Accurate model of antique fire engine

MOSSEL BAY NEWS - That neighbour's car parked outside in the street looked so cool.

The steam tug down at the Cape Town docks looked so handsome and busy and smelt so good.

The double-decker tramways bus pulling out of the bus sheds looked so proud and shiny. I really wanted to have these beauties in my playing hands.

I was 13 years old and this was the late 1960s. What I wanted could not be bought in local toy shops. Most or all models were way out of range of my sometimes pocket money.

Deciding to build these must-haves I found that I could, as time and mistakes went on, build pretty convincing replicas.

In those days it was cardboard shoe boxes, sticky glue, paper and my mother's crossword puzzle ballpoint pen. So many little and not-so-little models rolled off our cramped kitchen table in Woodstock, Cape Town.

After so many boring years at school, I joined the Cape Town fire brigade. During my service from 1972 to 1989, while at the Wynberg station, I decided to build one of our engines.

With paper, pen and a one-foot ruler, I measured and drew up plans of our turnout fire pump. Out of all that, a year later, came a half-inch to a one-foot cardboard model of Delta One. She was a very handsome and shapely thing. Everything opened and closed on this model and was fully stowed with all her equipment on board.

Some years later I reluctantly gave her up to a begging fireman colleague for R100, who had started a home-based fire brigade collection. He still lives today among his vast collection in Cape Town. The plans were later stored in a long forgotten file in a box in a long forgotten store. In 2006 they were largely destroyed in a Cape Town rainstorm flood. Carefully dried out and copied for safekeeping, the desire came to build another fire engine.

This time she would be the first turnout pump from the Roeland Street Fire Station in Cape Town.

Alpha 1 had a fine collection of stunning wooden ladders atop. The main ladder was a one-ton wheeled escape with carriage wheels. She was the last fire engine to carry this big, old ladder. Today, it's a museum piece at Roeland Street Fire Station.

Today, 37 years later, the second beautiful model fire engine has been completed. All her equipment is again on board with ladders that can be slipped and rehoused. Going a bit back in time ... my dad spent a full career in the fire service.

When I joined in 1972 he happened to be the training officer and I soon found out that I wasn't his son. Training was very physical in that sun-bleached drill yard.

On one such hot day, one of the recruits messed around during a drill. And there it happened. We were made to suffer taking that ugly one-ton ladder off and on that engine over 10 times. I think I hated that ladder and my old man after that. Today, I think, I am at peace after building a smaller version of it.

I am willing to let her go to a collector for the correct price.

David Clarke with his fire engine.