Because make no mistake,’ Bennington said, ‘if anything can emerge from Armageddon other than the cockroaches it’ll be our cars.’) Hence the months, and months, of training.
To begin with they were in the old carpet factory, watching videotapes and live demonstrations, being introduced to the DMC-12 part by part and to the tools they would be using to put those parts together, tools, as Liz soon learned, being a term that covered everything from a wire brush to the enormous dies – the size and shape almost of landing craft – in which the fibreglass bodies were to be moulded. A handful of completed bodies were already in circulation for them to practise on. ‘Mules’ they referred to them as and approached them to begin with as though they might actually get a bite off them or an almighty and unexpected kick.
As the new buildings
took shape and more and more of the equipment was installed the workers were walked through them, group tours, two, three times a week: here – the body-press shop – is where those dies would operate in the fullness of time; there – the chamber with concrete piers and desolate air of a concentration camp that never failed to give her the creeps – would be the ovens for curing the bodies for fettling (a good old-fashioned scrub, the task of the wire brushes) and transport by cranes – for the moment hypothetical – to the assembly shop, which was, or would be, a whole other world again.
They had been shown photographs of the Tellus carriers, which were somewhere between a low platform and a species of lunar vehicle, in length and breadth a foot or two bigger than the car bodies they would move around the assembly shop under instruction from a computer. The track that they would run on (Liz remembered the boys’ Scalextric, its cars more often off than on) had already been laid down one side of the shop starting at the point where what they called the trim line – all the internal wiring – and the chassis line were to meet and the body and chassis ‘mated’, a word that, when it came up in the tours, never failed to raise a laugh and a few choice comments: how many screws does it take...?
At intervals along the carriers’ route other lines would come in at right angles, bringing the engines, the stainless steel panels, those outrageous doors, and finally the seats and the wheels, at which point the car would be transferred on to another contraption – a rolling road (it went nowhere but round on itself) – to test its brakes before the big roller door in the bottom left corner of the shop was raised and out into the world it would go.
Gull Page 8