Proust’s madeleine has nothing on pink gravel
I was walking back from Homebase after collecting some new spots (lights rather than zits) for the bathroom and a mother drove her people carrier onto the drive of a house I was passing. It was gravel drive — quite rare in these parts. There was the familiar crunch of gravel beneath the tyres. Familiar in the sense that the sound immediately took me back many years.
“An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory — this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me.”
Well, not quite. Proust can keep his madeleine; I now have gravel.
In the last house we lived in before moving from Edinburgh to England we had a gravel drive. It passed the side of the house and went down to a garage at the rear. The house itself was a bungalow and having a drive was a bit of an extravagance. It also stood right at the bottom of the road. Well, at its U-bend. The road came down towards us and made a right turn west.
The house was separated from the road by a privet hedge that was the perfect width for being one goal for the games of football we played in the street. Only once in the years we played out there did a ball fly over the hedge and smash one of our front windows.
When we first moved to the house we didn’t have a car. Not many people had cars on our road, which was why playing football there was both popular and feasible. But one night, my mother came through to my bedroom and woke me and told me that my father was bringing home a car. I was to get up to see it.
I was young enough to assume that this new car was a toy for me. We sat in the kitchen — the back door was at the side of the house and opened onto the aforementioned drive. My mother had gone out earlier to open the gates to the street. We had gates! I may have finally understood that it was not a toy my father was bringing home.
It was dark and it was autumn, I think, so we sat with the kitchen door closed. Finally came the sound we had been waiting for. I knew the sound the gravel made when I walked on it but this was different.
Very different. It was strangely comforting. Four tyres pressing down on the loose stones and moving them slightly as it made its way down the drive. A strangely warm sound. Immediately, it made me feel safe and that things in the universe were ordered correctly.
(Later, coming back from long drives when I would be dozing off in the back seat of the car, we would reach home and the sound of the wheels finding the gravel was the sound of home, of bed, of the end of the day.)
My dad stopped outside the back door and we opened it and looked down — there were three steps from the kitchen to the drive itself — on the new car. Our first car. I was probably seven or eight at the time.
It was a Hillman Super Minx I was told. And I have never forgotten the registration number: KSC 774. Not a new car. So I remember the registration number but not my age. I don’t think my father is capable of remembering either now, should I ask him.
The next day at school I was insufferable. For a while. I wanted everyone to know we now had a car. That arrogance lasted only until I realised that most families had cars and that most other families had new cars. It was possibly the earliest realisation that I was one of the less well-off boys at the school. As I said, on our street cars were still fairly rare.
But I don’t think many of the boys in my class had gravel drives. Pink stone gravel drives at that. Get in!
