My first car, the MG Metro | Thank Frankel it's Friday

I got it when I was 17, and if you’re thinking what a lucky beggar I was to own even the most tepid of hot hatches at such a tender age, I really wasn’t. It came into my life in the late summer of 1983 only because its first owner, my mother, had dropped dead while making Sunday lunch for my brothers a few weeks earlier. They already had cars. I did not. So mine the Metro became. Half a lifetime later, I still think about that car. I’ve not driven one since, and I’d be fascinated to find out if it was remotely as I remember it. I expect not.

What do I remember? My mother loved it: she wasn’t a terribly good driver, which pained her given the family of petrolheads in which she lived, but nothing like as much as it pained us. Before the Metro, she had a rusty Lancia Beta coupé, and I can remember sitting next to her as we’d drive west out of London on the M4, desperately trying by way of thought transference alone to persuade her to change into fifth gear as its little twin cam motor sang for its life near the red line in fourth. Just once I pointed to the lever and its desired direction of travel. She looked embarrassed, then angry, then changed into fifth, then didn’t speak for the rest of the journey. But about five minutes later and for no apparent reason, she changed back down to fourth. It wasn’t to spite me, for she wasn’t that kind of woman, I think she was just happier like that, or maybe hadn’t even realised she’d done it.

So to us, the best thing about the Metro was it only had four gears. There was no fifth for us all to pray she might someday select; she probably loved it because, for some reason inexplicable to her, everyone was so much more relaxed than they’d been in the Beta.

I loved it because it was my first car. Not the first car I’d driven, nor the first to which I had access, but the first with my name on the log book. It was also a substantial upgrade for me if upgrading to something with 72bhp is a concept you can comprehend. I’d passed my test in my father’s Series III Land Rover (which I still have), then had the use of a Fiat 126 bequeathed free of charge to my family because someone had spilt a pint of cream on the back seat on a sunny day and no one could get rid of the smell. I wrote that off so it was replaced by a 2CV which I wrote off too. How I ever got insurance for the Metro I’ll never know.

It was black with grey seats with chunky side bolsters. The otherwise monochromatic interior was offset by red stitching around the rim of the leather-bound steering wheel and bright red seat belts.

It was so fast. The only way I could get the 2CV to do 70mph was to park it about two yards off the back of a National Express bus and get towed up the motorway in its wake, not a practice I’d recommend to anyone. But I could make the Metro do 70, 80, even 90mph just by pressing my foot on the pedal a little harder. Thrillingly, given the time or a decent gradient, it would even indicate 100mph. I had already done 100mph, just once, in my stepmother’s 1.5-litre Alfasud, but I never imagined I might actually own a car of such potency at such tender years, right up to the moment I rather unexpectedly did.

At the time I was attending a Sixth Form College in Market Harborough in a vain attempt to secure a set of A-levels that might persuade some University somewhere to take me; they didn’t. But I was also stepping out with a young lady who spent most of her year in Blandford and now, as then, if draw a straight enough line between the two, there’s a hell of a drive to be had there, even in an MG Metro.

It didn’t last. The car had cost me nothing to buy, but plenty to run and I couldn’t afford it. I drove it into the ground, then parked it when I could no longer pay the repair bills for all the things that fell off while I was door-handling it around the country.

So I decided to sell. Just before I did and for reasons I can’t quite understand, perhaps because in some mad part of my teenage brain, I thought it might help find a buyer, I decided to fit a set of graphic equalisers to upgrade the stereo. The cheapest I could find came from a company called Sparkomatic, but the box came with lots of sliding buttons and flashing lights so, to me if to no one else, they looked very impressive. Unfortunately, the only place they could be mounted was low down on the dash in front of the passenger. And one day I was busy down there, adjusting the settings while driving at 30mph in heavy traffic when the car in front stopped. And that was the end of the Metro.

Or so I thought. I got the insurance money, bought another 2CV because no one would insure me to drive anything else and tried very hard never to think of my wonderful MG Metro with its snazzy red seat belts again. So you can imagine my surprise to discover that a person or persons unknown went on to enjoy it for another eight years before, finally, it went to the great scrap heap the sky.