My life and FIATs - Part two

Tony Andrews

Oh! - where are the Fiats of yesteryear? (Answer from somewhere down there at the back - in Tony Potter's shed, being restored.)

(The story so far: Our hero has foolishly rejected lie-back seats in favour of a car with no power, no synchromesh, no boot, and no lie-back seats ( do we sense an obsession here?) But was it fun to drive? Oh, yes. The bug had bitten, and bitten deep. Now read on.)

Topolino means 'little mouse' in Italian. My Bambino is perhaps the only 500D ever to have dressed up as a mouse in public. (What people do with their Bambinos in private is, of course, their own affair. I don't wish to know.) The occasion was the annual Uni. Prosh-day procession through the streets of Adelaide. My friends and I thought that we could raise the tone of this event by turning my car into a giant mouse, thereby making a change from the usual lofty political satire of the prosh as traditionally expressed through the medium of flour-bombs and buckets of water .

This involved some expense on our part. The body was made of hessian draped over a simple frame consisting of a triangular piece of pipe which rested on the front bumper, projecting forward and held up by fencing wire stretching back over the rain gutters to the rear bumper. The whiskers were also fencing wire and the nose was a black motorcycle headlight. All of this (apart from the hessian) we found on the footpath, since it happened to be the annual hard-rubbish collection. (A thought just struck me. Could the headlight have been from a Topolino? Not impossible, and very serendipitous if it was. Ok, ok - probably not. Just wondering.) The eyes were paper plates painted black, and the ears were framed in wire, the fronts being made from pink cloth.

To drive this spectacle I had to sit on a box on the driver's seat. I was thankful for the practice I had had driving home from the cricket in the vertical position. I wore a silly hat, as did my passenger (she would insist on coming along for the ride - actually it was the most fun we ever managed to have together in a Bambino, and standing up as well ... ). Somehow I thought that two hats sticking out of the top of a giant mouse would look less unnatural than two bare heads. It seemed logical at the time.

A mouse - but not a Topolino

So that was my first car's apotheosis. It was a wonderful little car, and so inexpensive to run. Tyres were the greatest expense, something to do with the way I drove. And the time the clutch expired at peak hour (me, two buses and five cars) on North Terrace. I still remember the bill, thirteen pounds. This was a devastating amount of money. Over the years the car gained an Abarth exhaust and an Abarth sump, and only something special could have replaced it.

The car that I traded the 500 in on was a FIAT 1500 Mark II. This cost about one hundred pounds more than a Holden Special, and it had a light, graceful air about it, from its interior to the expanses of glass around the cabin to the way it drove - typically FIAT . Boy, was it fast. It had a couple of peculiarities, such as carpet in the back but not the front, and a column shift. Not that the column shift was slow or anything; and after I had matching carpet put in the front and a Nardi wood-rim steering wheel fitted I had a car that made just about everyone jealous.

One Rover P3 later and I bought my second FIAT 500. I bought it as a practical car for someone about to get married and raise a family. Perhaps my exposure to two FIATs already at such a tender age had irreversibly and fatally affected that part of my brain that handled logic. Or perhaps it was the common sense centre; after all, I did do my Master's in mathematical logic. Logic, common sense - two different things.

In any case, off we drove on our honeymoon in a Bambino which I had bought from a dentist's wife with 25000 miles on the clock (the car, that is - cheap laugh). When we stopped for a rest and a drink at a country service station we got some especially funny looks. It wasn't just the car, it was the fact that we were still in our rather beautiful going-away clothes.

That car shuffied us to and from Bendigo to Melbourne and Adelaide, and after a time it carried not only us and our luggage but also my son, Simon, in a bassinet on the back seat, and various baby accoutrements. I think that car must have been the special 500 Tardis model, the things that it carried.

Our second 500D, Meredith, and Simon (about to be born) - Bendigo

The miles that Simon covered in a bassinet located not more than a foot from a Bambino motor must have imprinted some message in his psyche, for when he came to choose a car a few years ago what did he choose? A Bambino of course. Or maybe he had become a vibration addict.

In those days before safety restraints he did get dumped from the bassinet one day when we had to stop suddenly in Lygon Street. But he was swaddled in blankets and probably enjoyed the fun. And another day a few months later we were so proud when he called out several times, 'Four door! Four door!' Not only was he learning to speak but he could count as well. It was some time before we worked out that what he was calling out was, 'Water! Water!'

But we really did need something bigger, and so we bought one of the best cars I have ever owned - a FIAT 125.

(to be continued - yes, there's more)