Sir, – When I was a student, around the early 1950s, I had a lucrative spare-time job selling cars. One day a friend sent me a customer who felt he needed a car. I took him for a drive in a Morris 8 during which he spoke hardly a word. My friend told me later, after the man had bought the car, that he was Brian O’Nolan, of whose articles I had been an avid reader for years.
But Brian was not a good driver, and the Garda sergeant in Blacrock, Co Dublin, who was an occasional drinking companion there, warned Myles that if he found him using the car once more while drinking he would have to charge him.
The next day, according to this story well known at the time in Blackrock, the sergeant saw the car parked outside their regular pub and confronted Brian at the bar. Brian replied that he had not been in the car that day and to prove it brought the sergeant out, opened the bonnet and showed that the essential parts were missing. An accomplice had been engaged to arrange that ploy.
Years later, when I was helping him with research for The Dalkey Archive, I mentioned the car and he just smiled. – Yours, etc,