A Passion for twins

From time to time I have a feeling that I want to have twins. I mean, a car with this paucity of ‘pots’, and perhaps a crackling exhaust-pipe on each side. I have had an ABC and a lowed, but that was a long time ago… The ABC poked a con-rod out after three days, and the chunky little 1923 Jowett did not last much longer, developing an unsolved ignition disease after a week’s wartime ownership. I had gone to a party in London, became bored, went for a walk, saw the thing in a breaker’s yard and bought it for £3. I went back, collected my suitcase, and drove back to Farnborough, Hants.

Since then my twinly desires have been unrequited. I once thought of acquiring a sports Jowett as raced at Brooklands, but the price was that of two A7s. I can’t explain this occasional fetish, which manifests itself faintly when I see a 2CV. It may have been induced by the articles I read as a boy in the excellent 3d weekly The Light Car & Cyclecar, with its splendid photographic front cover, about the merits of twins against the more costly fours. There were more twins then than you might imagine the sturdy Jowett, the jolly Rover 8, the quaint Trojan pretending to be a four, and the sporting GNs. I dreamt of ‘Kim’ and the obsession grew.

But I must have grown out of this passion, because for years a Family Morgan has occupied the barn, being run only occasionally, round the fields. That apart, this twin thing was occasionally revived by road-test cars like the Bradford, BMW 700, DAF, Dyna Panhard, Citroën, NSLI, Steyr-Puch and Fiat, but these failed to seriously re awaken the bogey. But what is it about twins?