Border Crossing

by Rosie Thomas

  Chapter Two

  The winner of the original Peking to Paris raid, Prince Borghese's car, was the powerful but massively heavy 40-h.p. Itala. The other four cars that crossed the start line alongside it were tiny in comparison; a 15-h.p. Dutch Spyker, two 10-h.p. de Dion-Boutons from France, and a minute French Contal, a tricycle car. To drive such a distance without reliable maps, or even proper roads for much of the way, was a serious undertaking. There was no explicit thin yellow line in 1907. But to attempt the journey in the equivalent of a sewing-machine-powered Reliant Robin cobbled together from bits of Meccano was close to madness, and the Contal crew were to pay dearly for their audacity. From the outset, the contest was seen as a struggle between the big Italian car and the Spyker, lighter by 600 kg – one car that could go fast, the other that could go anywhere.

  The prince was politely described by this third crew member, the Corriere della Sera journalist Luigi Barzini, as a great planner and strategist. Borghese was an Alpinist, a horse-breaker, a sportsman who loved obstacles because he loved victory. In preparation for the race he obtained and studied German and Russian military maps. He arranged with a Russian petrol company to have supplies of fuel deposited in advance in caches all the way across Siberia and Mongolia, and he applied to the Russo-Chinese bank for information about the tribesmen and living conditions he would encounter along the road. After he arrived in Peking, accompanied by his wife and her best friend, he reconnoitred the first three hundred miles of the route on horseback. They carried bamboo rods cut to the exact width of the Itala, and they measured every narrow point of the way to ensure that the car could pass.

  Plainly Borghese was a serious-league control-freak. He was never a gambler like Pons, the Contal driver, or Godard, a charming con-artist who had talked and flattered his way behind the wheel of the Spyker. The prince always made sure he held all the cards, but his ace in the hole was Ettore Guizzardi, the devoted chauffeur and mechanic.

  Tragedy had pitched Guizzardi into the Borghese household. Ten years before, a railway train had left the rails and crashed down an embankment near the prince's Roman villa. The engine driver was killed outright, and the stoker, a boy of only fifteen, was left unconscious. The prince and his staff carried the injured boy back to the villa where he was nursed. He made a good recovery, but the engine driver had been his father and by the time he was well again Ettore had lost his home and had nowhere else to go. Borghese suggested that the boy should stay on as part of the household, and made him his chauffeur. The boy showed a remarkable natural technical ability. The prince sent him to train as a mechanic, and in time he came back to take charge of all the machinery for lighting and laundry and heating and pumping water in the Borghese households. Ettore would relax by modifying and designing and building improvements for the prince's cars.

  The journalist Barzini gave a vivid picture of his first sight of Guizzardi.

  The chauffeur was lying on his back under the Itala, motionless, with his arms folded across his chest. He might have been working, planning his next mechanical adjustment, or he might even have fallen asleep. But he was just resting and looking, letting his gaze wander from one chunk of metal to the next, caressing the car's under-body with his eyes, like a lover admiring the curves of his sleeping mistress.

  Phil and I were clearly going to have divide these roles between us. I am afraid of horses and suspicious of most forms of sport, and Alpinist is a dated title for a member of the week's-package-to-Méribel ski generation to aspire to, but I thought I could handle the control-freak aspect rather well. Developing a lovingly erotic relationship with a camshaft would therefore, in fairness, have to be one of Phil's responsibilities.

  The first step, after we'd agreed our partnership over the dinner in Hampstead, was to decide on which make and model of car we wanted to enter, and then track down, and buy, and begin preparation of a suitable example. I learned from RO in my first nervous call to the Rally Office that most entrants were classic or historic car enthusiasts, and they were all months or even years into their meticulous 'prepping' for the big event. Phil and I were very late arrivals, and very green. We were painfully aware that we had a lot of catching up to do.

  Ianto, my North Wales and France first love, was now living and working in New York – as a motor racing entrepreneur. His current project was to finance and develop a motor-racing circuit on Staten Island, with the World Trade Centre twin towers and Manhattan skyline as a backdrop. He was the only person I could think of who had any connection with cars and racing, so I telephoned and left a message on the answering machine in his Upper West Side apartment. An hour later I answered our front doorbell, and Ianto was grinning on the mat. He was in London unexpectedly, and had called by on the off-chance of finding us about to dish up dinner. I took this coincidence as a good omen.

  Ianto was furiously jealous of my chance to do the rally, and also greatly encouraging. Knowing the right questions to ask he also rang the rally organisers, and took no shit from them.

  'It's basically a jolly,' he said when he hung up. 'A spree, a party. Nothing like the Paris–Dakar, for example. It'll be tough enough, but you won't die.'

  I felt rather put out.

  'What do you mean, a jolly?' I now wanted it to be tough. A challenge. If I was going to blow the price of a small house on a mere holiday, I wouldn't choose to spend it sweating in some old car with Phil.

  'I mean,' Ianto said kindly, 'that it's an adventure rally rather than a professional enthusiasts' event. It will attract some serious drivers, but it should also be within the capabilities of novices.' Like you and Phil, he refrained from adding, although he did say that he wouldn't give much for our chances in the Paris–Dakar.

  It was Ianto who went out and bought copies of Classic Car magazine for me, and who drew up a list of possible makes for us to consider. I studied it glumly. Everyone I spoke to was suddenly an old-car expert, and everyone had a different meaningless suggestion to make. A Rover 3500? A Mark II Jag? A Mustang V8 or a Merc 220 or a Willys jeep?

  The car magazines piled up. I had a stack of them on my bedside table where Vogue used to nestle, and the days were slipping by.

  Phil was busy too. Through a friend of a friend he made contact with a man called Nick Szkiler who owned Grundy Mack, the biggest classic car dealership in the country. Nick faxed us another list of possible cars, and then we drove to Huddersfield to meet him.

  It was 4 February, four days after the list of rally entrants officially closed. We had just made it. My entry fee had been banked, anyway, so I assumed we had been accepted. It was a thick, wet day, with dirty curtains of rain pasted across the M1. I was driving, and as I struggled to see through the walls of spray sent up by lorries Ianto's optimism seemed utterly misplaced. I wondered what it was really going to be like to rally-drive for 16,000 kilometres, on poor roads, through extremes of heat and cold, without a fatal lapse of concentration, without making a dangerous mistake, without driving blind off some hairpin bend in the middle of nowhere and leaving my children without a mother.

  That was always my worst fear, and it had been with me ever since Charlie was born. It was the black full stop at the end of every sentence of speculation. If I did this, and if something happened to me while I was doing it, then it would be the same for them as it had been for me.

  My mother died very suddenly when I was ten. I don't remember many details about what our life was like before; it is more a fading memory of rightness, a matter of security and soft textures and good smells. Afterwards everything was wrong, mostly with me. Her loss was like being taken in the grip of an icy hand, an unpicking by destructive fingers of the person I was only just beginning to be.

  Death wasn't a theory. I knew what it was like and how it could happen as fast as a light being extinguished, and if I couldn't bear the thought of my children's lives being overturned in the same way, why was I doing this trip, that was both dangerous and – unforgivably – unnecessary? I came back to the half-a
nswer I had been giving myself all along, ever since Phil and I had first talked about the challenge. I was doing it because I wanted to see if I could, because if I didn't do it now I never would.

  My knuckles turned white on the steering wheel and I was clenching my teeth so hard that my jaw ached.

  In the passenger seat, Phil poured coffee from a flask, peeled oranges and leafed through car magazines. This was the longest time we had spent in each other's company since Nepal. He didn't talk too much, he was relaxed and cheerful and undemanding company, but I felt edgy and uncomfortable with him. Partly this was because of my separate but accumulating anxieties, but I was also thinking that there was an opacity about him. He was always the same, every time I saw or spoke to him, and it was making me suspicious. I wanted to see a chink, an exposure of some weakness that would acknowledge the crevasses of fear and guilt in me, but he hadn't given me even a glimpse of one yet. I was intrigued by how different we were to be exclusively involved in the same enterprise. Somehow we would have to weld ourselves into a team, and I was beginning to think that this might be as much of a challenge as crossing the Himalayas.

  Grundy Mack and Nick Szkiler were a welcome lift to the spirits. The showroom was immaculate, a museum-like expanse of beautifully restored and gleaming classic cars. I fell in love at once with a sleek black Alvis TC21. I could just see us cruising the Mille Miglia route in it. In the workshop, men in white overalls were at work on more cars. Nick himself was a big, open-faced young man in a suit and tie. He took us into a conference room and gave us an hour of his time while we explained what we were doing and what we wanted.

  Phil and I had agreed that our requirements from whatever car we chose were, in order of importance, strength, mechanical simplicity, easy availability of spares, power and comfort. Oh, and cost.

  Noise and lack of comfort ruled out Land Rovers and jeeps. Jaguars were judged to be too unreliable. We couldn't afford a Mercedes or an Aston Martin.

  Nick nodded, then went back to the list of possibilities. Our requirements narrowed his field of choice to a 1950s MG Magnette or a '60s Rover P6 and he happened to have a suitable example of each in the showroom. We went to take a look. I wanted the MG. It was two-tone green and black, a feminine little car, suggesting leather luggage and white heavy silk scarves. I though it looked very cool.

  'What about a Volvo Amazon?' Phil persisted.

  Nick shrugged. 'It would do the job. We specialise in British cars, but we could find and prepare one for you, I suppose.'

  After the meeting Phil and I ate lunch in a pub. I felt suddenly optimistic.

  'I liked him, I thought he was really straight. What about the MG?'

  Phil was sceptical. 'He's a salesman.'

  'We could buy a Volvo and get him to prep it for us. He said he'd let you work alongside his mechanics, that would be good, wouldn't it?'

  Phil was non-committal. I guessed he didn't want to spend weeks on end stranded in Huddersfield with only the underside of a car for company. We drove back to London with nothing decided.

  I rang RO again, and aired Nick Szkiler's suggestions. He roared with laughter at the idea of the MG and dismissed the Rover as too complicated, with tricky suspension and no availability of spares overseas.

  'I'd go for a Hillman Hunter,' he advised. 'Simple, robust, still manufactured in Iran. You can buy spares all across India. There's a chap at my local garage, might be able to fix you up with one if you're quick.'

  Flapping like a flag in the wind, I rang Phil with this latest piece of intelligence.

  'So he's got a Hillman he wants to sell,' Phil answered. 'Listen, I've contacted the Volvo Owners' Club. There are two Amazon specialists in London. We should go and see them.'

  'I rather get the impression you want me to buy us a Volvo.'

  'It's a joint decision, of course.' he responded smoothly.

  I was starting to worry on a major scale. I couldn't sleep, and returning in a daze from the school run I ran into the back of a stationary car at a junction.

  The radiator grille of my BMW was crumpled, the bonnet crunched up, a sorry mess that promised to eat up hundreds of pounds of my insurers' money. A momentary lapse of concentration at only 5 mph causes this much damage, a voice carped inside my head. What will it be like when you hit an oncoming juggernaut at sixty? The car I'd hit was undamaged, not even scratched. It was an ancient Volvo Amazon.

  Two days later, on another wet morning when the streets were shiny with rain and patched with loose archipelagoes of dogshit, I went to meet Phil at a lock-up in Park Royal, west London. He was sitting in a tiny, austere and freezing cold office with a turbanned Sikh called Jeet Millchen.

  Mr Millchen was a rally driver himself, as well as a Volvo mechanic. He had come eighth overall in the London–Mexico. The only decoration in his office was a colour photograph of him with the car, his turban exchanged for a race helmet.

  We sat for a long time, cramped around his desk, discussing the rigorous standards to which he would prepare a rally car for us.

  It wouldn't matter what the starting condition of the car might be, since it would be stripped right down to the shell and totally rebuilt. There would be a newly bored engine, a competition clutch, limited slip differential. These unintelligible phrases murmured around my ears like waves in a seashell, but Phil nodded alertly.

  We would need a car that would not only stay the course – and Mr Millchen gave us to understand that in a car prepared by him this much went without saying – but one that would also be a pleasure to compete in.

  This struck me as a very good point.

  He himself, Mr Millchen said, had rallied his car all the way to Mexico City without having even to top up the water in the radiator.

  Eventually we reached the bottom line. The cost would be a basic minimum of twenty thousand pounds, and it would be very easy to spend much more than that. This was very clearly a non-downwards negotiable figure. I tried, and Mr Millchen remained cordial but utterly steely. The job could not be done for less. What's more, Phil was welcome to come to the workshop now and again to watch the mechanics at work, but he would not be able to work hands-on under their supervision, as he was keen to do. We had both agreed that it was vital for him to learn everything possible about the car by doing it for himself. The time and the effort that this would take were going to be Phil's contribution to the enterprise, and he was very eager to make it.

  'What did you think?' I asked as we mooched away again.

  'Impressive. But I don't think I could work with him very easily,' Phil said.

  The next morning, a twenty-page document spilled out of my fax machine. It was a complete specification from Mr Millchen, under ten separate headings like Front suspension and gearbox; clutch and prop-shaft, of the work that would be done on our putative Volvo. There wasn't a spelling error or a misplaced apostrophe in the entire document. I felt a strong yearning to put our fate in the hands of this perfectionist, but it was just too much money.

  Another week went by. We were already half-way through February and we hadn't even found a car to support our entry, and Phil was leaving to lead a tour-group to the Yemen. We made another dismal trek to the outer reaches of London, this time to the railway arches under Stamford Brook tube station, where the other Amazon specialist had his garage.

  Tony Barrett's arches were down at the far end of a narrow alleyway. I walked past various bodywork and welding operations, with their crews of speculative males in overalls and oily walls festooned with girlie calendars, towards the Volvo sign. As always in such places, it felt uncomfortable to run the gamut of the stares. When I came to the right arch there were several old Volvos in varying stages of dismantlement. There was also Phil, who had already met Tony, shrouded in his Gore-Tex jacket against the everlasting rain. Tony Barrett was standing in his tiny, chaotic office cubicle, talking on the phone. This, I later discovered, was his habitual position. He was a tall, gaunt greybeard, always dressed in a baggy grey jersey, a
nd he had a glittering eye like the Ancient Mariner. Phone call finished, he came out and shook my hand. I was introduced to his two mechanics, Noddy and Geza, and given a tour of the shop. It couldn't have been more different from Jeet Millchen's obsessively spartan operation. It was a nether-world of part cars and car parts with not a square millimetre of empty space anywhere. Ranks of Volvo doors stood in line like buckled books on a shelf, rusted thickets of back axles grew against the walls, and there were glowering oily vats in which rocker arms and tappets blackly bathed. There were tools everywhere, and crusted tea mugs, and a thick, pervasive stench of oil and grease.

  Standing exposed to the rain in the mouth of the arch, our voices regularly drowned out by the rumble of trains overhead, we began our negotiations.

  Tony talked a lot. The gist of it was that he could certainly provide and prepare a competitive-level Amazon for us. He had wide rally preparation experience, and even as we spoke two cars prepared by him were running first and second in the Monte Carlo classic rally. I tried to concentrate as he breezed through the list of what he proposed to do. It sounded to be at least in the same league as Mr Millchen's specification.

  'It's a beautiful car, great for the job, it'll go all the way. You'll finish in it, my love, no question of that,' he kept saying. His eyes glittered. Tony was clearly an Amazon enthusiast, in love with his cars. It was a good sign, the best, even though the man himself made the back of my neck prickle. I could pinpoint the realisation that we weren't going to be best friends at the moment when Phil asked him a question about storage space for spares and luggage.

  'Well, ha ha, the lady will need somewhere to put her lipstick, won't she?'

  It happened that Tony had a car, down in his garage in Somerset; an abandoned '68 Amazon that he had found in a barn on Exmoor and bought for restoration. He thought it would suit us very well. Its current crumbling condition didn't matter, because it would be entirely rebuilt. 1968 was the latest year acceptable to the rally organisers as a classic car. It all sounded very good.