This was round about mid 1944 and petrol and cars were virtually impossible to obtain. Then one Sunday afternoon at Paul’s tea party he mentioned that his boss (by that time Paul was really the boss, but he didn’t let on) had an old ute standing in his back yard, which he used to dump rubbish on and wanted to get rid of it. If I could take the thing out of the yard by the end of the week, I could have it for twenty five pounds. As none of us had twenty five pounds ready cash, Mel, Peter, Alan and I formed a syndicate and bought the car and bought the battery to start the thing.

We managed to get a couple of gallons of Shellite cleaning fluid, took it down to Abbotsford, pumped up the tires by hand and poured some Shellite down the carby and the rest into the tank and collected the new battery. And low and behold, the bloody thing started.

Bill, Paul’s boss, had shown me how to use the gears and the clutch and off I went with it staying in second gear. It was a Sunday morning and not a car in sight and all the lights were in my favour. So we toddled along at about ten miles an hour and all went well until I came to the last light close to my garage which changed on me and then I realised that I had no brakes. Not being able to pull up, I just went up onto the footpath round the corner and on as far as my garage.

Petrol was impossible to get, so we ran the car on kerosene. We had to use Shellite to start it, then switch over to kerosene. I didn’t need rear-vision mirrors, because there was so much smoke behind me anyway. Most cars were running on charcoal gas converters. There was a big burner at the back of the car, and you’d have to light it five minutes before you started, and there was a fan to boost it, and then the gas from the charcoal would run the car.

Of course, I didn’t have a licence, and the car was not registered.