The Girl in the Red Car

It's almost a direct quote from a Welsh lesson: "Pwy ydy hi, y ferch yn y car?"  (Who is she, the girl in the car?)  Only this time, having seen it, I can say it was 'car coch' - a red car - and I'm not interested in who she was, just the memories of which she reminded me.  I find that some things are only brought to mind at certain times: this was definitely a Saturday lunchtime recollection.  

I had been working in Norwich one Saturday morning and was going home on the train. (Those were the days when it was cheaper to take the train than to pay for the petrol and drive.)  Like many a railway, the line passes the backs of suburban houses as it leaves the city and I could see people who, like me, had been at work during the morning and were just arriving home.  For some, I pictured lunch waiting for them, children agog to know what was happening in the afternoon (just as I would have been, ten years earlier), and wives anxious to have some DIY job sorted as soon as possible.  The younger ones would perhaps be calling mates about an upcoming football match or the evening dance.  The weekend was about to take off.

So what of the girl?  It must have been about 1.20 a few Saturdays ago as I was taking 'a walk around the block', when a young lady of late teen-age or early twenties walked out of her home to a red car by the kerbside; she opened the door, parked her carrier bag on the seat beside her and drove confidently off.  For all I know, she may have been going shopping, or off to work for an afternoon shift.  My fertile imagination said she was off to visit her boyfriend for the weekend.  Apart from the carrier bag, which could have contained absolutely anything or nothing at all, there was no evidence to support my conjecture.

Music came to mind as I dredged back in my memory to determine whether I had ever embarked on such a weekend as I now vested upon her.  It is, I believe, a very old Welsh love song, Ar Lan y Môr.  There are several verses, with which I won't bore you, but the English version begins, "At the seaside are red roses, At the seaside are white lilies, At the seaside is my love, Sleeping through the night and rising in the morning."  

Yes, I decided, there was one relationship - with my first proper girlfriend - in which this scenario was acted out quite regularly.  She did indeed live at the seaside, so to get together at the weekends, one of us had to travel to the other.  Sometimes there would be 'an event' to attend, more often than not we would just share whatever the other happened to be doing.  I remember one afternoon spent cleaning our cars together outside her home, and another when we spent some while sitting in her brother's home a few streets away, while his wife was upstairs giving birth to a brand-new nephew or niece.

On one Saturday, after working the morning at the factory where she was a supervisor, she drove to mine.  I don't know what we did for the afternoon, but we spent the evening in Norwich, after which I stayed at hers that night and then on Sunday afternoon she drove me out of town to the main road and I hitch-hiked home: something that just wouldn't be possible today.

I sometimes have that same 'Saturday lunchtime' experience when I'm going to a football match ... the supreme example of my 'second teenage'.  It's a perennial situation: the routine of the working week is finished (even if I'm no longer in paid employment), and the liberty of the weekend is about to begin.  It is a wonderful feeling of freedom.  Long may it last!

And a personal footnote - on Monday, I booked my seat at Biggleswade's first FA Cup tie of the new season, so tomorrow afternoon I shall be hoping that it will be the first of many this season!