Chapter 2; The Gladys Car

My mother got her first car around that time as well, and as it turned out this was also a Mini. However, this was not just any Mini, but a Clubman. As tiny as a Mini might be, these little station wagons were extremely practical and in fact quite huge inside. The rear doors had the peculiarity of being split down the middle and opening out to the sides as opposed to most other hatches. Mind you, the hatchback had not yet been invented back then. This distinct rear opening was one of the real defining design elements of this Mini, and when BMW brought out their modern version of the Clubman in 2007 they maintained this feature.

This not our actual Mini. I hope to find some original photos soon...

Our Clubman had been bought second hand by my dad from a well-known photographer in Sweden. As a result, when my dad had come to pick up the car, it was filled with various Leica camera bodies end lenses in all the little storage bins of the car. More than likely the camera equipment in the car was worth ten times the car, and obviously they were all retrieved by the photographer before handing over the car.

The car was all red, and did not have the wood panels on the side some of the more up-scale Clubmans had. It was clearly a second-hand car, and as was often the case with cars in the 60’s and 70’s, it did suffer a fair bit from rust. I was still very young, perhaps 5, but I can still remember my dad fixing some rot holes with “plastic-padding”, and then painting over it with a small tin of original BMC red paint. This was probably my first exposure to some car DIY, something I would learn a fair bit more about as I got older.

This car quickly became very well known around where we lived, and everybody loved it. Our neighborhood dubbed it the Gladys Car, and in our family Mini Clubmans are often still referred to in this way. We eventually sold this Mini when the family moved away from Sweden, but it was far from the end of the Mini story.