Mike Harding: Why I’m doomed to be a Camper Van man

It was Whitby Folk Festival, way back in the late Sixties, that gave me my “Road to Damascus” moment. I saw a couple sitting outside their lovely Westfalia Splitty in the afternoon sun supping tea while their children played on the beach and, like St Paul, I saw the light.

Seeing the light and turning it into a tin tent on wheels are two different things, and, for various reasons, owning a VW Camper became both something of a secret dream and a family joke. It was a symbol of freedom and endless possibilities to me, but the rest of my family it was sign that inside this middle-aged fart there was a long-buried but now-reborn hippy fart struggling to get out.

The dream eventually turned into an obsession, and I began to crave a camper van of my own. I filled my bookshelves with books on Splittys and Bays, and all the nooks and crannies of the house held VW Camper Vans in the shape of tea-light holders, money boxes and fridge magnets. I even bought two books on restoring and maintaining camper vans, illustrated with hand drawn images in the style of Robert Crumb and the other California underground comic artists.

This meant I knew all about installing twin carbs and welding on a new battery pan, even though I hadn’t got a van and judging by the way I was shaping up, hadn’t the vaguest chance of getting one.

I had Camper Vanitis very bad. In fact I had become the most pitiful of beings: the Camper Van manqué obsessive. This amused my friends and family, and was mostly looked on simply as a powerful but harmless obsession – like stamp collecting or trainspotting.

For more years than I want to remember, I pulled up whenever I saw a Camper Van at the side of the road and confused complete strangers with inane questions about their little four-wheeled palaces. I realised that all this was becoming very serious indeed when, at the Sidmouth Folk Festival one summer, I bored the crust of two polite women in an Early Bay (Devon conversion) by chuntering on about how much I loved Camper Vans. They had just started making breakfast, but recognising me as a Camper Van nut, they very kindly were the acme of patience. They smiled and nodded politely at the gibbering fool in shorts and T-shirt standing outside their open door, wittering on and on and on like the Ancient Mariner about Westies and Danburys, until their bacon caught fire under the grill and they had to flap it out with tea towels.

After that I stopped bothering people, thought I didn’t stop looking, and spent hours online searching out Campers for sale on sites like G’day Campers and Dubs4sale. I found a good few that I liked, but the were often too far away for me to go and see or, if I did get serious, were already sold. But I still kept looking, even though friends still laughed and went on buying me VW memorabilia for birthdays and Christmas and kept asking me when I was going to get a real one.

This continued, quite literally, for years. I once drove all the way from the Yorkshire Dales to Gloucestershire to look at the Danbury workshops there (to save you looking, they’ve moved to Bristol now) because I’d just been filming a pilot for TV and had used a friend’s Danbury Rio as my transport (this was years before it became something of a televisual cliché). But still, for one reason and another, I didn’t take the plunge.

I even ended up in Wolfsburg, the home of the VW and drooled over the classic vans in the museum there. It was 2005, and I’d been invited to open and exhibition of work by a German artist friend of mine, Joachim Boske. Joe, as he is more generally known, is one of the most amazing painters that I have come across. I first met him on the streets of Clifden, Connemara many moons ago when I was in town shopping (I have a small cottage on the coast, just north of the town). Joe has lived in the west of Ireland for more than 30 years now, but as one of Saxony’s most famous sons, the VW company decided to honour him with an exhibition in their famous of Autostadt.

The day before the opening we were taken on a VIP of the VW factory in an open-top stretch Beetle, our guide pointing out the shell and bullet holes still there from the Allied bombing of the Second World War. I couldn’t help but wonder, as we looked up at the holes, whether my father’s Lancaster hadn’t perhaps been responsible for a few of them. Afterwards we were shown around the museum, which for me was like dying and going to motorcar heaven and my jaw was on my chest most of the time.

From a sawn-in-half modern Beetle to one of the very first Type 1 Carbriolets there was everything a VW fanatic would want to see. However, plead as I would, they refused to let me take one of the early VW Panel Vans home with me. It was after my visit to the Autostadt that things finally came to a head between me and the VW Camper. I realised if I didn’t do something drastic I would remain a Camper Van bachelor until I popped my clogs and they fitted me for a wooden overcoat, so I stopped browsing the web, took out my cheque book and made a huge manic lunge into the unknown – Preston to be more precise.

She was lurking like a Lancashire strumpet down a back alley in a narrow, terraced, red brick street in that desperately over-trafficked town; a 2001 Type 2 Bay Window, Brazilian-made, Danbury import. With hot-orange lower and off-white upper, she winked at me once I was lost.

Her authentic, classic body had come off the original presses, but she was modern made with a 1600cc engine and metalwork that was perfect except for a couple of minor rust sports. In theory at least I was buying a modern version of a classic, and she needed, it seemed, nothing doing to her. (Haven’t we all been there?) She was a bit shabby, but who was I to complain? I was no oil painting myself. A scrawl of pen on NatWest paper, three days of waiting for the cheque to clear and she was mine.

I drove her home one wet and blustery winter’s night as the light was failing, making my way along the Ribble Valley towards my home in the Yorkshire Dales, taking it nice and easy as we got to know one another. The gear lever seemed to be further away that I remembered and the steering wheel seemed very big, but eventually we made it back to Ribblesdale. I took a shedload of photographs of her the next morning and emailed them to friends all round the world. Almost all of them emailed me back to say I should have done it years ago and then asked me what she was called.

I hadn’t thought about a name, but realised now that of course she had to have one. My friends, the folk singer Martin Simpson and his partner Kit Bailey have a lovely little daughter called Molly, and Molly is also the name of one of my grandsons’, Felix and Toby’s, favourite characters in Thomas the Tank Engine, so Molly she became.

The afternoon of the next day I took Molly for a ride, setting off from my house and heading over to Bowland Knotts on the edge of the Bowland Fells. I parked up on the tops, completely alone as the sun sank into the west and long shadows crept across the hills in front of me.

Then I made myself a cup of tea on the stove and sat in the van watching the sun set behind the wild Lancashire moors. I felt that at long last, “Poop Poop!” like Toad in The Wind in the Willows, it was the open road for me.

Of course there were a few things wrong with Molly, and I have ended up spending a few bob getting her resprayed and fitted with a new radio, Webber twin carbs and other such 
stuff, but that’s a story for another time.

Since that afternoon I have trundled Molly all over the place; fishing trips to the Eden Valley; music sessions at the highest pub in England, the Tan Hill; folk festivals on the Fylde coast and the Langdale Valley and Vee Dub festivals in the deep south – and so far we haven’t fallen out.

• The VW Camper Van – A Biography by Mike Harding is published by Aurum, priced £14.99. To order a copy through the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 01748 821122.