Early in my life, I couldn’t get enough of Abba. My late father, a hospital surgeon, would repeatedly stumble home following his gruelling nightshifts patching up local unfortunates, only to be forced into blearily operating the record player and witness his young son cavort and caper about the lounge to ‘Dancing Queen’ in a manner that could only have caused profound distress to a solid, traditional Pakistani family man.
Given my father’s near-paranoid obsession with instilling proper masculine qualities in his only son, (it is only due to my mother’s firm intervention, and the prevailing recruitment policy, that I wasn’t enlisted in the British Navy by the age of five) it was no surprise that birthdays and other special occasions would invariably mean toys aimed solely at bolstering my macho credentials and hopefully, stop me listening to Abba and prancing about in that damn’ fool manner. Action Men, Meccano, toy guns, Tonka trucks – my toybox soon overflowed with unwanted gifts. Abba, meanwhile, released their landmark album, ‘The Movie’. The situation seemed desperate.
It was my ancient, 13-year old cousin Adnan who came to the rescue. Adnan was a silent, spotty type, who stared at cars with naked lust and drooled over the pages of auto periodicals with reverence. I was supremely uninterested in his ugly, oily world and would have remained so, had it not been for my eighth birthday and the arrival of a mysterious package.
Unwrapping it, I unwittingly stumbled into a whole new world. It was a Tamiya Wild Willy radio controlled kit car, and it was immediately, utterly entrancing. I scrabbled through the wrapping to ease out the contents of the box, which pictured a speeding, bucking buggy, extracting layers of mysterious plastic components, alongside more recognisable items, such as huge wheels, fenders and glorious stickers.
From that moment on, you could say I was lost – lost in a brand-new obsession that taught me more about creativity, science, physics or patience than any amount of expensive private schooling ever did. And within the reams of instruction manuals and hand-books, I soon found myself painfully learning my way through this bizarre new lexicon.
Rear Spring Eye! Idler shaft. 5 x 5.5 Spacer. Snap Pin (large). Differential Guard. They sounded like Star Wars characters to me. My father, meanwhile, was in heaven and had to be called for dinner three times – an unprecedented event in our house – from my room.
It soon transpired that my father had ordered my gift, on Adnan’s insistence, from the supreme kings of the kit-car world, Tamiya. This Japanese brand, for whom the term ‘iconic’ would be faint praise, had been making car kits for around forty years, and during that time, had evolved from humble beginnings making wooden toy cars to producing miniature models of familiar trucks, racing cars and modified buggies. With exquisite detailing and precision, Tamiya’s painstaking attention to detail and reliability was legendary amongst collectors and RC cognoscenti, just as much as it was to a small boy in the middle of 1980s England.
Unlocking the mysteries of my new toy became my all-consuming passion. To my father’s delight, Abba fell by the wayside (I attribute their split a few months later to my Tamiya’s utter domination of my life). Night after night, the two of us would crouch over my small table, breathing heavily and practising matching up the tiny, delicate pieces, before fixing them into place. And slowly, painfully – for I was rarely spared a lecture on the function of each freshly jointed piece – the glorious machine began to assume shape.
Finally, it was complete, and we proudly took our creation to a local park and let rip. Owing to the positioning of the heavy battery pack over the rear axle, the thing bucked and flipped maniacally at speed – yet once we’d got the measure of the vehicle’s unique balance and responsiveness, it roared across the bumpy municipal grounds, on the first of what would be a good half-dozen years’ worth of journeys.
That a radio-controlled car could change life in our family to such an extent, seems absurd. Yet, I have my Tamiya to thank, not only for the wads of useless information about rubber grommet housings and heavy springs I would go on to accrue over the years – but also, for bringing my father and I closer together, if only for a few years. The ravages of adolescence pulled us apart thereafter, but over our many evenings together and subsequent Saturday afternoons in the park, memories were forged that sustain me to this day.
