Free Between Friends by Audrey Howard

Tom were patient and tried to show an interest but they barely understood half of what he tried to explain to them. His enthusiasm flowed from him with all the fervency of an undammed river, in full spate now it was free, heady and exhilarating, dashing headlong from it’s source across the shining rocks and boulders of his mind, flinging its ebullience into the air like spray from the water and carrying with it the message of his hope and excitement. His warm brown face would be charged with colour at his cheekbones and his deep, toffee brown eyes would become rich and glowing. He was intoxicated with his own dream, carried away with an uncontrollable passion which had him on a course of bewitchment in his almost, at times, senseless state of joy. It cascaded from him endlessly and in such a deluge Mrs Whitley asked him irritably if he could ‘find summat else to talk about for she was sick of it, really she was!’
    He spent three evenings a week, with Mr Lloyd’s permission, at the Collegiate in Shaw Street where he was taught the basics of mechanical engineering and draughtsmanship and as many hours as he could manage in the Royal Institution in Colquitt Street. The late William Brown, one of its founders, had believed in the development of the young mind, and the building housed a library, a lecture room where interesting speakers might be heard propounding on the subject most dear to Martin Hunter’s mind, and a laboratory.
    He found he was not the only young man in Liverpool to believe, not just in the ascendancy of the horseless carriage but of the flying machine! He began to spend every penny he could save on the motoring magazine,
The Autocar
and was quite astounded to learn that steam propulsion which he had thought peculiar only to the railway train and the iron steamships on the river, had been in use in several countries for more than a century, particularly in the big, agricultural engines, but the very first motor car which moved falteringly under its own power was undoubtedly that invented by a German, Carl Benz in 1885! Martin had seen picture slides of it, shown by an enthusiastic lecturer and had been enchanted to be amongst men with the same passion as himself. He was shown pictures of the first passenger carrying vehicle. Spindly wire wheels, one at the front, two at the back and with
electrical
ignition! It was like a tricycle with a seat wide enough for two with the engine at the back, all horizontal wheels, chains, belts and bright, canister-like receptacles, one of which held petrol, the other water.
    He hung about many of the small workshops which had sprung up in Liverpool to service the bicycles which crowded the roads, earning Mrs Whitley’s wrath when he arrived late back from an errand she had sent him on. These were the only places available to the new motor cars should they go mechanically wrong, which happened quite frequently and by a ‘suck it and see’ method, the men who worked there, men who could by no stretch of the imagination be given the title of ‘mechanic’ for which Martin strived, learned the intricacies of the new machines, and Martin learned with them! He was not allowed to do more than watch, mind , for these were expensive vehicles put into their hands by their wealthy owners and a boy of his years could not expect to be allowed to do more than peek over their shoulders as they worked!
    He read everything that had been written on the ‘internal combustion’ engine, haunting the reading room at the Institution whenever he had the time, poring over the accounts of the inventors and their inventions, from Germany, France and America. Gottleib Daimler, Edouard Sarazin, Emile Levassor, who it was said had shaped the present motor car, putting the engine in front of the driver with a ‘bonnet’ over it and the gearbox behind, and of his partner, René Panhard! There was Armand Peugot, a simple ironmonger and bicycle manufacturer, and in America, the Duryea brothers