My father never learned to drive. He didn't really need to. When he moved with his young family to Birmingham in the late 1920s, it was the golden age of public transport: he knew that we would be able to get where we needed to go beyond walking distance on buses, trams and trains.
He and my mother must have chosen carefully what area to live in. There were a variety of local shops within a quarter of a mile, and Catholic schools for both boys and girls close by. And he would have made it his business, as an old hand on the Londonderry & Lough Swilly Railway, to find out about train services.
He must have been pleased to discover that, by a happy alliance between providence and the London Midland & Scottish Railway, a local train from New Street would stop to pick him up at 8.15 a.m. daily at Monument Lane station, a five-minute walk from the house, and, by easy stages through the Black Country (Smethwick, West Bromwich, Dudley Port, Tipton, Coseley), deliver him 25 minutes later at Ettingshall, 12 miles away on the outskirts of Wolverhampton, where he worked for Tarmac.
Nothing could have been simpler or more stress-free. He might have saved a few minutes travelling by road, but in those days they hadn't yet invented the heresy that time is money. The time when idiots would talk on a mobile phone while steering round corners was still far in the future.
Strictly for pleasure
He bought a car eventually, in 1934: a two-year-old Morris Major, with running boards to step on as you got in and a thermometer on the front of the bonnet to tell you when the engine was overheating. The eldest of us were old enough to drive now, and we took charge of it in great style after a couple of lessons. JW 1356 was strictly for pleasure; no business use was ever envisaged for it. Even shopping was done on foot or by a 1 1/2d bus ride to the door of Lewis's multiple store in the city centre.
Sunday afternoons were the time when the car came into its own. It turned out that my mother had been nursing a secret urge to "go for a run" in her free time, and now she was able to indulge it at will. During the winter months the car was put into hibernation, its axles supported on wooden blocks, but from March to October for the next six years four or five of us would pile in nearly every weekend and head for the country south or west of the city.
There was a plentiful choice of lovely places to visit: Stratford-on-Avon, its timber-framed houses not much changed from the time when Shakespeare walked there; the Vale of Evesham, especially when the whole countryside seemed like a foaming sea of white in apple-blossom time; Broadway, the jewel of the Cotswolds, its main street lined with ancient cottages and houses - no two alike - of golden stone, as though honey had been poured over them; Bourton on the Water; the Malvern hills; Bewdley, prettily situated astride the river Severn; the wood near Harborne where a nightingale sang.
Tintern Abbey
Further afield, for longer summer days, was the magical Wye Valley, with the evocative ruin of Tintern Abbey as a highlight. And further still, a three-hour drive away, the delights of the beach at Rhyl, where there was sand to play on, rock to be licked, and the sun was always shining - or so it seems in memory.
Twice we came by car to Ireland, watching on tenterhooks while the Morris was loaded onto the ship by crane. The second time, when we left Greystones after a holiday there, on September 2nd, 1939, the idyll came to an abrupt end. None of us, I'm sure, had any idea what a final curtain on an era Hitler's invasion of Poland would prove to be. It was certainly the end of our family motoring; from now on Broadway's cottages would glow unseen, and the nightingale would sing to himself.
When an objective history of the 20th century comes to be written, will the motor-car be seen as a blessing or a curse, or both? Certainly in the 1930s, and even in the 1950s - when motoring was a pleasure, before there was any thought of congestion or air or noise pollution, with quiet roads and comparatively few cars, when you could park where you pleased - it was easy to see it in an entirely positive light as the provider of incredible convenience and freedom of movement, and endless possibilities of enjoyment for ever increasing numbers of people. In economic terms the motor industry provided one of the main foundation stones of high employment and prosperity in post-war Europe.
Status symbol
But the car contained the seeds of its own undoing. The temptations it offered proved irresistible: in recent decades as a status symbol, and above all, fatally, as a means of getting to work and a work tool - so much so that leisure motorists are now looked on with disdain. Commuting by car, the school run, once-a-week shopping, the resultant decline of public transport, the grotesque congestion in and around cities, the traffic-jams choking streets and children, slow journeys when it would be quicker to walk, road rage, the endless lines of cars with a single glum occupant, the giant car parks at out-of-town hypermarkets, the craze for speed on open roads, global warming - all these make us wonder why it all went wrong, and force the conclusion that the car's inventors unwittingly played the role of Frankenstein creating a monster.
It will take a massive effort of will and leadership to provide the cheap, fast, frequent, reliable, clean, comfortable, strikeproof and generously-subsidised public transport services which could bring back a more rational and sparing use of the motor car, and make our cities again the comparatively civilised places they once were - a little more like Venice, a little less like Los Angeles. Have we got the will or the leadership?