He drives almost every day. Why not? Jan van Dijk is 92 years old and his driver’s license has been extended for three years. Then? “Then I will have it extended again. If I’m still alive.”
Satisfied, he hangs above the engine block. His left hand rests on the 1969 MG B Roadster (“this color is called British racing green”). He points to the different parts with his free hand. Everything is as before, except the brake booster. “I had it put in in the spring.” So easy at 92. “You had to press the pedal pretty hard to brake.”
Jan van Dijk was born in 1930. Yet he drives his oldtimer almost every day. “My driver’s license was renewed for three years in January. Then I will be 95.”
And will you extend it again?
“If I can still drive then I will have it extended again, of course. If it’s still possible, if I’m still alive.”
How often do you drive?
“If I have to go somewhere, and the weather is nice,” he lets the hood close, “I’ll take the MG.”
Van Dijk gets into the car, puts on his cap and starts the engine. Time for a ride.
Automotive engineering
Jan van Dijk grew up in Loppersum. There he witnessed the beginning and end of the war. In April ’45 he walked through the fields to Ten Boer. There the teenager saw how local NSB members were beaten up by the domestic forces and was horrified. Are these the good guys now?
The teenager goes to school, is employed and becomes a car mechanic. In the seventies he ends up at garage Oosterhuis in the west of Groningen city. His boss is the famous motorcycle racer Bert Oosterhuis. “He was my boss and my friend.” In 1982 Oosterhuis crashed in Algeria during the Paris-Dakar rally. Shortly afterwards, Van Dijk also leaves. He works for a few more years at garage Streppel in Rodeschool. When he turns sixty in 1990, he takes early retirement (“that was still possible then”). In 2014 he buys his oldtimer.
‘I’m not in a hurry’
With smiling eyes, Van Dijk drives via Noordlaren and Blankeweer in the direction of Glimmen. The sun is shining, his MG is grunting. Suddenly he steers to the left. “There are a few ugly potholes here and of course I have to be careful with my MG.”
When Van Dijk bought his car in 2014, he opened the roof and never closed it again. “It takes me fifteen minutes to close that thing. I have a big umbrella here. When it rains I put it over it. Then I wait for it to dry and then I continue. I’m in no hurry.”
Every now and then he joins an old-timer ride. In May he drove in a column from Ekenstein to Bellingwolde and back. “But in the end I prefer to drive for myself.” Moreover, the only time his MG was damaged was during an organized ride in the spring of 2022. The drivers took a break in Beetsterzwaag. When Van Dijk came back he saw a dent in the right rear fender. “That cost me nine hundred euros.”
Always nearby
He now lives in a guest house next to his son and daughter-in-law in De Groeve. They took him out of his sheltered home in Haren in 2020, the start of the corona period. Lien, his husband, had died a year earlier and he was wasting on his own. Because of the pandemic, Van Dijk had not seen or spoken to anyone for fifteen weeks. “The food was placed in front of the door, then someone knocked and I had to pick it up from the floor.”
Another advantage: the living room of the guesthouse is adjacent to the garage where his MG is located.
Van Dijk is now driving through Glimmen. There is a folding chair in the back of his car. “When the weather is nice, I bring a sandwich and a jug of coffee.” Two weeks ago he drove to friends near Apeldoorn. “I often cycled there with Lien. Somewhere in the woods, halfway through a bend, there is a bench where we used to rest.” Van Dijk sat down on the bench. “Then I thought about the past.”