alanclark2

Once winter is upon us, the pleasure - the need - of a classic car diminishes arithmetically as the bleak months accumulate; until at last, around the end of February, we lift the dustsheet. What do we find? I speak from personal experience, repeated year after year, in spite of the best of resolutions.

The first and most obvious flaw in this preface is that there may not even be a dustsheet. Not spread over the car, at least, but scrubbled up in the corner of the shed, where it has been playing its part in the conservation of nature's cycle by functioning simultaneously as food store, dormitory and latrine for a small colony of mice.

Even if the car is sheeted, you will find that - blast! - you forgot to turn off the battery master switch/disconnect the terminals. Amazingly, the ignition light does - just - glow a very soft red. It mocks you. Press the starter button and there will be a noise like a single blow on a tiny nail from a muffled hammer. And the red glow extinguishes itself.

Right. Battery charger. I have a special "Loony Toons" charger on a trolley which, if in really vile mood, I can link up on "boost" and operate the starter motor as the charge is going in. This is something you should only do if you are going to sell the car within the following few weeks, as it buckles the battery plates, wrecks the alternator, and burns out the leads.

So now - the idea of going for a little test drive rapidly losing credibility - carefully disconnect the leads, open the cells, top up with distilled water and allow the charge to "trickle" in. Soon it's after lunch and the light is fading. A lovely day is changing to wind and drizzle. But we shall overcome. On the (highly optimistic) assumption that the battery will "take" a charge, it still has tricks left to play. Notably a loud and irritating clicking noise when I (re)press the starter. I have been told that this is due to a "bad earth". Very occasionally, if the battery is really strong, one can get past it by holding, teeth gritted, the button in until the corrosion on the earth terminal post burns off. Usually all that happens is that the leads (again) get fearfully hot and all that precious charge so recently fed into the battery dissipates.

Next, having furiously cleaned up the terminals, you run into that second line of defence with which a classic electrical system obstructs anyone who actually wants to start the engine. Pump trouble. This is a special characteristic of that most loathsome of all accessories - the SU electric pump. Sometimes it won't tick at all; sometimes it does so sluggishly. Invariably, its performance is intermittent. A mild blow with a light hammer will occasionally galvanise it, but not for long. If the pumps are mounted on the bulkhead, they can sometimes be reached as one drives along. I well remember a journey, bonnet open all the way, from Washington DC to Orange, West Virginia, in a Lagonda V12 and, by leaning out of the driver's window, tapping the pump with a jack handle every 40 seconds or so.

What's all this in aid of? For most of the winter months, B-roads in the south of England are covered with a strangely resilient slimy veneer. It's not exactly mud, but it's certainly not clear water. I have even quite inadvertently "hung out", on a right-angled corner, the tail of a car built in 1910. Also, raindrops at 60mph are incredibly painful. Spray and splatting from other vehicles runs down your neck. It's easy to see why "tourers" became almost extinct in the 1930s and everyone wanted "saloons". If you don't fold the windscreen flat, it will get covered in water on both surfaces. If closed, it will mist up in five minutes.

So, my preference in winter is for bum-warmer seats, climate-control heating/ventilation, anti-lock braking and effective screen washers As long as you don't allow yourself to be lulled into thinking that all is OK out there. A favourite manoeuvre is to "join" motorways in the Bentley, using its 400bhp in full. Mindful, of course, of Segrave's aphorism that if you are always going faster than anything else, no one can run into you from behind. (As he also recommended crossing intersections at top speed in order to minimise time in the danger area, one can understand why he died at 34.) Not long ago, the slip (sic) road being covered in slime, I did find myself occupying both inner lanes at 45 degrees on full lock, though still enjoying Segrave's immunity. Winter should be a time for discretion, summer for display. That, after all, is nature's own rule.

Saltwood: Sunday, June 28 1987

We had planned our first outside lunch, M Goisot [from whom the Clarks bought their house wine] and a huge brie, but forsook it to tend to a baby jackdaw who had got sump oil on his wings and (how, for God's sake?) torn off one of his legs below the knee joint. I thought he was a goner - how could he survive? But he had so much fight in him, and his lovely pale blue eyes were so lively, that we had to try.

Jane washed his wings and tail feathers, rinsing and re-rinsing. He didn't seem to mind; positively enjoyed the warm whirrings of a hair-dryer. We stuffed a couple of worms down his throat and left him to gain strength in a basket with a heat bulb glowing over. In no time, he appeared to make a full recovery and later that evening, after being returned to the wild, actually flew from the sleeper pile to the yew tree by the long garage. Cheered by this, I started the Silver Ghost and went for a drive.

On a fine evening, there are very few pleasures comparable to driving a light, open Ghost on country roads. Some will get it from waiting for salmon to take, in dark peat pools, but I am too impatient, and can't stand the midges. In a Ghost, you waft along, high enough to look over people's hedges, noiseless enough (as was the original intention) to leave horses unscared. It started at once, of course, although I hadn't been near it since last November. No modern car would have done this. Because the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost has - except for the magneto, which sparks on a turn - not one single piece of electrical equipment. No battery (flat) or pumps (stuck) or solenoid (up the creek, Squire) or "black box" (I'm afraid we're talking about a factory replacement unit, sir, at �873 plus VAT). There are 21 separate actions, all of them involving beautifully crafted mechanical linkages, from turning on the gravity petrol feed to actually cranking the starting handle. And after they have been completed in the correct sequence, it will - infallibly - fire on the first compression.

My car was built in an epoch when the Grand Fleet dominated the world's oceans. And under the bonnet, in the brass and the copper and the hugely over-strength componentry, there is much trace of marine influence. The factory record shows it going out to India, in Curzon's name (although I doubt he ever sat at the wheel).

Now the Grand Fleet is no more, and Lutyens' beautiful vistas in New Delhi have been overrun by shanty settlements. And yet, even when the Rolls was built brand new, "there's something wrong with our bloody ships today".*

It is the perennial problem, the need to arrest industrial decadence. At what point does the refusal of innovation overlap with the introduction of the "black box"? - but not as an enhancement of quality, more a signpost to the soft life and "shorter working hours".

I drove for about 40 minutes and on my return took a jug of iced lime juice and soda water to the music room, where I played the piano, quite competently, until the light faded. A day filled with trivia, but douceur de vivre also.

� Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2001.