Breakdown

Life has become very unexpected.

I am not on the taxi rank, nor am I likely to be.

I am sitting on the hard shoulder of the M1, a mile before the turn off to Oliver’s school. I can see the sign.

My car has broken down.

Mark thinks that the cam belt has gone. 

I do not know what a cam belt is. I know that I was barrelling down the fast lane of the motorway when suddenly the engine did not seem to be related to the wheels any more. That is to say, the engine was making a noise, as it is supposed to, but it  had ceased to make the wheels go round. 

I pulled over as everything died, slowly. 

Oliver and I looked at one another.

I rang Mark, who made me open the bonnet and inspect the mysteriously oily things underneath it. I do not think that I did this very well. However we quickly established that water and oil were present in the desirable quantities, but that it was not going to restart. Mark told me what a cam belt was, and I looked for it, but to no avail, if there was one then it was carefully hidden. Mark made some sighing noises and told me that he would come and pick me up. Obviously we don’t have a breakdown service, for predictable financial reasons, related mostly to school fees.

I rang school and told them that we were going to be late, and then I managed to get hold of Actual Head Boy’s father, who very kindly agreed to come and collect Oliver. 

All we had to do then was wait.

After a very short while the police appeared and told me, menacingly, that I had got two hours to get off the motorway, or else Things Would Get Expensive.

Then they  helpfully shoved the car on to the grass verge so that it was less likely to be hit by a truck, and made me put the hazard lights on. I had been delaying doing this in case the battery went flat and left me helpless, in the dark, but they insisted.

Once they had buzzed off, I rang Mark in a panic, who had been hurling things into the camper van in a panic of his own to come and get me. He thought that we might need to stay out overnight if things had gone very wrong, so a bit of preparatory packing was called for. We have not used the camper van for ages, and it needed everything, from water to clean clothes to a box of wine. I told him about the police, and he thought that it might be pushing it, but he would do his best, and not to worry.

Oliver and I settled down peacefully and practiced his lines for the play on Friday until help arrived. Actual Head Boy’s father appeared in his shining armour to whisk Oliver off to school. I assured him that I was perfectly all right by myself, and so he left me, a bit reluctantly, to my own devices, which is where I am now.

I am not at all helpless in the event of an emergency. I had a complete dinner stashed on the shelf above the windscreen, with fruit and salad and chocolate and sandwiches. I had my Steve Jobs book, and my computer, and in the boot was a rather repulsively smelly quilt, which I use as a dog bed for travelling canine customers. I dug this out, and wrapped myself up against the rapidly encroaching chill, and here I am.

I am feeling quite cheery and positive. I started reading my book whilst it was daylight, and then switched to the torch on my phone as it started to go dark. I worried about the battery on this, and then to my joy, discovered in the dashboard, a battery pack that I had utterly forgotten I owned. I plugged the phone into it, and all was rather splendidly well.

The police have rung me, warningly, to see if I have buzzed off yet, which I haven’t, but Mark is about half an hour away, and there are still forty five minutes of their Permissible Two Hours to go. I shall keep you posted. 

EPISODE TWO. 3 am.

You would not think, after such an inauspicious start to an evening, that things could have become much worse. You would think that the Gods would have had their amusement, and buzzed off to do something more interesting: but it appeared not. There were many more adventures yet to come.

Eventually Mark rang to tell me that he was just a few minutes away, at which point the grumpy policeman pulled up behind me again, wanting to know why I had not removed myself, and my scruffy heap of junk, from the side of their motorway.

I was terribly apologetic, despite secretly wanting to be horribly rude, and assured them that there were still ten minutes of the two hours left. I promised, faithfully, that I would be gone before they had expired.

They scowled, and went and sat in their car behind me.

I rang Mark in a terrible flap, and told him to slow down as much as he could.

I am quite sure that whatever they were expecting to turn up and rescue me, it would not be Mark in the camper van with a tow rope, and I had a horrible uneasy feeling that they might start to get very shirty. You are not supposed to use tow ropes on motorways.

Mark drove as slowly as he could, and eventually they got bored, and reversed away so that they would have a good clear space to pull out.

They pulled out into the big space left by the peculiar camper van approaching at a snail’s pace.

Mark stopped in front of me.

He did not have a tow rope. Ours was buried somewhere at the farm and he had not had time to go and find it.

He had a reel of orange nylon rope.

We rushed about frantically, folding it into four lengths and tying it between the van and the car. If the police had seen it they might not have been very pleased at all, so there was a sudden terrible urgency.

We cut it and looped it, and dived into the car and the van, and we were away.

We had just got into the service station at the end of the slip road when the policeman rang. It was exactly two hours since he had first seen me.

I told him that we had gone for ever, and he agreed that this was a good thing, and hung up.

Mark went off around the service station and exchanged a tow rope with a lorry driver for a box of home made chocolates.

We had a cup of tea and thought we would try and make it home. We thought that on the whole it would be more prudent to stay under cover of darkness, because of interested policemen, and the potential for mishaps. Mishaps are better dealt with without interference from the authorities.

In the end we set off.

Obviously we did not go back on the motorway. We drove up the winding roads beside it.

Once the tow rope snapped, severed by a sharp bit on the underneath of my car, and once the knot in it gave way.

After a little while, Mark rang me to tell me that the fan belt on the camper van was making a terrible noise, and that everything was overheating, and we had better stop.

We were still in the civilised world, where there are service stations, so we stopped on one, and Mark lay underneath the camper van and hammered things and swore. I took the dogs for a walk and held the torch, hoping to be helpful. He put up with this patiently.

This was when the picture was taken. It was just before midnight.

In the end it was fixed, and we set off again.

We were a short way along the A66 when Mark stopped again.

There had been a terrible clatter, and a bump on his way to get me. This turned out to be the camper van water pump falling apart.

Water pumps are important things. The nut that holds it in place had come off, and was lost for ever.

We stood there, forlornly, in the midnight dark at the side of the bleak A66, with not one, but two broken vehicles. We weren’t even in a lay-by. These were all full of lorries. We were in somebody’s driveway.

Mark is very clever.

In his toolbox he found a small piece of rubber hose. He pushed it on to the bolt that was sticking out of the water pump, and put a jubilee clip round it.

Carefully, in the torchlight, he tightened the jubilee clip, and it held. It was not the missing nut, but it would keep everything in place.

He eased the fan belt back, and we were ready to try again.

It was a long, scary drive across the wilderness.

Every time we were going down a hill I put the car into fifth gear, to charge the battery a bit, because it would have been awful if the lights had gone out. I stared at the back of the camper van and tried to keep the tow rope tight. This was not at all easy. There are a lot of very steep hills. It was a long, long journey.

There was one grim moment when. a police car drove past us, and then turned round and came back for another look. We held our breath, but they decided not to bother. Perhaps they thought we were gypsies.

We staggered back into the house just before three in the morning, and thought how truly wonderful it is not to be macarooned on a bleak Yorkshire fell side in the cold.

It is almost four o’ clock now, and I am going to bed. We have got to put a new engine in the car and fix the camper van, but tonight I don’t care.

I am not broken down in Yorkshire.

I am too tired to write any more.