Ecurie Ecosse

It is a weekend afternoon in the autumn of 1962, and Rosemount Parade is deserted, as it is a cold windy day, and the shops along the parade are all closed. Only crisp and crackling leaves scurry along the pavement, but young Martin Dale is indulging in some solitary wistful gazing through the transparent orange sunscreen the toyshop staff have pulled down behind the window. Slouched over the handlebars of his Philips bicycle, school cap pulled down against the wind, he is still wearing his uniform under his belted mackintosh, the lining already inserted in preparation for winter. He has idled his way home slowly after school—it is half-day Saturday, and normally he would have made a bee-line home for his tea, but he has dawdled along the canal, looked without success for horse-chestnuts in a small copse outside the village, and has been drawn to the toyshop window yet again. It would not be correct to call his loitering ‘window-shopping,’ as the object of his passionate gazing is well beyond his reach. At 17/6—seventeen shillings and sixpence—he knows it will take months of impossible self-denial to save enough from his pocket money to buy the die-cast Ecurie Ecosse racing car transporter that is Corgi Toys’ latest offering for boys still far too young to drive their own vehicles. Martin is annoyed that the sunscreen has affected the appearance of the vehicle. Displayed mounted on its box for all to see, the shade has rendered it a sickly green that is a parody of the vibrant royal blue it should be. But Martin prefers to stare at it undisturbed, as he does not like to catch the baleful and disapproving eye of the unsympathetic shop assistant behind the counter whose aunt owns the shop. Now that it is closed, he can stare away to his heart’s content, even if the object of his heart’s desire is a frogspawn bilious green. But perhaps that is not accurate: is frogspawn green? Perhaps not. Tadpole green, then. Something unpleasantly inauthentic, necessarily. Martin is a dreamy, unworldly soul, the only child of loving but impecunious parents. It would never occur to him to ask for an increase in his weekly allowance.

Fast forward fifty years or more. Martin’s parents are long gone. He and his wife live together in contented retirement in a modest bungalow in an unremarkable Toronto suburb. They make an admirably matched pair. He is gentle; she is generous. Where Martin is impractical and sentimental, Michelle is the living embodiment of hard-working practicality. She is decisive where he dithers. A case in point is the heavy glass-fronted curio cabinet Michelle had picked up years before at a garage sale, at the end of the day from an exasperated neighbour unable to sell or otherwise dispose of it. She had manhandled the unwieldy thing into the back of their station wagon unaided, all six feet of it wrestling with her five feet one of sturdy wifely determination. “I’ll take it off your hands for free,” she offered, and the seller nodded assent.