XI Lesson 14 Jigsaw reading

Group B

Read about Ted Hewitt. He lives with his wife and three small children in a village between London and Oxford. He owns a coach business.

You’re sitting in your dining-room, surrounded by a wonderful collection of miniature coaches. Some of them date back to when I was a child, and they were given to me as toys. But the bulk of them I’ve added in the last ten, fifteen years. I’m the third generation in a family coach business. I haven’t counted miniatures for a long time, but there must be at least five hundred, I should think.

My favourite is probably what is also the oldest, and that’s a little tin-plate double-decker bus, loosely based on a London Transport double-decker of the period. That would have been manufactured in the late thirties, early forties. And we’ve got it here. It’s lovely. And it winds up. The bulk of it is here, but I have others in other rooms of the house, and some stored up in the attic, as well. There are a surprisingly huge number of people who collect buses and coaches; there are specialist shops that sell them. And then there’s also a network of what are called swapmeets, where people go and trade in either current models or old models. So there’s no difficulty in finding models at all. People pay thousands and thousands for a specific model. I’ve never paid more than probably about fifty, sixty pounds. I’ve got some that have become rare. I’m too attached to them to sell them. If a model appears of an actual vehicle that I own, then I would have to have it, I think.