...as you turned sixteen. I reminded Dick about the Wolseley the other day and we both remembered the other as having been responsible for dinging it at some stage. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the guilty party, but I do remember a hairy moment on the Summit Road with a few of my friends on board when I got a little too close to the edge for comfort and I had that panicky flash of nearly being responsible for a horrible mishap. Before the tunnel was opened in 1964 the Summit Road was the only road over to Lyttelton and, more particularly in our mother’s case, Governors Bay, and it was pretty unforgiving if you strayed into the gravel on the verge of a largely unprotected and fearsome drop. The Wolseley was quite luxurious in many ways, but I don’t remember it having power steering and it could be quite a beast to manoeuvre. It was a scary and sobering moment, but it probably served me in good stead for subsequent unsupervised forays.
The Wolseley had a column shift when a column shift was still considered as innovative, and I do remember the Wolseley version as being quite well mannered. It has to be said that, apart from the caché of being the first choice of the London Metropolitan Police Flying Squad, the Wolseley was the absolute epitome of a well-mannered car through and through. Happily I’d recovered from my first encounter with a column shift, which occurred on my very first driving lesson. The instructor had asked me to indicate that I was about to turn right and I grasped the indicator lever with the same vigour as the column shift – with the result that it broke off in my hand. I remember the instructor going white and reassuring me that I wasn’t the first.
Dick was keen to drive and was busting to get his licence as soon as he turned sixteen and, while I got mine about the same time, of course I was a year older. The competitive nature of the brothers’ Rudd meant that Dick actually provoked me into getting my drivers’ licence. I wasn’t that fussed really, but I suppose I’m glad that I did now, particularly as it gave me the opportunity to drive such a classic British car as the Wolseley 6/90.
The first car I ever bought however, again in company with bro’ Dick, was a second-hand little brown Ford Prefect, (or was it a Morris 8?), which was instantly dubbed the Chocolate Bomb. It was excessively modest in every respect and, as it was deficient in synchromesh, I quickly learned to double declutch – both ways. (I used to double declutch in the Nissan van I owned in the ‘80s as well, but that was mostly to annoy Bill).
We had no idea how to maintain a car, (although Dick remembers doing some maintenance armed with a crescent wrench and a chisel), and basically drove it into the ground – in the end the only way we could drive it up to the family home on Cashmere Hills was to reverse it all the way up Hawthorne Rd, which had a less severe incline than our regular route of Dyers Pass Rd. It served us well though and shuttled us to Art School and back for perhaps a year as well as actually completing the trip to Nelson and back with me and the other Dick in my life, Richard Pearse.

Mad uncles are fairly evenly spread in the community I’m guessing. I suppose that I qualify as one these days. But there’s mad - and then there’s barking mad. Uncle Eric was pretty out there. I reckon that an uncle using a cattle prod for sport on two terrified young boys is pretty out there. Anyway, Eric had a penchant for Jaguars and enthusiastically bought each new mark as it came onto the market.
He must’ve had some sort of epiphany, because he suddenly switched his allegiance to Citroën. I think it was the hydropneumatic suspension that intrigued him. I must say that I was impressed. The Citroën seemed like it had been beamed in from the future, but a future that hadn’t occurred to me, even though I was fond of The Eagle (comic) with the reverend Frank Hampson’s artful prognostications on some of the hardware that might become available to our future cousins.
Dick and I naturally kept our eye on the Popular Mechanics magazine, so we were aware of developments in the American car industry, but actual evidence was almost impossible to find in the New Zealand we knew. However, even amongst the pantheon of Yank Tank spaceships featured in the pages of Popular Mechanics, the Citroën was on its own and very much a statement - a romantic as well as visionary Gallic statement. It’s hard to describe any car these days as being any of those things. It’s bit like politics and almost anything else you can think of.. Everything’s moved to the centre, everything’s ubiquitous.
I’m getting a little myopic here so I’ll leave you to ponder the way you felt about your very first drive and/or your own car and how it relates to the disappointment of actually living in the future.

1) Popular Mechanics magazine 2) The Wolesley circa the 1930s

3) The 6/90 as used by the London police circa 1960 4) Popular Mechanics magazine

5) Popular Mechanics magazine 6) A Citroën circa 1960

7) Was this Morris 8 the Chocolate Bomb? 8) Or was it this mostly harmless Ford Prefect?