They Don't Make Jeeps Like That Anymore

My father loved Jeeps. He was enlisted in the British Army in WWII when he saw his first Willys Jeep in North Africa. It was an instant love affair.

He and an army friend found an abandoned Jeep in the desert and spent half the night digging out sand so they could drive it into the hole and the rest of the night covering it up. Exactly how they planned to get `their' Jeep back to Britain was never finalized because the next morning the whole unit was given its marching orders, and they had to abandon the prize. For all I know it's still there.

Through the years my father went through a number of cars – with one proviso. They had to be big, they had to be American. For a long time he enjoyed possession of a Packard Sedan, which he painted red and yellow just to make it a little more conspicuous. But he longed for a real Willys Jeep, and finally, in the early 60s, he got one. He found it sitting in a boatyard in Scotland, along with a lot of WWII motor torpedo boats. He bought one of those as well. The man never could resist a postwar bargain.

We were living in Scotland at the time and the Jeep was an asset on some very rugged terrain. Once we sat it out in a snowstorm on top of the Pennine Mountains, the inhospitable border range between Britain and Scotland. Were we warm and cozy in our Jeep? Certainly not.

It looked like a vehicle built to take it on the chin. Short wheel based, rugged and often snarly, we called it Cagney. My father said it had a crash gearbox, which I thought meant the noise it made.

Since I was by now of an age to learn to drive, Dad decided to start teaching me to drive the Jeep. In my light and inexperienced hands, it felt like driving a pile of rocks. Always a little stubborn in the gears, it required putting my whole weight and my foot behind the gear stick to get it into first.

There was a disused football pitch nearby, overgrown with weeds. Dad thought this would be a perfect place for me to learn to handle the Jeep, since there was nothing in the field except the goal posts, still standing forlornly in the uncut grass of the pitch.

``You can't do any damage here," he assured me.

I drove round and round the field, fighting with the gearbox until he was satisfied that I could steer it a forward direction. Then, using the goal posts, he started teaching me to reverse and park.

He wanted me to back up to the goalposts and park neatly along side of them as if they were an entrance or another car.

I did my best, struggling with the recalcitrant steering, and trying to see through the side mirrors while I fought with the gear stick. В Cagney had decided to jump out of reverse, just to spite me, so I grabbed the gear stick with both hands, temporarily abandoning the steering, to hold it in place.

I got one hand back on the steering wheel, and hit the accelerator. The wheels spun madly in the long grass, but the Jeep didn't move. Cursing at the gear stick, I rammed it into reverse again and hung onto it as I accelerated again. Still no movement.

``I can't back up," I yelled at my father, who was watching me, puffing on his pipe with a bemused look on his face. ``It won't move!"

Dad took his pipe out of his mouth and grinned. ``I'm not surprised," he said. ``You've backed into the goalpost."

They don't make goalposts like that anymore, either.