With petrol the price it is, you would think that my family at last would have stopped telling me that it’s about time I finally learned I to drive.
‘It’ll do you good – take you out of yourself,’ they will keep saying. ‘But I don’t want to be taken out of myself,’ I keep mumbling.
‘Nonsense,’ they cry bracingly. ‘You’re only saying that. Just think – you’ll be able to nip about all over the place, once you’re really mobile. You just won’t know yourself.’
But that’s just it. I do know myself. Past experience has convinced me that I am just not one of the Graham Hills of this world, nor ever likely to be. And, anyway, I quite enjoy walking to the shops or catching a bus or train if I get any sudden urge to ‘nip about’ further afield. Recently, however, the brainwashing became so insistent that, sighing heavily and with trembling hands, I dialled a small local driving school.
‘You’ll need a provisional licence,’ said the man on the telephone. ‘Nothing to it, you’ll see, we’ll soon have you out and away on the open road.’
He sounded quite breezy poor chap. Carefree even. Little did he know the ghastly experiences which awaited him/us/the rest of the world. Experiences which even that classic Bob Newhart record, The Driving Instructor had failed to prepare us for.
When I tell you that I was so nervous I very nearly fainted in the Post Office, just filling out the provisional licence form, you will have some idea of what shape I was in by the time the driving school car pulled up outside our house …
Mindful of a learner friend of mine who said she always put on her smartest clothes and drenched herself in her most expensive perfume to give herself confidence, I, too, had taken great pains with my appearance. I had even bought myself a luxuriant chestnut wig. Looking back I can see that this may have been a subconscious need for disguise but I also thought it might make me seem young and keen and dashing. (I needn’t have bothered. Long before the end of that first lesson even the wig had turned grey.)
I won’t describe Lesson One in detail. Nor Lessons Two to Eight for that matter. Some memories are painful even now. Suffice it to say that the next few weeks passed in a nightmare of shuddering lurches, flinching at pedestrians and cries from the instructor to ‘Stop trying to pull the damned gear stick out of its socket!’
He wasn’t very nice, either, the day the door handle worked loose and fell into my shopping bag. I found it when I got home and returned it to him at the very next lesson. Which should have pleased him really as he had apparently spent a rather wet week dodging round the bonnet to release his pupils.
I was very apologetic the day I bent that spindly little lever jutting out of the steering column. ‘It’s the trafficator – not the gears,’ he sighed as I tried several times to waggle the silly thing into neutral.
To cheer him up I told him about a girl I knew who was so tense after her first driving lesson she found that she was still gripping the steering wheel when she got back indoors. But he didn’t laugh all that much.
Other far-from-magic moments included the day he saw a whole crowd of people he knew in the High Street and paused in the lesson to turn and wave at them.
Suddenly finding ourselves left to our own devices, the car and I broke into an unaccountable series of kangaroo leaps. As we bounded over the horizon I could see all these people in the driving mirror, cheering wildly, flinging their hats in the air and hollering: ‘Yahoo – ride’ em cowboy!’
But even this was better than the day we passed a group of road menders. With a big, intrepid tug at the steering wheel I pulled out to avoid the row of red and white cones they had set up for some distance along the crown of the road.
You may be interested to learn that if you drive over one of these cones it goes ‘ger-dung’. I know this because I could hear them going ‘ger-dung-ger-dung-ger-dung’ as I flattened them, every single one.
I wouldn’t have minded so much if the workmen had laughed or nudged each other or even shaken their fists. But they didn’t. They just leaned on their shovels, in a long solemn line, and watched in complete silence as we ‘ger-dunged’ away into the distance.
‘Now – about your ninth lesson …’ said the instructor, in a curiously tight, breathless sort of voice, as we squealed up on to the pavement more or less outside my house. ‘I’m afraid we may have to take a little break for a while. I get these asthma attacks you see …’
I quite understood. I told him I, too, had been feeling a bit run down, lately, and could do with a break in transmission myself, ho, ho, ho.
He did his best to laugh at my little joke but I could see that it was an effort. ‘I’ll be getting in touch,’ he said dispiritedly as he drove away. But he never has.
Just as a matter of interest, I did catch sight of him the other day, driving along the High Street. He saw me, too, but he didn’t turn and wave. No, with a great shuddering of gears he turned and shot off, in a series of leaps, up a narrow alleyway. Funny that. But then, who am I to criticize other people’s driving?