Im really pleased that people have been open to this, and that I wasn't met with a stony wall of silence (again!). I'm much obliged.
The simple answer is no, in don't recall any of the conversation while going down the lane. I was in the back, on the right side, and just remember watching out the window as it paced the car.
I say "remember", but I'm at pains to point out that if it happened at all, it seems that the moment we turned into the road at the bottom, I instantaneously "forgot" for the next sixteen or so years! It was only the very similar story (though geographically different) in a IHTM volume that caused the sudden and overpowering surge of "memory".
Is it possible *something* about the story, some arcane rhythm or sequence of words and phrases *planted* an image so strong that I interpreted it as a "false memory"? I don't consider myself "particularly suggestible"- but isn't that how really good poetry is supposed to work? To be so overpoweringly evocative that it changes your brain?
It wouldn't explain the reaction of my friends though- surely a simple "No, nothing odd happened" would have sufficed? In fact, I would have expected some humorous reminiscences about the plastic gnome and suggestions of a probably ill-advised reunion.
I have no idea what, if anything, happened that night. Only what my memory tells me- which is in itself very hard to accept.
The one thing that niggles however is my age. I wasn't a kid, I was somewhere between 22 and 26, and probably nearer the top end of that. I know much time has passed, but I can't dismiss it as a fevered childhood imagination- like the "dog headed men", "headless punk", "Brixton skinheads", "Witchy Poo and her shears" and the "hanging skeleton of Bushy Wood"- all of which did the rounds among my playground friends, and some of which I have "memories" of seeing in the flesh (but were obviously dreams), and at the very least being so terrified they existed that I'd shut my eyes on car rides past where they were said to be seen.