
Luke Batterham
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CRASHING CARS IN THE DAYS BEFORE BALLARD. This seemingly unpublished story tells of an obsessive patrolman (of the AA or RAC variety) who spends every day at the same lonely crossroads: "He knew nearly all the habitués of the road by sight: the doctor in his Studebaker, the solicitor in his high Ford, the local lord in his Rolls-Royce. He knew which bonnet bore the badge and which did not. The native snobbery of his soul concentrated entirely on cars, and the rest of the world seemed to lie beyond the constant cloud of dust raised by the passing wheels. His home and his wife were less real to him than the little sentry-box at the cross-roads". One day he sees two cars converging unbeknownst to each other. Neither bonnet bears the badge. Seized with fury, he signals to each that the road is clear: "Reassured by the scout, the chauffeurs drove on without sounding their horns, and the cars, meeting in the centre of the roads, came together with a tearing and a splintering, and overturned, telescoped into unrecognizable wreckage./ The scout stood looking down upon the blood human debris at his feet with the horrified dawn of returning sanity in his eyes". We can find no record of the story in Robert Cross and Ann Ravenscroft-Hulme, Vita Sackville-West: A Bibliography, 1999. See illustration on previous leaf.