An Alfa Romeo, A Mini, a Chevrolet and a famous Aston Martin. Remake, remodel…look for the two screws underneath, and don’t lose the tyres…

My first car was an Alfa Romeo Alfetta 158/159, but at first I didn’t know its name. It was red, crude, had a fading number eight in white at the rear. A racing car, the driver looming serious and large in the open cockpit. Black rubber tyres I quickly learned how to remove and lose, so that for years it clanked and rattled on empty rims.

It had probably belonged to one of my uncles, the youngest one, my mother’s wee brother John, who would later help form my tastes in music, guitars, and help lead me down the twisty B-road to rock’n’roll. When I learned to read, (through comics – Dandy, Beano, Topper; so much to thank DC Thomson for) I could decipher the words on the red car’s bottom. I knew what it was: Alfa-Romeo, Dinky Toys. Made in England. Meccano.

The Alfetta 158/159 was one of the most successful Grand Prix cars ever made. First in production before World War Two, it went on to dominate motor racing for two decades after the war ended. Forty-seven wins, most famously in the hands of Juan Manuel Fangio. Skinny tyres, rear wheel drive, no helmets or safety belts, and that supercharged 1.5 litre V8 engine (1.5 miles per gallon of methanol) looming hugely in front of you. Two hundred miles an hour on circuits where safety meant spectators huddled on bends to catch the skidding cars. Unimaginable excitement on the dining. room table or the kitchen lino.

Paisley Road West in Glasgow, a flat that incorporated dad’s dental surgery. Everything smelling of gas and mice and the cat that provided my earliest memory: A soft, fluffy thing I embraced like a teddy bear, resulting in unbelievable agony as it raked me with its claws.

The Alfetta brought comfort, even without tyres.

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Shiona arrived in 1958, and with her came my second car, this time an Austin Mini-Minor in blue, in compensation for now having a sister. “Awful small” I responded on being presented with this Corgi-reproduced, dye-cast piece of Alec-Issigonis-designed bribery. A different scale from the Alfa. I then used it to batter the unattended baby, thankfully without doing any serious damage. Corgi models had suspension and the tyres were, briefly, still on, so just a few rubbery marks. She has forgiven me. I think.

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Later, who knows when, a Chevrolet Corvette Stingray arrived, red with yellow interior and flip-up. Corgi again, and a breathtaking sleekness that remained the absolute paradigm of car design for me until I saw, in real life, an E-type Jaguar (the original drophead. The later 2+2 is hideous). I never owned a Corgi version of a Jaguar, though.

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Two house moves on, no longer in Glasgow but by 1967 in Troon, Ayrshire, where I’m writing this. I was 11 and too old, really for toy cars. But the James Bond Aston Martin DB5, also by Corgi was too much of sensation to avoid. Mine was ordered from Menzies in Portland Street, there were queues, a release date. Thinking back, that complex and glamorous car was probably as much for my dad as for me, as there was no way on earth I was going to see Goldfinger at 11 Gospel-Hall years of age. Dad, though, had a complete set of Ian Fleming books in Pan paperback, including Goldfinger with the bullet holes through the cover. I later found them stashed in a. secret cupboard in the spare room. Maybe he’d sneaked off to see the movie, risking discovery by Jesus if He returned to pluck the Saints up to Glory in a premillennial, rapturous flourish. I don’t know and it’s too late now to ask.

You lost the baddie immediately, of course, flicked out of the ejector seat to some down-the-sofa eternity. All the astonishing appurtenances of gadgetry failed eventually – the bullet proof rear screen, the guns,. Nobody remembered the rotating number plates. Until you undid the two screws beneath the car and the whole thing fell into an unfixable mess.

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They’re all lost in the abandonment of childhood, the approximate advent of adulthood. But now, thanks to the wondrous temptations of eBay, they, or versions thereof, can be found again. The red Alfa. The blue Mini, the Stingray and the DB5. Cheap if you seek them out in battered, boxless form. There are brand new reproductions of the Aston Martin available at huge expense; painstaking men exist who wil remake, remodel, resell. And elderly collectors who amass pristine fleets of the vehicles their childhood was never allowed. And probably a Johnny Seven Gun to boot.

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For me, these four are enough. Scraped, rubbed, rattly and rough, I pick them up and unlock the past. Turn the key. The engine starts, and I’m in dad’s Vauxhall Velox, trundling down Pollokshaws Road in the pea-soup fog of the 60s. Racing south through the night on holiday, sisters asleep on the back parcel shelf of a Ford Zephyr.

Or lying on the floor at 1425 Pollokshaws Road, another dental surgery with screams and groans from awakening gas cases echoing through to the kitchen. There was always an escape, though. A Chevrolet Corvette Stingray will take you anywhere. So will a Mini.

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And an Aston Martin. Several decades later, working on a TV car show, I drove – drag raced – a DB7 and tentatively manoeuvred a V8 Vantage around the grounds of Hopetoun House. It was brand new and leaked sump oil like a 1960s British motorbike. I didn’t look for those two screws underneath that would let me take it apart and try to fix things. But I’m pretty sure they were there, and just needing tightened.