A Hyundai Pony Jigsaw Puzzle…

There is a Hyundai Pony jigsaw puzzle at my parents’ house. The Pony was not a memorable car, in fact I bet you have forgotten it if you ever knew it at all. Simply imagine a generic hatchback car shape, red and cartoonish in this illustration, set against a background of blue sky, green grass, and children and parents playing as the sun smiles down from the top left corner. For some reason there are multi-coloured shooting stars in the sky.

The jigsaw dates from the mid-eighties, and is from a car dealership that my dad worked at near Croydon, in south London. The dealership sold unusual cars, by which I mean cars from manufacturers that were not at that time household names. Hyundai, but also Subaru and Isuzu. There were Hyundai Pony coat hangers, too. Brown (of course) with a dull gold outline of the car shown front-on at the point of the hanger where the hook is fixed. The hangers were of the sprung expandable type, for trousers or skirts rather than shirts. Hyundai’s image has certainly changed a great deal in the intervening thirty years, but I can’t think of merchandise than a brown coat hanger to represent them at that point in their history.

My dad has been a car salesman for as long as I have known him, selling Hyundai then and now. In the intervening years he will have bought home hundreds of cars, dozens of makes and models. Many of them are memorable in different ways, but I do not remember dad bringing home a Pony.  In truth I don’t remember many of the cars he bought home from this period. I was about four, and dad would have been only in his early thirties and perhaps not at the point in his career where he would have been given top of the range cars. At least not on a regular basis. But it must have happened some of the time, because I think one of my first car memories is from this time; the oddly exotic Subaru XT Coupe.

The car was unusual enough to entice people out of their houses to have a look, I don’t know who the people were, but it doesn’t matter. My memory of this car is of people being stood around on our road looking at it, examining it, sitting in it. The car was metallic pistachio green, a shimmering hospital wall green.  The interior was simply brown. The car’s look was a mix of sharp angles at odds with the jelly-mould Ford Sierras common at the time. It had pop-up headlights. It was a curiosity.

And that’s all there is to it. My first car memory and probably one of my earliest memories. People standing around in a suburban housing estate looking at an odd Japanese coupe. Like the green of the car, the memory has shimmered in and out of my consciousness for a while, until now. Its outline has sharpened into focus as one piece of the jigsaw of my grown-up interests.