The car was in the bottom of the glass case and tiny, hardly bigger than a decent fingemail. Its roof was awry, but the body was intact and the colour was screaming green, like some tropical insect; an insect scuttling out of my past. I asked Patrick Cook, founder and curator of the Bakelite Museum if the toy had an engine and he said it did, which c1inched it. I had remembered right. Some time in the 1950s, one day, a week, maybe a month had occurred when childhood obsessiveness had focused on a tiny plastic vehic1e, an obscure object of desire that sped across the St Marks C of E school playground at stunning speed. Then it lost itself in my unconsciousness for four decades.