by Timothy Lea
When I get in to his surgery, Doctor Murdoch attacks my plaster as if gutting a fish that has done him a personal injury. From the look of him one would guess that he had just returned from a meths drinkers’ stag party. The sight of my ankle causes his prim lips to contract into walnuts and I can sympathise with him. The object we are both staring at looks like a swollen inner tube painted the colour of a gangrenous sunset.
“What do you do?” he barks.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean if you’re a ballroom dancer, you’d better get down to the labour exchange.”
“It’s going to be alright, isn’t it?” I whine. I mean, what with heart transplants and artificial kidneys you expect them to be able to mend a bloody broken ankle, don’t you?
“You’ll be able to walk on it, but I won’t make any promises about the next Olympic Games,” says Murdoch who must be a laugh riot at his medical school reunions.
“I’m a window cleaner,” I pipe.
“You were,” says Murdoch. “That ankle has been very badly broken. You can’t risk any antics on it. I’m amazed we’ve got it together as well as we have.” I’m speechless for a moment. All those windows, all those birds. I could weep just thinking about it. What are they going to do without me? What am I going to do without them?
Added to that, there is the money.
“Are you positive?” I gulp.
“Absolutely. Of course, you don’t have to take my advice but you’d be a damn fool to get on a ladder again.”
So there I am, redundant at 22. Lots of blokes would envy me but there is a crazy streak of ambition in the Leas and I’m too patriotic to go on National Assistance—at least for a few years yet. What am I going to do?
Broken-hearted, I manage to get pissed and return to the family home. As I have already indicated relations with Dad have been strained since Sid’s departure and my accident has not drawn forth the sympathy one could expect from a father figure. I suspect that this may be due to some of the rumours that have been circulating. “Look Mother,” he sings out as I come through the door. “It’s the Birdman of Alcatraz!”
This is really witty for Dad and besides confirming my suspicions is an unkind allusion to a few months I once spent at reform school.
“Shutup, you miserable old git!” I say.
“Don’t raise your voice to me, sonny,” says Dad, “otherwise I’ll start asking you when you first began to clean windows in the all-together. Got a nudist camp on the rounds, I suppose?”
Dad and Doctor Murdoch would make a wonderful comedy team, and I’m wondering what Hughie Green’s telephone number is when Mum chips in.
“Do leave him alone, Dad, he’s told you enough times what happened.”
“Oh, yes, Mother. I know all that. He was stretched out on the roof, wasn’t he, having a little sunbathe. Then this bloke opens a window, dislodges the ladder. Timmy grabs at it, slips, loses his balance and does a swallow dive into the street. Sounds very likely, doesn’t it?”
“I really can’t be bothered—” I begin.
“I suppose that bird got a black eye when you landed on top of her?”
“I wonder what your excuse is going to be, Dad?”
“Don’t adopt that tone with me, Sonny Jim. I could still teach you a few lessons if it came to the pinch.”
“Well, prove it, or shut up.”
I mean it, too. Every few weeks or it is probably days now, Dad and I are squaring up to each other and sooner or later I am going to dot the stupid old bugger one. Nothing happens this time because mum throws a tantrum and sister Rosie arrives with little Jason.
“I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it,” Mum is wailing when little dribble jaws shoves his jam-stained mug round the door and her mood changes faster than a bloke finding that the large lump in the middle of his new cement path is his mother-in-law.
“Hello darling,” she coos. “Who’s come to see his Grand-mummy, then? Ooh, and what a nasty runny nose we’ve got. Doesn’t naughty mummy give you your lovely cod liver oil, then?”
Honestly, Rosie must feel like belting her sometimes. She still exists in a world of cod liver oil, cascara and milk of magnesia. Open your bowels and live might be her motto.
Mum and Rosie go rabbiting on and little Jason rubs his filthy fingers all over the moquette. Just like old times. I haven’t had a chance to tell anyone about my problem, and nobody would be interested, anyway.
“How are the lessons going, dear?” says Mum.
“Oh, smashing Mum. I’ve got this lovely fellah. Very refined, lovely even white teeth. I think they’re his own. You know what I mean?”
Mum shakes her head vigorously. “Yes dear, some of them are very nice. I’ve thought about learning myself, but your father will never get one.”
What are they on about? I’ve never known Rosie to acknowledge the existence of any other bloke than Sid.
“He’s ever so gentlemanly and he never shouts at me. Everything is very smooth and relaxed.”
“That’s the secret, dear,” agrees Mum. “If you were doing it with Sid he would probably start getting at you. I’m told you never want to take lessons with your husband. Can you imagine what your father would be like?”
They nod enthusiastically.
“Bloody marvellous, isn’t it?” says Dad, letting me in on the secret. “For thirty years I struggle and sweat to support a family and never even sniff a motor car. Now every bleeder has one and your mother starts saying she wants to take driving lessons.”
“Yes Dad.”
I’m not really listening because suddenly I’ve got this feeling that fate—or whatever you like to call it—is trying to tell me something. Become a driving instructor! Why hadn’t I thought of that before? It would be ideal. I can’t hop about on my leg too much and as an instructor I’d be sitting on my arse most of the time, telling some bird to turn left at the next traffic lights. It would be a doddle. And what opportunities to exploit my natural talents! If Mum and Rosie could be aroused, just imagine the effect on a normal red-blooded woman! I’d seen all those ads and tele commercials—that’s where they had got the idea from. Tight-lipped, hawk-eyed young men ruthlessly thrusting home gear leavers with wristy nonchalance whilst, open-mouthed x-certificate “yes please” girls lapped up every orgasmic gesture. It was a wonder a bird could look at a gear stick without blushing. And the whole operation had so much more class than window cleaning. I’d seen them with their leather-patched hacking jackets, nonchalantly drumming their fingers against the side of the window. “Very good, Mrs. Smithers. You really are beginning to make progress. Now let’s pull off on the left here, and I’ll ask you a few questions about the Highway Code—”
“Oh Mr. Lea—”
“Careful, Mrs. Smithers, you’re drooling all over my chukka boots.”
I can see it as clearly as Ted Heath’s teeth. An endless procession of upside-down footprints on the dashboard.
Are you the guy that’s been a pushin’
Leaving greasemarks on the cushion
And footprints on the dashboard upside down
Since you’ve been at our Nelly,
She’s got pains down in her belly,
I guess you’d best be moving out of town.
That’s the way Potter the Poet tells it and that’s the way I can see it.
The rest of the day is background music and the next morning I am round at Battersea Public Library which is the source of all knowledge to the lower orders. I had been simple enough to imagine that you just slapped a sign saying “LEArn with LEA” on your car and you were away. But, oh dear me, no. Not by a long chalk. The lady with a frizzy bun and indelible pencil all round her unpretty lips soon throws a bucket of cold water over that one.
“You’ll have to write to the Department of the Environment,” she says coldly. Me writing to the Department of the Environment! I mean, it sounds so grand I hardly feel I have a right to. Maybe I should chuck it all in and get a job on t
he buses. But I do as she says and soon receive an AD154 (an official paid buff envelope which Dad snitches to send off his pools), an AD12, an AD13, and AD1 3L, two AD14’s and an AD1 14 (revised). My cup overfloweth. After poring over this lot till my eyes ache I work out that I have to get on the Register of Approved Driving Instructors and that to do this I have to pass a written and a practical examination. I will then be a—wait for it—“Department of the Environment Approved Driving Instructor” and you can’t get much higher than that, can you? D.E.A.D.I.—oh well, I suppose they know what they are doing.
Filling in the application form is a bit of a drag because there is a section about convictions for non-motoring offences and a request for the names of two people prepared to give references. I decide to come clean on the lead-stripping because, on the application form, they give you four lines for details of your offences and tell you to continue on a separate sheet if necessary, so they must be used to getting some right rogues. My criminal record will fit into half a line.
The references are more of a problem because you can’t use family (not that anyone, apart from Mum, would have a good word for me) and I am not on close terms with anyone else in S.W.12. In the end I make up a couple of names and give my sister’s address for one, and a block of flats where I know the caretaker for the other. Both of them get instructions to hang on to any mail addressed to the Rev. Trubshawe or Lieut.-Colonel Phillips R.A. and sure enough, both of them get a letter asking for a character reference.
I am dead cunning with my replies, even getting the Rev. Trubshawe to allude to my schoolboy indiscretion: “no doubt accounted for by his having strayed into the company of the wrong sort of boy”, whilst the colonel says I am a “damn fine type”. My little ruse seems to work because two weeks later I get a receipt for my £5 examination admission fee and am told where to report.
The first examination is the written one and I mug up all the guff they give me so I see road signs every time I close my eyes. I have never worked so hard in my life and I feel really confident that I’m going to do well. But—and that is one of the key words in my life—once again fate puts the mockers on me. This time it is in the crutch-swelling shape of the eldest Ngobla girl Matilda. The Ngoblas are our next door neighbours and, as their name suggests, are blacker than the inside of a lump of coal. Mum and Dad are very cool about it and would never admit to anything as unsavoury as racial prejudice but the Ngoblas are not on our Christmas card list and when Mum smiles at Mrs. Ngobla it’s like Sonny Liston trying to tell his opponent something as they touch gloves. For myself, I am not very fussed either way but I don’t have much to do with the Ngoblas, basically, I suppose, because I never have done.
My encounter with Matilda takes place when I am revising on the eve of my examination. Mum has gone to the bingo and Dad is at the boozer so I have the kitchen to myself and am reading “Driving” for the four hundred and thirty second time when I look out of the window and see Matilda prancing about on the lawn (which is what Dad calls the patch of dandelions by the dustbins). She has just achieved that instant transformation from schoolgirl to woman and with her pink woolly sweater and velvet hot-pants she looks decidedly fanciable. I can hardly believe that when I last saw her she was wearing a grubby gymslip and dragging a satchel behind her. It turns out that one of her kid brothers—there are about 400 of them—has lost his ball over the wall and I help her look for it whilst flashing some of the small talk that has made me the toast of Wimbledon Palais. I am glad to find, when she bends over an old chicken coop, that there isn’t a drop of prejudice in me. In fact, quite the reverse. I could board her, no trouble at all. She looks as if she has been poured into a black rubber mould and the sight is enough to give Mr. Dunlop a few ideas for new products, I can tell you.
I persuade her to pop inside for a quick drink (tea or coffee) and—well, you know what it is like—one thing leads to another and I’ve got her hot pants off before you can say Enoch Powell. A few moments later, we are wearing out the pile on the fireside rug when Dad comes in. He must have crept across the hall on tiptoe, the nosey old sod. He goes spare and starts rambling on about “your mother’s home” and “blackamoors”, “thin end of the wedge” etc., until I nearly go out of my mind. No sooner has he belted up than Mum comes in to hear the whole story and start blaming herself for leaving me alone for a couple of hours just as if I was still a schoolkid. Matilda stalks out with her head in the air right at the beginning and, I must say, I have to hand it to her.
“Ooh, the hussy,” squeals Mum, “can’t you see, it’s a conspiracy. They’ve been trying to lure you for years. Give themselves a bit of respectability. You mark my words, that black trollop will be saying you made her pregnant.”
“She’ll be dead lucky,” I say. “Dad put the kibosh on that.”
“Shut your mouth, you dirty little bleeder,” howls Dad.
It’s all pretty turgid, and when I tell Dad he is jealous and I have watched him giving Mrs. Ngobla the eye for years, he goes stark raving bonkers.
“Get out of this house!” he rages. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”
So I do. Straight out of the front door, slamming it behind so the whole terrace sways. And that is the start of one of the worst nights of my life. I am not going back, oh no, not me! But where am I going? Rosie seems a good bet, even if I do have to throw myself on Sid’s mercy, but I find that they have gone to Hastings for the week.
When I think about it, I’ve got the same problem I had when I was looking for a reference. No friends. I end up sleeping, if that is the right word, in one of the tennis court huts on Clapham Common, and I have to hang around there for an hour until the last pair of lovers vacate it. It is bloody cold and I think I still have the pattern of the benches stamped on my shoulder blades. When I eventually drop off it is only onto the floor and then it starts raining so I give up the whole idea of sleep and huddle in the darkness until it begins to get light.
The result of this is that by the time I get to the examination, I am totally knackered and can hardly keep my eyes open. I am not looking my best, either because pride has prevented me from returning to the family home and velvet jeans and a Mr. Freedom T-shirt are a trifle conscipuous amongst the selection of sports jackets set off by the occasional Burton masterpiece.
We have one hour and twenty minutes for the first two papers and by a superhuman effort I manage to keep my eyes open most of the time, though it is fatal if I prop my head on a hand. My habit of jumping out of my seat and taking violent swings at the empty air causes a little surprise though, as does the occasional slap round the chops I administer to myself.
We have a break before the second examination and I nip across the road for some tea and a couple of ham rolls. Trouble is I’ve no sooner sat down than I fall asleep and all the other buggers have been working for fifteen minutes when I come stumbling through the door. I try and settle down but it’s hopeless. Every question I read about five times and I can’t take in the words. I start writing and my mind drifts off into cotton wool and I forget what I was about. Then I make the mistake of thinking that if I could just take a little cat nap I would awake refreshed and be able to dash off the papers in half an hour. The next thing I remember is the examiner tugging my papers from under my head and the trail of saliva running down the desk and on to the floor. My paper has my number on it, the question number and “The interpretation of the reason for failure”. That is all. I could weep.
But of course, I don’t. I drag myself home and go straight to bed, ignoring Mum who is glad to see me, but damned if she is going to show it too much. It’s a funny thing but though I am still flaked out I can’t sleep. I just lie there thinking how I have blown the exam and how bloody unfair it is. After a while, I get up and go through all my AD12 and AD13s to see if and when I can take it again. Three months it says.
Three months! That is a bloody long time; especially now that I have vowed to get out of Scraggs Road just as fast as my tiny legs will carry m
e.
I pore over my papers and discover a faint ray of hope. I can get a “Licence to give Instruction” which would allow me to do just that whilst I am waiting to take the written exam again. Trouble is, that for at least one-fifth of the time I’m on the road I have to be supervised by an A.D.I. so that means finding a driving school that will accept me as a trainee. LEArn with LEA will have to wait for a bit.
Slightly cheered I pad round the local schools but not a sausage. They are all one man bands, fully staffed or “we only take fully qualified people” said with withering contempt.
So there I am again, on the scrap heap at 22. Stuck between the Devil and the Deep Black Ngoblas for another three months. Dad is, of course, not at all surprised by my failure to pass the exam and the verbal war between us festers unpleasantly with Mum flapping miserably on the side lines. The situation is intolerable, as my old schoolmaster used to say, and I keep out of the house as much as I can. “You use this place like a hotel,” moans Dad, who would start belly-aching about me always being under his feet if I watched five minutes of Coronation Street! It is at this time of frustration and bitterness that help arrives from an unexpected quarter.
I am having a solitary drink in the public bar of the Highwayman when I see Sid in the saloon. At first we pretend not to see each other but then, when I am sitting down thinking how stupid it is and on the point of going over and buying him a beer, he comes in and buys me one. I tell him my problems and he nods sympathetically.
“You want a driving school, eh?” he says. “Funny that, but I just might be able to help you. Bloke I knew in the army runs a driving school. Did I ever tell you about B.S.M. Cronk?”
“Cronk?! That’s a funny name!”
“Yeah. Battery Sergeant Major Cronk. He was the herbert who got me chucked out, bless him.”
Sid had done his national service, which shows you how old he is, and been dishonourably discharged after getting involved in some petrol fiddle. I could never understand the details and Sid swore that he was innocent—not that that meant anything. When he was caught red-handed in a fur warehouse he said he had heard a cat mewing, climbed in to let it out, and picked up the wrong fur in the darkness.