What lethal weapon can you own at 17? A car

Illustration by David Foldvari

It’s quite something when your kid’s friends start driving. My daughter Lila was born in July and is one of the youngest in her year. It seems like every other week one of her pals who was born in January or February is sitting their driving test. And, alarmingly, some of the buggers are passing. Watching Lila drive off with her friend Georgia at the wheel, unsupervised for the first time, reminded me of the US author Elizabeth Stone’s famous quote: to have children is to “decide forever to have your heart walk around outside your body”.

Except in this case, it’s like your heart has also been doused in petrol then strapped to a box of matches and left in blazing sunshine to see what happens. I mean, am I the only one thinking: “Seventeen-year-olds driving cars by themselves is just bonkers. Won’t someone do something about this?” Of course, in the US, they let them do it at 16. You can’t smash a pint of lager until you’re about 30 but, sure, here’s the keys to a 2-tonne truck. Enjoy.

“Look, tell Georgia to be careful,” I say.

“Dad. Calm down. She’s a really good driver.”

“Even so. You have to expect the unexpected.”

“Like what?” Hmm. That’s a good question ...

I passed my test first time, aged 17, and duly hotfooted it to my dad’s office. Before I even opened my mouth, he knew. He knew from the glee on my face. With hangdog expression, he handed the keys over, accompanied by a warning: “Remember, John, you’re in charge of a lethal weapon now.” I clearly recall driving out of Dad’s office car park and thinking: “This is insane. Why isn’t someone stopping me?”

Insane or not, off I went to pick up my pal Andy. Turning into his cul-de-sac, I saw his mum, the lovely Mrs Kerr, crossing the road up ahead. When she saw me driving alone, she realised I had passed and started grinning and giving me a huge thumbs-up. I tried to return the gesture and, overexcited, lost control of the car and started heading towards her. Mrs Kerr had to run quite fast to gain the pavement while I performed a slick emergency stop by panicking and taking my feet off all the pedals at once and stalling the car. Excellent. Driving time: four minutes. Close fatalities: one.

When I passed my test, Dad had a huge, heavy, Ford Cortina Mk3. It was secondhand, navy blue and packed 1.6 litres of teen-pleasing power. It was built like a tank and I never put a scratch on it. A couple of months later, Dad changed it for a brand new silver Vauxhall Nova. It was the first new car he had ever owned and he was prouder than a first-time parent Alas, like Stephen King’s Christine, that car was doomed from the moment it rolled off the production line. I took a wing mirror off. I reversed into a pillar, denting the boot. And then ...

I was driving from Glasgow to Edinburgh on the M8. I’d only been allowed to borrow the car because Dad was in hospital, recovering after a (mild) suspected heart attack. (Not, definitely not, the result of my driving.) There I was, in the fast lane of the M8 at night, doing about 70mph, when I beheld an unusual sight. A large border collie. Scampering across the motorway.

As if in a movie – or a nightmare – the dog somehow made it across two lanes of traffic before I realised, with sickening inevitability, that it was going to run right in front of me. I doubt many readers will know the experience of hitting a large animal with a Vauxhall Nova at close to 70mph. Incredibly, I managed to get the car up against the central reservation without causing a pile-up and the police quickly appeared. I got out of the vehicle with some trepidation. Dear God.

I won’t go into detail, but if you’ve seen John Carpenter’s The Thing, the dog now looked like the Thing during one of its more abstract, transitional phases. “How?” I say to the cops. Meaning: “How in the name of Christ did a giant bastard dog get onto the motorway?”

“There you go,” the sergeant says, gesturing off into the dark night. Glittering in the near distance lay  the formidable bulk of the vast Easterhouse council estate. As the police deal with the remains, it occurs to me for the first time to check the front of the car, expecting a bit of a dent. It was totalled; radiator grille smashed to pieces, a headlight gone, the bumper destroyed. “What kind of insurance have you got, son?” one of the cops asks me.

“Uh, I don’t know. It’s my dad’s car. Why?”

“Well. If it’s fully comprehensive, you’ll be fine. If it’s third party ...”

“What?” I know less about insurance than I do about emergency stops. He must spell it out for me, and he does so by holding up a piece of blue nylon rope. “What’s that?” I ask. He replies: “The third party.” The rope is, of course, the former dog’s collar.

“Um, so, Dad,” I begin, the next day in the hospital, where he’s propped up in bed, reading his Daily Record, still wired up to all manner of monitors. “I’m thinking about getting a car when I graduate and get a job.”

“Oh aye.” “Yeah. And I was wondering about insurance, you know, third party, fully comprehensive and all that, what’s best? What kind of insurance do you have, for in... ?”

My father is a very wise man. His head snaps up from the newspaper. “What have you done to the motor?” Monitors start flashing and bleeping. “Nothing! Nothing! I swear!’ I eventually manage to pacify him and find out what I need to know. Naturally, his insurance is third party only. In the end, my pal Basil helps me and – with the last of my grant cheque – we visit a local scrapyard and salvage the parts needed to rebuild the radiator, headlight and bumper. We then pay a mechanic to put them all together. I have to say, the finished job looks very convincing. To us, anyway.

The deception survives all of 48 hours, until the moment Dad opens the bonnet to top up the windscreen washer fluid. He frowns. And then explodes. “What the hell have you done to this car, John?” He knows his engine and he has, of course, noticed the new wiring, the replacement parts. And here my dad had an advantage over me with my kids today. For they could have replaced the engine with an actual elephant’s head with candles stuck in where the tusks had been and told me that the car was, in fact, elephant’s-head-and-candle-powered and I would have nodded and said: “I see! Excellent! Drive safe.”

I tell Lila this story as a cautionary tale. “Tell Georgia to be careful,” I say. “Expect the unexpected,” I say. She looks at me for a full five seconds and then...

“Dad. You ... murdered a dog.”

“Expect the unexpected!’ I yell as I storm out of the room.