Articles > Roller Derby

Owning a Rolls-Royce, October 2001. There are days when you wake up, and you know. Before you draw back the unbleached calico curtain, before your feet touch the kosher forest-hardwood floorboards, before you step into the pulsing, intimately pummelling power shower, you know. You just know that something has changed. That out there in the chaos theory of socio-economic consumption, in the clamorous diorama of culture, the multi-screen iconography, the babble of semiotics, they gaudy gala of fashion and style, a butterfly’s wing beaten, a domino has fallen, a lost piece of sky has been found down the back of civilisation’s sofa, and the big picture has changed. A chain reaction of choices has begun.

Thus it was that one morning in the beginning of the year I knew that the bingo balls of the zeitgeist had called the number of a new truth. The Rolls-Royce had come in from the cold. Owning a Roller had become the smart thing to do. In short, a Roller was an object of desire, and I desired one. I desired one fervently, imperatively. The mantra of modern culture I hold closet to my wallet is: “O Lord, grant me instant gratification.” The only problem with that is, it’s not fast enough.

Everything you choose to own, wear or associate yourself with says something about you. One of the defining characteristics of being human seems to be the ability to read symbols and metaphors. Every generation invents it’s own, and up until that moment a Rolls had represented all the wrong things. All my life, Rolls-Royces have been symbols of what I’m not, of what my family, my friends, my tribe wasn’t. A Rolls was emphatically what we didn’t want. If you took everything we thought, believed, worked at and aspired to, it would have been the antithesis of Rollerdom. Rolls-Royces memorialised a risible self-satisfaction. A repugnant image of plutocratic vanity wrapped up in a boorish reactionary nationalism. Gents’-club eulogies about British engineering and standards and roast beef with trimmings and my-lords-ladies-and-gentlemen deference and call-me-old-fashioned values. But mostly they were simply a couple of tons of inequality, where at a sedate 30mph all you could hear was the clock holding back time. A Rolls was the overt secret handshake of us, as distinct from them, and I’d always counted myself among the “them”.

So what happened? What changed? As far as I can tell, two things. Rolls-Royces are now cheap. Not just cheaper but really, really cheap. A Rolls doesn’t wear out; a ridiculous percentage of all the Rollers ever made are still running. It’s owners who wear out, succumb to furry tubes or dangerous sexual practices or the Inland Revenue. So longevity combined with dodgy association and bad karma have released them from bondage of riches and avarice. Having a Roller no longer means you’ve made a packet or inherited a stately wad. It could just as well mean you can’t afford a four-door Ford.

Now they’re free to represent other things. That morning, a Roller had an ironic, iconic wit. It wasn’t a Blairish, inclusive, going-my-way people carrier. It’s not an airbagged, bull-barred, disco-breaking piece of Kraut hospital engineering that assumes the driver is a haemophiliac dummy with a smaller IQ than his motor. It’s not a sad symbol of testicular performance. It doesn’t go from 0 to 60 in Rolex seconds. It goes from here to there with good grace. Here’s the real reason why Rolls-Royces are suddenly a good thing: shorn of their cash snobbery, you can see a quieter, more sympathetic truth. They’re not aspirational, they’re not about going places. They were always about arriving. A Roller’s natural home is not the gravel of the double drive; it’s the cobbles outside the back-to-back. It’s what every boy with nothing but pluck dreams of going back in, back to his roots, back to his mates, back to the secondary mod where the teacher said he’d never amount to anything. For me, a dyslexic boy who was told by the careers master to seriously consider hairdressing, it’s two heavy-metal fingers. My Rolls was bought with words. It’s my story. I wrote it. But I’m getting ahead of the plot.

How to find a Rolls-Royce? Where do you start? Well, happily, that very evening the spirit of ecstasy, which, by the way, has the added little irony of becoming a druggable, clubbable pun, took me to dinner with Jeremy Clarkson and Damon Hill. Between them, if they couldn’t find a Roller, then Rollers didn’t exist. I told them about my pre-cappuccino revelation. They laughed the way Higgins and Colonel Pickering laughed at Eliza. And then they took a beat and said: “By God, I think he’s got it.” The next day, Damon called to say that he knew a bloke who might just have what I was looking for. So I met Steve. Steve isn’t called Steve. I’ve called him Steve because, despite everything, I still have a sneaking fondness for him. He produced a turd-brown, early-70s Silver Shadow with a vinyl roof. “And I’d better warn you,” he said, “A gold lady, it’s …How shall I put this?”
“An Essex bookie’s car?” I offered, helpfully.
“Yeah, that would be the technical term.”

Perfect. It was a smidge under the $10,000. I wrote a cheque on the spot, still on the phone. The next day, Steve showed me round, his white shell suit rustling conspiratorially, his mullet massaging his neck. He let me into some arcane secrets of Rollerdom. Did I know, for instance, that the driver’s seat was fixed? They bespoke-fitted them to the owner. (Not, I learnt later, strictly the truth. It was just broken.) Did I want to look under the bonnet? What do you think? I didn’t want to kick the wheels, either.

That night I went to bed knowing that outside was a Rolls-Royce and it was mine. I let the moonlight zeitgeist lap me to sleep, and the next day I sat in my Rolls and marvelled. I sat in it and marvelled because it wouldn’t start.

Steve came up from Surrey with a mechanic. He looked through the driver’s window and started to laugh. Speechless, he urged the mechanic to take a gander, and he laughed too. Together they laughed and laughed like cockney extras from Mary Poppins. There was much side-holding and thigh-slapping. What Steve hadn’t told me – and why should he? – was that the thing only starts if the steering-wheel wand is pointing to park. I’d left it pointing to drive. I intoned imbecilic apologies like a mad rabbi.” No, no, don’t,” gasped Steve. “It was worth it. Really. Oh my, that’s a classic.”

The nest day, it started and it went – but only in a straight line. The power steering had bled to death. This time I called the AA, and a very nice man came and told me the power steering had bled to death, and let me in on some more Roller arcania. Like: did I know that no force on earth can tow one, they have to be winched aboard a tank transporter, of which there are only five in the northern hemisphere? Two days later, I turned it on, and it didn’t do anything at all – it was a dead Roller. A deceased Royce. It was no more. Its un-moral coil had been shuffled off. And someone had tried to jemmy the spirit of E out of her socket.

So I did what all writers in extremis do. I called my agent. Ed has Bentleys. ( My advice to all aspiring writers: always get an agent with a really extravagant motor and an unfeasibly pretty wife. They only get 10%. Think what you can do with the other 90.)

Ed introduced me to Alan Ledington of Balmoral UK. Alan had three things going for him, which were three things more than I had going for me. He came from the Midlands, and the Midlands still elicits a sense of mechanical probity. He had the sort of moustache that is the stalactite of a Midlands accent. Most importantly, he didn’t make fun of me, suck his teeth or roll his eyes. He just took the Rolls away and sent me back an e-mail of things that were wrong with it. After the third page, I stopped reading. Apparently, only the front end of my Rolls-Royce was a Rolls-Royce. The back end belonged to something quite else. Possibly a Bulgarian Zil. The engine was remand home for tumble-dryer parts, and at speed the vinyl roof acted as an airbag for suicidal sparrows. The good news was that he could let m have a better one for just a little more. Again I wrote the cheque there and then.

He even transferred the gold lady. And so it was that, after a couple of non-starts, I got my blood-clot-coloured Rolls-Royce with nicotine upholstery, Tania Bryer woodwork and whitewall tyres. Only four or five previous owners, the last of whom was a provincial solicitor. I imagined him, pinstriped, in the driver’s seat, pink-fingering the volume on The Black Dyke Brass Band Goes Pop, patting the Bakelite steering wheel and saying: “Where there’s conveyancing there’s a conveyance.”

I could say that getting it is the best thing I’ve ever done in my life, but that would be open to justifiable criticism. I also have two children. And any number of ex-wives, whom I love. But I’ve never owned a piece of kit that has given me so much profound pleasure. Since the birth of the mechanical age more than two centuries ago, millions of things have been conceived, manufactured and used. Millions and millions of gadgets, great and small. Our lives are awash with the efforts of ingenuity and physics. But how many of thee things have never made that leap from utility to culture? Things may be beautiful, may have ergonomic aesthetic, but they remain thingy. Very few get to be awarded a metaphorical soul for being more than simply the sum of their parts. A Rolls-Royce is one of the few.

If you see a car crash, your immediate reaction is: “Oh, poor passengers.” If on of the cars is a Rolls, you think: “Oh, poor car.” The Rolls has two spirits: one on the bonnet and an invisible one under it. I could go on and tell you about the mastery of the Silver Shadow. Its Shire-horse beauty, the Chubb-like weight of its doors, its sarcophagal boot, its touches and flourishes. The kindly vanity: en suite cigarette lighters, the shag pile that implores shagging. The ability to park, with one nonchalant hand, in spaces that are 2ft too small because it simply pushes other rude mechanicals out of the way. But let’s take that as read.

Let’s agree it doesn’t so much drive as proceed, that to be a passenger is to view the world from a panoramic first-class lounge. Let’s just assume that a Rolls-Royce behaves like a Rolls-Royce, and instead, let me draw your attention to two facets the moustachioed Midlands men don’t tell you about: first, its smell. The scent of leather with a hint of woody veneer and warm, oily metal. An indefinable smell of confidence and experience. The other thing is that it makes my music sound better. Not the speakers or the amplifiers or any of that nerdy wired stuff. It’s just that we share the same tastes.

In car years, we’re contemporaries. This Rolls was born on the forecourt of the winter of discontent. Just as its petroholic engine sidled up to its first leaded nipple pump, oil prices doubled. Ayatollah Khomeini took over Iran, Idi Amin was deposed in Uganda, Zimbabwe was born, Ronald Reagan was declared as a presidential candidate, and Roy Jenkins proposed the SDP. The US surgeon general confirmed that cigarettes directly caused cancer. The first spreadsheet program was invented for personal computers. Mad Max, Life of Brian and Alien was what it saw at the cinema. On TV it was Life on Earth and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. John Wayne bought the farm: Lord Mountbatten blew up at sea: ad at 92, the inventor of the bouncing bomb, Barnes Wallace, hit the pillow for the last time. And out of the flat steppe of gloomy shires a new force appeared, sweeping all before it: Margaret Thatcher became prime minister.

For 1979 was year zero of the grab-it-and-run, blink-and -you’re-a-loser modern age. My Rolls grew up as Margaret’s child. It was her derided and loathed tumbrel. It rolled through the Falklands, the poll-tax riots and the miners’ strike. It kept on rolling, past robo-nanny. The iron car outlived the Iron Lady and now it can just be itself. Few mechanical things, outside museums, exist long enough to acquire a story, a history. Regrets? It’s had a few, but then again too few to mention.

You know, the pheromones of style are funny things. Now everyone loves the Roller: now people call me to ask if min is true or merely a legend. Friends ask me to pick them up for dinner and say they’ve been considering one for ages. This car has become a bandwagon. An old chemist in a white coat came out of his shop and stared. “ Wonderful,” he said. “ Mine’s a slightly earlier model.” Joan Collins curled her feet up on the front seat and purred. Jools Holland, a man I once stood behind in a taxi queue, sent me an old enamel owners’ club badge for my owners’ club badge bar, and recommended weekend memorabilia boot sales.

In the end, all cars are only the sum of their journeys. A car that isn’t going places is an expensive rabbit hutch. My Roller needed a journey, a lap of honour, a pilgrimage. But where to? Allegorically, symbolically, there was only one place. It had to go to the dogs. Walthamstow dog track is surely the spiritual nirvana of all Rollers.

First I had to fill it with acolytes. People who said as much about the Roller as it had been saying about people like them for a generation. Tim Jeffries, the home counties Lothario, Don Giovanni as composed by Mantovani. He brought a Venezuelan model with the eyes of an alpaca, a body designed by Nintendo and the sexual vibration of a freelance queen bee. On his other arm was a girl of such pristine, radiant beauty that it was safest to look at her as she saw herself, as a reflection. She spoke little but said plenty. There was my Blonde, and the groin-throb actor Tom Hollander, and Sir Michael Gambon. Michael is thespian version of a Rolls: big, stately, solid, confident and, under the immaculate coachwork, properly common.

No matter where you start, Walthamstow is a million miles away. The Rolls followed the spirit north, hunkering down on its soft suspension, certain of the way, sure-footed on the blind canyons and one-way precipices of Camden, Highbury and Hoxton. The old warhorse sensed the chipped concrete and flood-lights of home, it whinnied as it went, there was a flash of the old gadabout, a squirt of adrenaline. We caught it too, by osmosis: the essence of going to the dogs in a Roller.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been greyhound-racing: I never had. If it hadn’t been for the motor, I never would. It’s a ridiculously unexpected heaven. Gambling is the only grade-A vice I’ve never been able to get my synapses around. But six dogs with brains the size of walnuts, looking as if they were bred in a wind tunnel, and a tart’s nylon pyjama case on rails picked that last lock, and I flung notes at a bookie’s runner called Mick with a butch abandon.

We sat in a very modern, commodious restaurant set out like the dress circle of an Imax cinema. We ate prawn cocktails and plaice and chips and cheesecake and drank champagne and watched the hare coursers do their business. And we changed. We changed into people who said “monkey” and “pony” and “carpet”, who called “Leave it out!” and “Come again!” and “Your bleeding mother was a mongrel who did it with corgis!” And we punched shoulders and massaged necks, patted thighs and chook hands that had more rings than knuckles. And we laughed a lot, but laughter, serious, crowing that looks very much like anger. And we made a bit of folding, got a drink out of it. I don’t know how much, a herd of ponies, a tea party of monkeys, an office block of carpet.

Then, when the last race was over and we’d bet the last gold watch, it was back into the warm neon car park. And there was the Roller, big and burgundy, sitting in a space that was still 1979, chewing the cud of its memories. As I switched it on, it lit up, I kid you not, lit up, all its dials glowing with pleasure and pride. And I realised something profound: you don’t take a Rolls-Royce anywhere; it’s the Rolls that takes you.

The next morning, I woke up and knew. Before I smelt the coffee, I knew. Before the duvet of want had slipped off the mattress of desire, I just knew. I had to have a greyhound.

Articles

• More from AA Gill