Through East Anglia in a Motor CarVincent, James Edmund
General
Through East Anglia in a Motor Car
Vincent, James Edmund
Norfolk (England) -- Description and travel; Suffolk (England) -- Description and travel
Practical considerations make it desirable to say what my daughter and I
wore. My friend and his mechanic wore a lot, precisely in what detail I
cannot say. My daughter wore a thick tweed dress, a short fur coat, a
mackintosh with sleeves gathered in at the wrists over that, a red
Connemara cloak sometimes--its colour proved to be of incidental advantage
later in quite an unexpected way--a motor-cap and veil, fur-lined gloves,
and a muff. I wore a vest, flannel shirt, lined corduroy waistcoat,
ordinary tweed trousers, a rowing "sweater" over the waistcoat, thick
Norfolk jacket, thick Ulster coat--without inner sleeves gathered, worse
luck--and loose woollen gloves. I was never too warm, often much too cold,
and the woollen gloves turned out a fraud. They were of no use as a
protection against wind and cold combined, and a motor-car makes its own
wind. In fact, there is nothing like leather, with or without fur or wool
within.
The undergraduates were useful as pilots to Jesus Lane, where we turned to
the right, which brought us in fact, although not in name, into the direct
road for Newmarket; not that it is so difficult in Cambridge, as in many
other towns of East Anglia, to solve correctly the all-important problem
how to find the absolutely right exit having regard to the point sought in
the distance. But the streets of the heart of Cambridge are of an
exceptional narrowness, and we were not through them without becoming
witnesses of an incident, almost worthy of the title accident, which
delayed us a little and might have delayed us more but for the camaraderie
of motorists. We were proceeding slowly up a narrow street behind a motor
omnibus, the roadway being wide enough to allow two vehicles to pass, but
no more. On the off-side of the omnibus, facing it, were a motor-car,
attended as the law directs, at rest by the kerb, and a tradesman's cart
and horse behind the car, cart and horse being unattended, as is not
unusual, law or no law. The horse, perceiving the motor omnibus, and being
probably unaccustomed to the sight, proceeded at once to give one of those
convincing exhibitions in equine intelligence which must be the constant
joy of the thick-and-thin champions of that traditionally "noble animal."
Planting its forefeet on to the pavement, it backed the cart violently into
the bonnet of the passing omnibus, of course blocking the route completely.
Somebody, possibly the man who ought to have been in charge, came up and
pulled the stupid brute into line, but not before it had also contrived to
injure a wing of the resting and innocent motor-car. The omnibus was
disabled for a time at any rate; traffic accumulated rapidly behind us; it
seemed likely that we might have to spend the rest of the afternoon in this
street that might justly be called Strait. But the injured motor-car was
most courteously backed out of the way to make a passage for us, and we
proceeded on our journey rejoicing and grateful.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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