Driven. James Martin
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what I told my mum I’d been doing. I don’t think she cared: she was too busy worrying about the fact that my thumb was hanging off and my blood was going everywhere. My dad knew what I’d been doing though. He didn’t say anything, but he knew. My dad’s of the opinion that most parents can be too protective of kids. Instead of trying to stop me from doing dangerous things, my dad would say, ‘He’s going to hurt himself in a minute, watch this.’ When I did, he’d turn round and say, ‘Told you.’ He always claimed it was the best way to learn, and, painful though the lessons were, he was usually right.
Remote control cars were the ultimate toy. I used to have remote control buggies and me and my mates would build race tracks and jumps for them and we’d drive them all over the farm. They were proper little all-terrain things and they could really go. They were toys, but they were quick little things. I never had Scalextric though. That was always too expensive. But it was okay because I used to save up and buy these remote control cars, a cross between a beach buggy and a stock car. They came in a kit that you’d build, and which I then used to modify – no surprise there. Like a junior remote control Pimp My Ride I’d sticker them up and paint the wheels and the rims, always trying to make them better. My mates never really used to bother tricking theirs out, so they were never quite as good as mine. Well, I didn’t think so. My modifications didn’t usually make them go any quicker, but they looked cooler.
The important thing, though – and this has really stuck with me – is that I always used to look after them well. Whereas most kids would use them and trash them, I would use them then maintain them and keep them in mint condition. Even now I can’t stand it if something happens to one of my cars. If I kerb a wheel, that’s it, it has to go straight off to have the wheels sorted out. These dings you get when some idiot in a Volvo opens his door on to yours; the little chips you get when gravel kicks up and nicks the paintwork – I can’t stand to look at them. The second I spot something like that, that’s it, it’s got to be a respray straight away. I don’t care how much it costs, I can’t look at it. It’s the one thing that really, really bugs me, and I was the same way about my cars even when they came with batteries and a little crystal radio control unit.
The other thing that’s stuck with me since the days when I used to zoom my little tricked-out buggy around the hard standing out the back of our house is the ambition one day to have a proper track to race them on. When I was a kid, I used to dream of having a garden of my own. I decided that when I had my own house I was going to build a race track for my remote control cars, a proper track with little humps and jumps and everything. It was going to be ace. It never happened of course. You get older, you grow up, you pack away your childhood toys and your dreams change. Now I want a proper full-size track in my back garden. A proper tarmacked go-kart track to go all the way round the house and my back garden, for me and my mates to drive proper full-size go-karts around. I don’t think the neighbours would be too happy, but it would be bloody cool.
4 THE CASTLE HOWARD RUBBISH RUN: THE FERRARI 308
My dad only ever had one great guiding philosophy in life: if you can walk, you can work. So if you wanted pocket money in our house, you bloody well worked for it. After a few years of odd-job earners, from mowing the lawn and other gardening tasks to helping out with the animals when my dad decided to ‘have a go at farming’, I officially went on the payroll at seven years old.
My first regular job was parking cars at Castle Howard. Not literally, of course – my feet wouldn’t have reached the pedals and I’d never have got insurance. No, my job was directing cars into the car park when there were big events on at the house. There were a lot of weddings and corporate dinners there, when the likes of BP and Shell would pay loads to hire the place for a night and have big fireworks displays and military bands and that kind of thing. It was my dad’s job to organise it all, including the parking. Castle Howard was the only place to work for miles around, especially if you were seven, so my dad put a word in and got me and my best mate David Coates the gig.
It was a big responsibility. On average there’d be something like three hundred people coming to an event, down the long driveway in coaches and cars, and you had to make absolutely certain that they parked in the right place or Simon Howard and the rest of the family who still own and run the house would get really upset. You had to make sure that all the visitors and guests parked on the right-hand side of the drive, not the left, because the left side was the Howard family’s garden and they weren’t too keen on people parking on it. Funny that. So I’d be there, with Herbert Press the gardener, who used to do all the edgings on the lawns and the flower beds and had done for something like 80 years. Herbert would go out in his flat cap, stop the traffic and direct the cars to the bottom of the drive where I’d get them to swing out to the left, and then I’d guide them as they backed up towards the fence on the right.
Because of the nature of the events, we used to get all kinds of amazing cars there. I’d be there helping Bentleys, Ferraris and Aston Martins to back up into spaces: to me, to me, bit more, bit more, stop. That’s a lot of pressure for a seven-year-old. Obviously, once they were all parked and everyone was inside eating their lavish meals, we’d be out there, me and David, wandering around, looking at all these fantastic motors. We’d be there for hours, checking out all the angles, peering in through the windows, admiring bodywork; we’d be wowing over the big chrome bumpers on the Bentleys, the beautiful leather of the Astons and the exciting lines of the Ferraris. There’d be an event – a dinner, a concert or a wedding – every couple of weeks at least, sometimes more, and always there’d be these unbelievable motors.
It was like stepping into another world for me. My dad might have been the Don when it came to running Castle Howard, but he never earned big bucks. There was no Aston Martin or Mercedes or Bentley parked outside our house.
In fact the Howards themselves were never that big into cars, certainly not cool ones. They always preferred the reliable and the practical over the glamorous and the exciting, with the possible exception of Nick Howard, one of the sons, who, I would later discover, had better taste than anyone knew. (At least I think it was Nick, I never found out for certain.)
So parking those cars was a great job. David and I would have to be there for the whole evening because we had to see them out of the car park again at the end of the night, so we’d be there a good six hours, and we got paid quite well for it, something like a fiver a night, which for a seven-year-old was good money back then. You could buy quite a lot of Floral gums with that. Save it up long enough, which I of course did, and you’d have a new skateboard, or at least some new wheels and ball bearings to trick it out with. Either that or I’d buy something to do with motoring: a toy car, a model car, a remote control car, always something good. Not like most of my mates who, as soon as they got any spare cash, would do what my sister did and be straight off down the pound shop, blowing it on loads of rubbish they didn’t really want. I always knew exactly what I wanted and I’d save every penny until I had enough to get it. That was my dad’s logic. Even if he’d had the money he probably still wouldn’t have given it to you because he wouldn’t have thought you would appreciate it. Harsh but probably true, and definitely a good thing. Certainly none of the money I earned, from mowing my granddad’s lawn to parking the cars at Castle Howard, was ever wasted.
By the age of nine David and I had been promoted to the pot wash. Well, it wasn’t promotion so much as moving inside. It was still bloody cold though. The pot wash area was just outside the main kitchen. We didn’t wash the pots from the kitchen itself, that was done by Izzy, a lovely old woman who was always bent over the sink. We used to wash all the cutlery and plates and glasses. As with the car park, we did this work when they were having big dinners and events at the house, but there was a cafeteria as well, which meant that we’d be working weekends too, making it a much more regular income than the car park gig. Saturday and Sunday I used to go up there and work, and after school as well, washing the cups and saucers in one of those industrial dishwashers, the ones where you pile everything up in a big wire basket, slide it into the machine, pull down the hood and a couple of minutes later all your plates come out clean and sparkling. It wasn’t as exciting