Me & My Motor

Now look here: I brought the first white car into London. When my husband died, his company took away the car that they'd provided for him and so I had to buy myself one. I went to Rolls-Royce and said to them: "I want a Rolls-Royce: a white one." They said: "White! Nobody's ever had a white one." I almost had a row with the man and told him if he wouldn't do it I'd go to someone who would.

He said he'd do it and I had the first white car in London. People used to stop me and try to take a photograph. I'm very annoyed to hear now that Rolls-Royce - which is very English - has been bought out. But now it's been taken over by Germans . . . sorry, foreign people. I think it's awful, quite frankly. What's the matter with us? Why can't we have our own things? Everything's been taken over by foreigners and we're not going to have England. I suppose I'd better not let it be known what car I have at the moment, because it isn't an English one. I bought one in a hurry. It's very comfortable: a Mercedes. It's white; I have white cars you see.

I've got music in it. But I talk, you see, and you can't have the music and me. I love any music that has a lovely tune. All the old English tunes you see - you could drive along and then sing them merrily once you'd got out of your car. All the ones that were on at the shows. People dressed up so well in those days. When I was young we danced all night and usually the men took you to a hotel. That was where all the best dances were. But now Germans own all the hotels, too.

What's happening to England, the England your fathers knew? It's awful now - we have all this talk, talk, talk, but we forget that the great thing was the English gentleman. George IV came in as the first English gentleman in Europe and after that everybody wanted to be one. It didn't matter where you were born, but if a man always said good morning and hello and what have you, people would say when he died that he was a great gentleman.

We want to get back to the time when a man had beautiful manners and looked after women and certainly didn't talk about sex all the time. All our grandmothers would have a fit if people talked about sex, wouldn't they? My grandfather went around the world three times in his sailing ship and I'm quite sure he had lots of love affairs. The point was that he never talked about them. Now people talk about them even the next morning. I'm shocked, quite frankly.

Women have learned to drive rather fast. In my day you went rather slow. I started in the war you see, and I had to drive a car. All the men were fighting. Women used to drive very, very carefully because they didn't want to smash their cars up. Nowadays everybody seems to smash up everything and they don't seem to care a damn.