Driving nostalgia.

Toward the end of my marriage I had dreams of trying to drive from the back seat of the car. Not hard to interpret! Sometimes the steering failed, or the brakes and sometimes I lost the car altogether, parking it in some desolate wasteland like a corporation rubbish tip, or an endless suburbia of privet hedges and cheap housing, then unable to find it again. Once we separated  the dream didn’t occur, although it probably should have because, although I had charge of the wheel and the gear stick I hadn’t, to push the metaphor, learned the functions of some of the controls - the brakes for example. 

I can’t remember if there was anyone in the car with me in the dreams. If my husband was in the front seat he wasn’t helping to protect me from myself. At the time I thought the imagery was quite clear - that I needed to gain total control. Now as I write this (twenty odd years too late) I suspect that the message my subconscious was trying to get across was a warning. I was going to be useless on my own!

Cars in dreams are very significant. Cars in Real Life are also very significant. I’ve always loved driving (less now maybe because I don’t like to go so fast and am conscious of annoying the younger, speedier, souls behind me). I’ve driven many thousands of miles in my life-time. From London to Athens via Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and what was then Yugoslavia. When we lived in Brussels we made the same journey, once accompanied by thousands of Turks on their way home for the summer holiday. They filled the hotels and guest houses so we slept in the car night, in a lay-bye on the side of a mountain, spent the next night in a Yugoslav motel between wet sheets which hadn’t had time to dry.  Once we took in Germany on the way home and I was petrified by Mercedes passing us at 160kph and lorries furious with us for pootling at 100kph.

I wasn’t on my own then but far from being a back-seat driver I did all the driving because I was such a very bad, mistrustful, passenger. It was far more stressful to sit by the side of my husband than to be doing it myself and he was happy to relinquish the wheel, giving the lie to my nightmares.

There were journey’s to France, to the Ardennes, Lot et Garonne, Languedoc, Pyrenees, Aquitaine, Normandy, Brittany. There were trips backwards and forwards to Britain, first England to visit parents, then Scotland. Once we had properly discovered Scotland I was up and down Britain on the way from Brussels to Scotland frequently, usually with one overnight stop at Scotch Corner. Later in my life the journeys were shorter, from Scotland to Carlisle where my daughter was at  the College of Art, then from Scotland to Oxford when she moved to find work; her sister also found herself in Oxford for her Osteopathy degree so I saw a lot of the beautiful little town. Our son settled in Cornwall and I drove to Liskeard, and more recently to almost the farthest tip of Cornwall, Hayle, 750 miles from here, almost as far as Brussels but with no ferry ride.

Whereas driving for most people causes back pain and cramps I have never been physically more comfortable than when behind the wheel. It’s especially good driving alone, perhaps because until the last few years it didn’t happen often and was a luxury. Throughout the years the children were growing up  I liked to get into the car whilst they were at school and drive somewhere - anywhere, it didn’t much matter, but the moors or forests where best. This far north in Scotland it is easy to find a road across the moors and be the only human being visible from one horizon to the next.  I have never been a hill-walker but would like to have been, to find myself at the ridge of a hill looking down into small lochs surrounded by acres of bog-cotton, with only birds, rabbits and the occasional sheep moving. Real space that for a moment is mine. 

Even better at night when the chill clear air, bringing with it loneliness and emptiness, seeps into the car, the headlights picking out the mesmeric swoop downward and upward of the grey line ahead that pulls me on; my own reflection watching me from the windows either side, isolating me, protecting me from the wilderness. 

Occasionally I have stopped in a passing place, turned off the engine and the lights and got out to allow myself to be part of it. I’ve even slept in the car once, on my way home from a tiring expedition south. I would probably not have the courage to sleep in the open without my car to reassure me I could escape because the moors are not in the business of caring for humans. Humans haven’t cared for them, tearing down their forests to build ships, or create grazing for sheep, the money-raising commodity of the time. The habitat for grouse has been destroyed, pheasants have to be raised to be shot, bewildered creatures hand-fed one day, beaten into the air the next week to amuse the guns. I feel anger from this landscape. At best it’s neutral but without a car, or possibly and horse and dog, I would never visit it alone for long.

I get back into the car regretfully but also thankful for the warmth waiting for me. I turn on the engine, send a beam out into the night again, frightening a hare who lopes hastily off into the heather, and I return to my illusions, become a space capsule hurtling through galaxies, always a tourist.