Island Life Magazine Ltd October/November 2008 | Page 56

life

INTERVIEW

Beginning with
a banger
A chance remark from a
colleague led Nick and
Carolyn Pointing to commit
to driving their replica
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
from the Isle of Wight to
Australia. Roz Whistance
hears about their first leg.
You expect to meet a showman or an
anorak. Either someone who needs a
notorious car to carry his huge ego or a
complete motor nerd who will bore the
pants off you with his obsessiveness. What
kind of a man builds Chitty Chitty Bang
Bang, as true to the original as financially
possible, and, with his wife, drives it
across the world from the Isle of Wight to
Australia?
Nick Pointing is neither of the above. And
his wife Carolyn, an attractive police woman,
would not, you sense, put up with him if he
were. His journey, literal and metaphorical,
of building the replica car comes from a
huge sense of “why not?”
He’d given Chitty toys, Chitty models to
Carolyn for birthday presents because she
loved the film. She asked him flippantly to
make her the actual car, not realising what
she had triggered. Nick, as a 16-year-old
had spent some weeks on a YTS scheme
(remember those) learning how to weld,
while waiting for a vacancy in the Royal
Navy. Now a dad with grown-up kids,
working as a departmental manager at

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Marks & Spencer, Nick’s imagination had
been fired: “It was a bit of fun, so I didn’t
want to commit too much money to it – the
car is a 1973 MOT-failed Landrover which I
bought for £100. But the project gradually
took hold.”
The ornate interior is of “anything I
could lay my hands on” – including an
M&S tea-light holder – and it looks like
the fantasy it represents. Maybe you can’t
blame the colleague who came round and
said ‘it’ll never go!’. But that was enough to
goad Nick into saying he’d prove it’d go, by
driving it to Australia.
So began this fun, foolhardy but enviable
trip of a lifetime. The couple got sabbaticals
from their jobs, and spent the summer
organising visas for themselves and, for
Chitty, a vehicle carnet (a sort of passport for
the car which allows its import and export
to any country). They rented out their house,
and then spent the summer going to shows,
using the car to raise money for charity.
“We funded the trip itself through savings,”
explained Nick. “All the money raised at
shows went to charity.”

Beginning with a banger was never going
to be straightforward, and even in the weeks
before leaving the setbacks started. The
rear differential went, as did the clutch, and
after they had left the Island, with all the
accompanying razzmatazz, on the car’s first
blast on the motorway towards Dover, it let
out a huge rumble from the front. Nick and
Carolyn pulled into a service station, and the
AA man who turned up happened to be a
Landrover mechanic. “He was blown away
by the car,” says Nick, “but couldn’t find
anything wrong. Then he offered to drive
with us for 20 miles to see we were ok –
and even gave us £20 to see us on our way.
Normally people give them tips!”
The mix of extreme uncertainty and
unexpected kindnesses was a theme of the
trip – which went like this: France, Belgium,
Luxembourg, German, Austria, Italy, Turkey,
Greece, Iran, United Arab Emirates, India,
Malaysia, Singapore,Thailand, Burma and
Cambodia. From there Chitty was shipped
over to Freemantle in Australia, and the
route continued from Adelaide, Sydney,
Brisbane, Melbourne, and back to the UK.

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