Life on the Road

By Bob Francis

This is a selection of short stories, I suppose I should call them anecdotes, as every one of them is true, about my life revolving around vehicles I've owned, jobs I've had, and other antics, all centred around wheeled transport in one way or another.
I've had dozens of different jobs, most of which I've enjoyed, although some of them were a but trying at times, but almost all if them have involved driving in one way or another.
Life's what you make it and I've had fun in the course of mine. I hope you have fun reading about it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bob Francis
• Release date: Aug 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005727543

Bob Francis

Robert (Bob) Francis was born in Eastbourne, England in 1957 and has been (amongst many other things), a butcher, chef, milkman, bus conductor and driver, truck and coach driver, driving instructor, window cleaner, DJ, comedian and presenter, tour guide and licensee. A “jack of all trades, but master of some.”He teaches English and international cookery and is also a professional wine taster.His hobbies are editing the magazine for a British Classic Car club, writing, cooking, building guitars, and restoring old cars.He plays trumpet and trombone, sings (badly) plays the washboard and blues harmonica, speaks fluent Italian and is “quite good” at some other languages, but by his own admission, repeats the same old rubbish in all of them.He has lived with his long-suffering partner Jeanne, at Lake Garda in Northern Italy since April 1991.

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LIFE ON THE ROAD

Copyright 2021 Bob Francis

Published by Bob Francis at Smashwords

ISBN: 9781005727543

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my long-suffering partner Jeanne.

About the author

Robert (Bob) Francis was born in Eastbourne, England, in 1957 and has been, amongst many other things, a butcher, chef, milkman, bus conductor and driver, truck and coach driver, driving instructor, window cleaner, DJ, comedian and presenter, semi-professional wrestler, tour guide and licensee. A jack of all trades, but master of some of them.

He is retired but occasionally teaches English and cookery and is also a professional wine taster and guide.

His hobbies are editing a British Classic car club magazine, writing, cooking, building guitars, and making wooden clocks.

He plays the trumpet, washboard and blues harmonica and sings (badly), speaks fluent Italian and is quite good at some other languages, but by his own admission, repeats the same old rubbish in all of them.

He has lived with his partner Jeanne, at Lake Garda in Northern Italy since April 1991.

My Life on the road is his third book.

For my erstwhile friend, Jon Scott.

Foreword

This is collection of short stories; I suppose one would call them anecdotes seeing as they’re all true, about my life on wheels. I have had a very diverse life, and as a lot of it has been centred around wheeled transport, cars I’ve owned, jobs I’ve had, driving trucks, buses, coaches etc. I decided to put some of my experiences together in this collection, some short, some more or less epics of their own accord. They’re not in any particular chronological order, but that’s done on purpose to add to the fun (mine, not yours), and to keep you on your toes. I hope you have as much fun reading them as I did writing them.

Contents

Yam Fizzies, Pukes and a Quickly

Zebedee

The Unpopulars

The Viva GT

Sweet Revenge

Old No 49

The Twin Engined Alfasud

A Driving Instructor’s Tale

The Saga of the Escort

My Granny

The Saga of the Snails

The Guardia di Finanza

I was in Germany near Dortmund

Jeanie and the Double Six

The Mojo

Henry

The Dead’un

A Lucky Escape

Phyllis

Penny’s Mini

OUCH!

From Little Acorns

Flying with Jim

A tin of Sardines

The BAG

Warehouse Hitlers

Austrian Border Guards and Customs

Final Thoughts

Life on the Road

Yam Fizzies, Pukes and a Quickly

It was September 1973; I’d been back at school for just over two weeks and had turned 16 on Tuesday the 18th. The next day I was allowed to drive my moped to school. I had previously ridden in on most days on my pushbike, a modified Dawes racing-cum-touring bike that I’d adapted to my needs over the years, having been a keen member of Eastbourne Rovers Cycling club since I was 13, but as soon as we were 16, and as long as we obeyed the rules set down by the headmaster at Ratton County Secondary School (now just Ratton School) Mr Morrell, we could ride our mopeds.

To start with there was only one rider, that was me. There were only two boys in the school who were older than me, Ian Gates, who was two days older and Jim Robson, a good mate (RIP sadly) who was born on the 17th, but neither of them had mopeds.

I had a 1962 NSU Quickly 2 – 23 which had belonged to my father’s youngest brother Cliff, which he’d given me (along with a Triumph Tigress 250cc motor scooter) on my 15th birthday, to practice on. We lived at the Eastbourne High School for Girls and I was able, at weekends, to ride around the perimeter road. Dad was the head caretaker and we lived in the tied cottage (it was just a house really) attached to the end of the school next to the music room, and opposite the school kitchen. The house is still there today according to Google Earth.

My NSU was made in Neckarsulm, Germany, which is what the abbreviation stood for. The town which is a very old one, dates from AD771 and is located near the confluence of the rivers Neckar and Sulm, hence the name. It, the moped, had a three-speed gearbox operated by twist grip and a 49cc 2-stroke engine, supposedly capable of 29mph, altho’ in fact it did 35, and after I’d taken out the baffle tube from the silencer and cut half of it off, 38mph, which was great apart from the fact that it could be heard coming from miles away.

A few other lads at school soon reached 16 as well, like yer do… and a good mate, my fellow school DJ partner Steve Talbot (I had been DJ’ing since I was 13 years old borrowing equipment from my dad who had done it since the mid 50’s), started coming in on a little Honda, given to him by his grandfather. That was a 4-stroke bike and was a bit of a putterer but reliable. He’d been boasting for a while that he was going to get a ‘KTM Comet Cross’ for his birthday, which was capable of topping 60mph (apparently) but unbeknown to him, unavailable in the UK at the time, nevertheless he was happy with his Honda.

I, because I had an ‘old’ moped (it was only 11 years old but as far as the others were concerned, obsolete and useless), got the piss taken mightily, altho’ it was a lot faster than what most of them had, ‘Pukes’. That’s Puch Maxi to anyone else, they were made in Austria and depending on the model, would do between 20-30mph and if you modified the air box and exhaust, would go a little bit faster.

A little bit about me, I was - and still am as far as I know - an only child and as my parents are both deceased, quite likely to remain so. My dad came from a family of 10 but my mother was an only child too and made it clear to my father before she married him that there would be ONE child, regardless of gender, and that was it. Once the child, in this case myself – oh lucky me – was born, he could use rubbers, or go without. Closed for business.

She was an odd one out at school, daring to be different, probably because she was quite talented and extremely intelligent and would probably have gone far if her parents hadn’t lacked the resources to give her a private education: being different and not fitting in doesn’t make you many friends at school and you’re often the butt of ridicule and cruelty, as I found out all too painfully.

I too was different, and dared to show it, thus I suffered a similar fate. I won’t say I’m mega talented or overly intelligent, but I’m no fool and if I set my mind to it, can turn my hand to most things. The term ‘Jack of all trades but master of none’ comes to mind but in my case, I’m a Jack of quite a few trades and am a fully qualified master of many of them, I just don’t choose to boast about it.

The problem for me is that I set myself a goal, and, having achieved it, move on. It no longer represents a challenge to me so I have to look for something else, which is probably why I’ve never stuck at the same thing for long, and never made a career out of anything, or, for that matter, any money. Another sad fact is that I’m inherently lazy and if I don’t HAVE to do something, I won’t. There, I just thought I’d get that out of the way.

‘Oh Fraaaaanciiiiiis!’ They’d mock as I turned up on my old moped with its dull and faded paintwork. I got used to it I suppose, it had been like this since jnr school and I’d learned to take no notice. I knew that if the push came to the shove, I could probably outsmart most of them regarding intelligence (something I wish I’d known at the time), and if it came to it, beat them with physical retribution too as I’d been doing amateur wrestling since I was 10 years old and Kyokushin karate since I was 11, but had kept my mouth firmly closed about it. I wasn’t a hard nut, nothing of the sort, I just knew how to defend myself adequately if I had to.

Only one boy, a good friend and brilliant judo student, with whom I wrestled in the High school gym (I was permitted to use it as long as I put stuff back, like floor mats, and any other equipment) on most Saturday mornings, a guy called Nick Ody (RIP), knew that I wrestled and did martial arts and he kept quiet about our private wrestling bouts where he taught me judo moves and I taught him karate, and wrestling holds. Thus, I let them carry on mocking me, safe, and blissfully happy in their ignorance.

There was only one boy at Ratton, who came from a fairly affluent family, who had a faster bike than mine and that was a Yam Fizzie. ‘Yam’, short for Yamaha, ‘Fizzie’ (plural fizzies) for FS1E, the 49cc motorcycle styled moped that the Yamaha introduced to the UK in 1973 which cost £599 then, a lot for a moped. It could do 56mph (this was restricted in August 1977 to a max of 30mph to comply with some Common Market regs. or something of the sort) and, like mine, looked like a motor bike, having a long seat and motor cycle style fuel tank, for which I got the piss taken, and he didn’t. No-one else at our school could afford a ‘Fizzie’ but a few of the Grammar school boys had them.

My favourite subject at school was metalwork and I got on very well with the teacher, Mr Walsh. I was keen to the point of madness on custom cars and read all sorts of publications, my favourite being ‘Hot Car’ but ‘Custom Car’ was also not a bad read. I preferred the former because it was more serious and contained quite a few technical articles on ‘How to’ referring to modifications one could make to various engines, cylinder heads, exhaust and induction systems etc. The articles were mostly about Ford ‘cross’ and pre-crossflow, Mini and Vauxhall engines at the time, but great to read. The ‘Hot Car’ guru then was a motor engineer/mechanic named David Vizard, aka Vizard the Wizard.

I had read in a magazine which I think was called ‘Custom Bike’ but I can’t be sure now, an article on how to make an expansion pipe for a 125cc 2 stroke engine, which could be adapted to more or less anything between 50 - 250cc by means of an adjustable length input pipe and had sent off for the plans on how to make it. I think it was 75p in postal orders plus 10p postage, there, that’s going back a bit, eh? It took a while for them to arrive, as these were the days of stamped self-addressed envelopes and trawling through classified ads in the magazines as opposed to using an app on your mobile phone and buying stuff on eBay within seconds of pushing a button.

The plans duly arrived and as I was a fairly apt pupil and was showing ‘promise’ for want of a better term, Mr Walsh agreed to let me make it as a private project, something we were allowed to do in the 5th year classes. I had to pay for any materials of course. After three four-period sessions, I’d completed it and the following weekend fitted it to my NSU.

It took some fiddling around with the input pipe length to get the right amount of power to come in at the right time, i.e., too long, the power comes in at lower rpm, too short and it comes in only at full throttle. I wanted it somewhere near ¾ throttle, however, I managed, with help from the Motorcycle shop Motcombe Motorcycles, not far from us, who re-jetted the carb for me, to get an appreciable gain at around 35-40mph. It didn’t actually rev much faster, but had more bhp and would hold a higher gear whilst going uphill for a longer period than before.

The three-speed gearbox didn’t work properly and as Uncle Cliff had given me a spare engine and two speed gearbox from an earlier model, it was simply a question of undoing three bolts, and fitting the two speeder. The selector shaft on the three-speed unit was broken, I could change up into 2nd gear and then into 3rd but not back down, so dad took it to a friend who had a lathe, who, after a few months – and when he had the spare time, as it was a favour - made a new one by piecing together the jig-saw pieces he’d found in the bottom of the gearbox casing. It required a little grinding down, like filing the teeth on a new-cut key, but after this it fitted and worked just fine, giving me the three-speed box. The top gear wasn’t any higher than on the two-speed box, it was just that it had an intermediary gear so that one didn’t need to thrash it right up to high revs in low gear in order to get into top.

Along with the Triumph Scooter Uncle Cliff had also given me a Lambretta 125 frame and engine, it did have a seat and footrests but nothing else apart from the handlebars and brakes. He’d played around with motorbikes since he was a lad and I remember him having an Ariel Square four when he was 19 or 20, which he’d rebuilt, and was going to take me for a ride on it, this was when I was about 7 years old and we still lived in Hampden Park, a suburb of Eastbourne. He had brought it down the back garden path and parked it outside our back door in the little courtyard there which had a coal shed and an outside privy. When we were about to get going, he wheeled it halfway up the garden path and decided to start it to save him lugging it over the step up to the back gate. He mistimed the kick, it backfired and catapulted him over the fence into next door’s garden!

As soon as I was old enough to hold a screwdriver in my hand, I’d been taking things apart to see how they worked. I still do it even now. I’d get something new, and out of pure curiosity, would find out how it came apart, unscrew it, or unbend locking tabs and open things up to see what was inside. Sometimes it would get me into a bit of trouble especially when dad gave me an ITT/KB transistor radio for my birthday. I almost immediately took it apart and in so doing, pulled one of the speaker wires off, which dad had to solder back on for me. He was probably pleased that I’d had the curiosity to investigate but not happy because if it went wrong, the guarantee would then be void as I’d removed the cover sticker.

I started messing about with the Lambretta 125 which was a sod to start, having no kick start so I had to run it down a hill a few times to bump start it, but when it went, it was really quick. And when it suddenly stopped working, probably a magneto problem, I took it apart, like you do, and discovered something quite interesting, well, I thought so.

I also had the two-speed ‘Quickly’ engine in pieces as I was polishing up the ports in the cylinder barrel and noted that the piston of the Lambretta was the same height as the NSU one, but wider. I knew that the Lambretta had a longer stroke, which together with the bore size gave 125 cc but by looking at the piston and the NSU barrel, I was convinced that if the NSU barrel was bored out and the Lambretta piston fitted instead, the swept volume would be 68cc if I’d got the calculations right: maths was never my favourite subject. The gudgeon pin – that’s the pin that holds the piston to the con rod – was a different size but the piston could be ‘sleeved’ to accept the smaller NSU one as to ream out the NSU con rod for the larger Lambretta one would weaken it by making the remaining metal at the ‘little end’ too thin.

I waited till dad finished work and spoke to him about it and the following Saturday we went to see his friend Robin Erry (the same chap who had made the gear selector rod), who ran a motor engineer’s business ‘Erry Engineering’ from a few lock-up garages, situated in the ‘Roselands’ area of Eastbourne. It didn’t look much but he was still going many years later and I used his engineering services many times with future projects. We took the Lambretta piston and the entire 2-speed NSU engine and gearbox, carb, the lot, and asked him what he thought.

Piece of piss is what he said, more or less, after measuring the piston and checking how much ‘meat’ there was in the cylinder barrel, come back next week.

We did. He’d fitted the Lambretta piston and rebored the cylinder barrel, which was getting worn anyway, and I ended up with a swept volume of 69 cc, it was 69 point something, but my calculations of 68cc weren’t far out, he’d had to skim about 1mm from the piston crown to avoid it fouling the combustion chamber edges but I still had a compression ratio far higher than the original, I think it ended up at 9.0:1 as opposed to 7.5:1. It cost just £12 which dad paid and allowed me to pay him back a pound a week, I was a ‘washer upper’ after school in a well-known Eastbourne butcher’s, Leeson’s in the town centre, and was paid £4 a week. Robin started it up on the bench. It made quite a bloody row!

Back at home we took the crank, barrel and piston out of the two-speed engine and fitted it into the three-speed, putting the other parts back on the two speed to keep as a spare. It ran very well but there was an obvious increase in airflow due to the increased cylinder capacity and although the inlet tract was quite short, it, and the carburettor started to ice up if I held the throttle wide open for too long.

Dad and I shortened the inlet tube/manifold of the Lambretta carburettor (the carb fouled the NSU’s frame otherwise), and attached the NSU mounting bracket, suitably filed out to the larger diameter and brazed it on. I filed out and polished the inlet port as well, then fitted the Lambretta carb. This along with the larger bore induction tract stopped the icing up and for a 125 engine, for which it was designed, gave the right mixture but it wasn’t quite right for the new set-up so off I went to Motcombe Motorcycles again and with a bit of experimentation, and adjustment of the exhaust outlet to silencer pipe, we got it jetted just right. Now it really shifted!

I now had a 69cc bike that didn’t look or sound any different to the 50cc one, but gave the Yam Fizzies a run for their money. It would out accelerate them due to the low gearing and on a hill I’d fly past them. On the flat they’d catch me when they got their engine’s wound up, because altho’ I was cheating and using a larger engine (which I didn’t tell ‘em about of course) the gearing was still suited to the 50cc engine but I could still outpace them up to 40mph ‘topping out’ at 44.

I could have fitted a larger drive sprocket but it wasn’t worth running the risk of getting stopped by the police at a speed a moped wasn’t designed to do. I’d then have the bike confiscated and probably taken apart, and the deception would be discovered. As it was undeclared, and I was only on a provisional licence, the insurance would have been invalidated and I’d have had the book thrown at me, not a good thing as my career choice was HM Police force – which never came about, but that’s another story, so I didn’t take unnecessary risks.

When the MOT came up, three bolts and a quick engine and gearbox swap for the 2-speed did the trick, with the spare NSU carb and original exhaust pipe, and after the MOT, a reverse of the procedure put it back to ‘custom’. I ran the bike until Feb 1975 when I took my driving test and could drive my MG Magnette, which I’d had by then for quite a few months, and sold the bike to Lenny, my brother-in-law to be, for £5. The version I sold him was the 2 two-speed, the three-speed engine and box went to Motcombe Motorcycles for £25.

I never did let on about the Quickly altho’ I’m sure some of the lads in metalwork classes saw me making parts for it, but as they didn’t ask, I didn’t tell.

Zebedee

My first car was a 1957 MG Magnette ZB. Zed Bee, which became Zebedee, nothing biblical or anything to do with Time for bed said Zebedee, of ‘Magic Roundabout’ fame.

During the summer, after I’d left school in June 1974, my dad’s best mate Ernie Carter had decided to emigrate to New Zealand and wanted to be rid of a 1957 MG Magnette that he’d bought with the intention of doing it up. It was in fair condition and he really didn’t want to scrap it so dad asked me if I wanted a car like Graham’s?

Graham was a Policeman who had become a family friend of ours when his patrol included passing around the school grounds (my dad was caretaker of a girl’s high school in Eastbourne) on his motorcycle (a DKW 125, maybe it was a 250) at night and he called in regularly for a cup of tea.

He later became a sergeant and as he lived locally, he often came to see my dad with his MG, and dad did mechanical work for him. His was a grey car, very nice, this one that Ernie wanted to sell for £35 was dark blue and needed a bit of work but I liked the idea of it so dad bought it for me and allowed me to pay him back at £5 a week. I was working as a butcher’s apprentice then, trying to join the Police Cadets but as the places were limited, they only took the highest scorers, and I didn’t make it, so dad suggested I learn a trade in the meantime and when I was 19, apply for the regular force, where I’d almost certainly be accepted straight away. As I had been working part time after school in Leeson’s butchers, in Terminus Road Eastbourne, I asked if I could go full time as an apprentice (wisely keeping shtumm about the police) and was awarded the princely sum of £15 a week for my efforts.

During that summer, my fiancée Jayne and I stripped the seats out and re-coloured them using shoe leather dye which she was able to buy at staff discount price from Woolworth’s where she worked. We took the headlining out and replaced it with purple satin and re-covered the door cards with black corduroy. Dad helped me rebuild the engine which although good, smoked a little so I fully rebuilt that too with new piston rings and bearings.

I took my first driving lesson on my 17th birthday in Sept ‘74, (18th Sept) which was a present from my dad and on Monday, Feb 11th 1975, at two ‘o clock in the afternoon, after just 12 lessons, I took my driving test and passed it with flying colours. My examiner’s name was Mr Walton, a tall severe unsmiling man. He did however say;

Well done, at the end of the test and gave me a couple of tips about how to apply the handbrake without driving people mad with the sound of the ratchet and without wearing out the mechanism.

Later, when I became a driving instructor, I began to understand why it is that the examiners have to be the way they are, a bit austere, but at the time it was quite unnerving as no doubt many who have been nervous on a driving test, can attest (pun intended). Not long after this we got Zebedee on the road and then instead of having to go everywhere by moped, or on foot if I was with Jayne, we magically had our own transport, somewhere else for us to … err, you know…

I loved that MG, we went everywhere in it, it was a lovely old thing and once again the old saying comes to mind, if only I had it now. When I bought it, it was just an old banger which was the attitude then. Many of them, the MG’s, Farina A 60’s (Morris Oxfords and Austin Cambridge’s), and old Wolseley’s, because they were tough, were used as stock cars or banger racers as they were almost indestructible. Rover P4’s too, heavy old things and built like tanks.

When I acquired it in 1974 it was 17 years old, just a bit older than I was and it wasn’t considered a Classic. The Classic Car movement in those days did exist of course but it was composed more of old Bentleys and 30’s & 40’s cars, nowhere near as specialised or developed as it is today where you can buy new reproduction body shells and panels for Mini’s, Minors, MG’s, Triumph TR 4’s 6’s etc. and most of the body parts for Jensen Interceptors, in fact so many clubs and/or companies like Moss and Martin Robey have invested in the market to such an extent that you can now buy almost anything you need to do up more or less any old car you like.

In the 70’s I was mad about custom cars, I still love seeing a good customised vehicle but I wouldn’t dream of customising an old car now unless it was an unsalvageable wreck (making a full-on concourse restoration uneconomical), or a commoner car. In the case of a car being a ‘shed’, customising or modifying it keeps it on the road and avoids the scrap heap. However, at that time my MG wasn’t a Classic and I decided I was going to customise it and put another engine in it. Dad said It can’t be done so, as per usual, Mardy didn’t listen and rose to the challenge.

I’d better explain Mardy. Mardy is an expression that originates from the Manchester area but was quite common at one time in the midlands too. Mardy Mouth. It means willful, sulky, petulant, stubborn or moody. When I was born, the midwife, who was from Birmingham, referring to the determined set of my mouth said to my mother,

Eee, look a’ that! Ee’s gorra proppa Mardy Mouth on ‘im, that wun. Ee’ll never listen ter a werd yoo say – mark mah words – and ee’ll always learn the ‘ard way, yooo’ll see.

I have to admit she was close to the truth there.

I bought a Rover 2000 engine and gearbox for £30 from a small scrapyard in Hempstead Lane near Hailsham. Sammy Killick, the owner, knew me well and would let me have bits at reasonable prices, as opposed to Ripleys which is a very well-known scrap dealer and auto wrecker, sorry, ‘Vehicle Dismantler’ also in Hailsham, on the Diplock’s trading estate, if they’re still there that is.

They’re descended from Romany gypsies. Ripley’s were mostly fair, but tight sods when it suited them, as most people who had dealings with them would agree. My Dad knew most of them