Little yellow car at the roundabout

In the time the 1970s tipped over into the 80s, my mother had a buttercup yellow Renault 5. It looked like this.

She lived very frugally, focusing with sustained intention on buying and selling houses, which was how she made her living — this included the houses we actually lived in. So she was very sparing indeed when it came to any purchases other than houses. She grew our food. But a car was a (joyous) necessity, because we lived in the Hertfordshire countryside, and she also had a house in Yorkshire, where my father had a mill. The A21 road that runs between Hertfordshire and Yorkshire was a well-worn track for her. She loved driving, and often in the evenings — after the garden and greenhouse were watered, and the hens fed and we'd checked on the sheep, and had supper — she and I would go for long meandering drives round Hertfordshire and Essex and sometimes into Cambridgeshire or Suffolk or Norfolk. We lived near the boundaries of those counties, and she loved driving and chatting. 

Her car before the Renault was a Sunbeam Stiletto, a racy little machine with twin carburettors, in iridescent blue — like this.

It lasted well but finally bit the dust late one night when she was driving our friend Ant (short for Anthony) home after he'd spent the evening at our house. My father was away working abroad most of the time when we were teenagers, and our household was very laid-back and welcoming, usually full of kids who lived nearby. My mother fed them all and gave them lifts home when it got late.

Driving Ant home — so she said when she got back in — there was a loud bang, and looking back they saw glowing coals in the road, so they knew something must have gone wrong (!)

She managed to actually get him home, and drove back as far as the village church, at which point it just stopped, and she had to walk the rest of the way.

She thought it was quite funny, and interesting. My mother was a quiet woman, but she laughed a lot. She was intrepid. 

Nothing daunted her. "I expect it'll be all right," she used to say.

But the blue car was dead, so she moved on to the buttercup yellow one (all her cars were second hand). Yellow was her favourite colour, and I think that was her favourite car of all time.

She still had the little yellow Renault 5 when I went to university at York and then got married and moved to Hastings.

Once our kids were born, we'd drive up to Hertfordshire to visit her in the summer and at Christmas, and in between she'd come down to visit us. She had a house called Apple Tree Cottage at Coniston Cold in Yorkshire when our kids were between about 3 and 9 years old, and during that time we went camping in Yorkshire one summer, to visit my husband's auntie and uncle, who lived near Hebden Bridge.

My mother visited us at the camp site, and took our twins away with her to stay a couple of nights at Apple Tree Cottage, bringing them back when it was the day for us to drive back down to Hastings and her to drive back down to Hertfordshire. She lived in this house in Much Hadham at the time. What you're looking at is three cottages. She owned them all back then, and lived in the white one on the left.

 

There was a fourth, on the far right, which she didn't own. Those are just internet pics. I haven't kept any family photos. But those houses are all still there in the photo album inside my mind. At one point my father lived in the one on the right of the red-brick one, and my sister lived in the red one for a while.

So that was where my mother was driving home to, from Yorkshire.

Back in those days (the late 1980s) the roads weren't so busy, and we were able to drive in convoy, tailing her for 200 miles, all the way down the A21 from Hebden Bridge. 

When we got to the roundabout where the A10 branches off to Hertford and Bishops Stortford, that was her turning. Our road carried on south, another 90 miles down to the coast.

I still remember the feeling of that moment when we reached the intersection together, us following behind her, and she lifted her hand in a cheery wave goodbye, and then the buttercup yellow car peeled off to the left, and our ways parted. That lurch, you feel it in your heart, the realisation that this is for now but one day it will be for ever.

This year — 2026 — and this month (May of this year) has been a time of divergences and partings and ending, of various different kinds, some expected and some surprising.

It has been a time of the ways parting, and I am fairly sure this will be true for you as well as for me. There will be have been deaths or simply the realisation that something has had its season and is finished now.

If that is true for you, for whatever reason, give yourself the time you need to honour what has gone — space to acknowledge it, and a moment to grieve.