Everyone in my family learned to drive in a Laughton Engineering van. Harry Laughton is my mother’s youngest brother. Learning in his van was almost a ritual, a rite of passage, even. Not that it was any guarantee of passing your driver’s test. In fact, in retrospect maybe it was a deterrent. I failed my first attempt and Audrie, Harry’s daughter, drove the van through the neighbour’s front wall during a practice drive. Frank, his son, had a really bad car accident before he was 21. But good or bad, that’s what we practiced on.
I started working for Harry in the months before I left for Israel. I was allowed to take a van home on the weekends so I chose a Bedford van. It was similar to the van in the picture. It had a huge hub cap shaped dent in the driver side door. This type of van had a door that slid back to open. One day I was stopped at a red light at major intersection not too far from the office. As I pulled away from the lights the door slid back and fell right off the track landing in the middle of the traffic. I had to jump out and grab the door and heave it into the truck. Traffic is going all around me.
Nevertheless, the van got fixed and was now safe to drive.
It was typical on a long weekend for me and my friends to go down to Brighton. Since there were no seats in the back I put in mattresses for my friends to sit on. One particular long weekend we were down in Brighton and I was driving back to the B & B where I was staying. It was raining. Bucketing down, actually. The windshield wipers were having a tough time keeping the windscreen clear. I spotted a couple of guys getting soaked and pulled over to see if they would like a lift. Of course they would and tumbled gratefully into the van. Their B & B wasn’t too far and as I dropped them off they thanked me profusely. The rest of the weekend was uneventful.
Sometime later, maybe three months, I was in the Bedford van driving to Gants Hill and had just turned left from Whipps Cross Rd on to the road up to Gants Hill. Suddenly the van stalled and came to a stop by the curb. It was a bright sunny day and I wasn’t too far from Wanstead Station, so I could easily phone for the AA. No big deal; just a nuisance. I was standing on the curb pondering my choices when all of a sudden a car pulls over and out jump two guys. “Can we help you?”, they chorused. “Sure, why not?”, I replied gratefully. They looked a little bit familiar. “What made you stop for me?”, I enquired. “Well, we both recognized you and the van. You gave us a lift in Brighton.”. So I did and so they did; help me that is.
