First weekend in a posh hotel. Maybe it was Easter. First sight of a Jowett Javelin, only just launched so it was 1948 or 1949. First grown-up kiss with intent. First camera, first pictures of cars at Peebles Hydro. Well-off clientele had Jaguars, Standard Vanguards and elegant upright “razer-edge” Triumph 1800s as they were before 1949. There were others, like the Javelin I’d never seen before, and Rileys to thrill a car-obsessed teen.

Sleek back: Jowett Javelin was a trail-blazer. Malcolm McKay Classic and Sportscar.

This was growing up. Peebles Hydro had a lift you drove yourself, long corridors, and its own ballroom. I had never seen anything like it. Holiday hotels I’d been in before 1945 were never like this, spacious, tall, designed in 1878 to provide anxious Victorians with hydropathic water cures. It burned spectacularly in 1905 and was redesigned by James Miller (1860–1947), who drew up Glasgow Central, Wemyss Bay with its graceful curved walkways to Rothesay steamers I knew so well. He did Stirling station as well as Peebles’ languorous lookalike, Turnberry.

Alvis Fourteen in Peeblles’ Hydro car park. 1948

I expect I did take pictures of parents. They were, after all, paying for this signal-board to ambition. I didn’t take a picture of my kiss, although I cycled over to Cumbernauld in pursuit of her. Round trip 32 miles and fruitless. Her father had a chauffeur and an Austin Princess, so there never was another kiss.

Jaguar cliff-front. Pictured Goodwood 2008

Still, I got the picture of the Alvis Fourteen. Worthy but not exciting. So obsessed with Jaguars’ tall chrome fronts, and Lucas P100 headlamps, I lay in the grass of Peebles’ elegant steep close-cropped lawns to get a better angle. I never grew out of it. I have included the one I saw at Goodwood in 2006, in my new Jaguar Centenary Book One, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jaguar-Centenary-1922-1955-Vintage-Archive-ebook/dp/B09KFW5BQ9 .