Back To The UK

IN MY EARLY twenties I moved back to England. Sort of ... as I went back & forth several times, as in those days I was able to get an easy job transfer between the AA & the RACV.
In London you don't really need a car but by the time I was living in Walthamstow with my girlfriend Jennifer & her parents, there was much to explore. I don't know how I came upon my 1964 Renault R4, or how much it cost - around￡300 I think - but the R4 was probably the first hatchback & thus a precursor of the ubiquitous SUV. Being a french car, designed to compete with the iconic Citroen 2CV, it was pretty basic, with a small engine of less than a litre in size, seats reminiscent of deckchairs & lots of roll (but limpet-like handling) but also had a wonderfully large sunroof. Many manufacturers charge around $2000 for sunroofs these days as an "extra", more's the pity! You can see that the Renault has the 2 box shape so prevalent today. But the interior was rather different as the gear lever protruded from the dashboard. To change gear you pulled & twisted left & right, in more or less the familiar H pattern.

This car was slow to accelerate, but very comfortable & practical, so I was sorry to have to sell it, as I "moved on" in life. I put that term in quotes as possibly inappropriate, but changes were certainly made.
As I said I worked in London for the famous Automobile Association, who were based in Leicester Square, a truly wonderful place to work. As the job involved dealing with cars going in & out of the continent, in those pre-EU days, cars were required to carry Carnets de Passage to enable easy entry into France, in particular, so I was exposed to many international travellers, at at time when travel was not as cheap as it later became. Several were planning to go "overland" to Katmandu, perhaps inspired by The Beatles venture into eastern music for a while. George Harrison's Within You, Without You is the best example.
So I wanted a car that could go anywhere - just in case my new lady friend & I decided to take off for Asia. It had to be something strong & 4 wheel drive, we thought, but the obvious choice, Land Rovers, were out of our price range. Still, as the Second World War was only 25 years in the past, an ex-military vehicle appealed, built as they were supposed to be, to last!

Ours looked just like this restored one, without the snorkel or shovel, but we were able to utilise the gun racks for umbrellas. Unusually, the Champ had the ability to reverse the transmission, so that with a lever, you could go through all 4 gears in reverse! We used to joke that this must have been very useful during the Dunkirk evacuation! We took that car for a lovely summer sojourn in Andorra, camping out in a farmer's field by the edge of a lovely stream, & fell asleep each night to the sound of that bubbling brook mixed with the dinging of the cowbells around the necks of the farmer's Charolais cattle.