Page 91 - It's a Rum Life Book 3 "Ivy House Tales 1970 to 1984"

CHAPTER 15

THE “PAUL” SAGAS

Paul was a friend of Ruth’s brother Michael!
To those that knew Michael in his ‘youth’, that should be sufficient to realise that knowing
Paul brought with this knowledge an extreme experience of unusual and catastrophic
events.
These short episodes occurred during the time that Michael was working as the full time
mechanic at our ‘enterprise’ ECYB Transport, very limited!

THE END OF THE VOLKSWAGEN TRANSPORTER
The very first vehicle we purchased to provide a service to our unwary clients was a ‘split
screen’ Volkswagen transporter pick-up truck. The split screen bit describes its age, as
today, well into our new millennium, very early or ‘split screen’ transporters can demand
high prices.
It was a strange grey colour and I used simple transfer lettering to proudly proclaim who
the vehicle belonged to! That old transporter served us very well.

For several years it was our main collector of complaint commercial tyres from the tyre
retailers of Lincolnshire.
It was the hero of the ‘Auger and the Bus’ story and on one occasion it even went as far
afield as Pwhelli in North Wales, a trip for Rundles that Ruth and I managed to do together
on one of her days off from Nursing.
It also earned me my first licence endorsement when one of our drivers, Ray, was
delivering a large electrical transformer to South Yorkshire for neighbours Rundles.

The old Volkswagen had developed frilly cills below the bodywork, we took them to be
minor holes that could be dealt with in the future; however, some enthusiastic policeman
declared them sufficiently bad for the vehicle to have ‘dangerous parts’!

Michael begged the use of the old transporter one evening for use in one of his own
‘enterprises’.
It was never to return!
“It was Paul who was driving,” he declared the very next morning when we were faced with
being one short in our small but vital fleet of vehicles of various sizes.
The story as told to me went something like this, “we were travelling out to Mablethorpe
and the roads had become icy”.

So I was to learn that the old VW transporter would never more be returning as it had
found itself nose first in a dyke, having first of all passed through a strong iron paling
fence. The clincher was that a large piece of the said iron paling had come through the
front of the vehicle into the cab and pierced the seat between the driver and passenger!

The VW transporter of course has its engine in the rear. It was eventually replaced with a
much smaller second-hand Renault 4 van in blue.

Brother in Law Michael was an “original”, not just in his youth but during his entire early
life.
He suffered from asthma which would conveniently erupt when confronted with ‘authority’
in its various forms demanding to know if he was the person who had cause this or that

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