The bitterness of it was that I did want something from Granny. I needed a car, and the lessons which I must have before I could tame it. If I broke with Granny, then I was stuck with Mum and Dad and the suffocation of dependency. This wasn’t just about vodka and counting peas, ice cream and coffee. Homeric geography had put in an appearance in a hotel dining room in Marlow, Scylla and Charybdis bursting up through thick carpeting. If I wasn’t dashed against the harsh rock of Granny’s willpower, then I was doomed to the sludge-whirlpool of life in Bourne End. And from my storm-tossed barque I was counting on the implacable Granitic rock to cough up an outboard motor, so that I could skim away from the entire dismal scene. Why would it want to provide that?
Still, if we were trembling on the brink of rupture, neither of us took a step either further or back. If this was High Noon at the Compleat Angler, at least no one was in a hurry to shoot first. Then Granny found a way to negotiate without either party having to back down. She picked up her spoon and stirred her black coffee. Then she turned the spoon upside down over her diminutive cup, took the cream jug and poured from it carefully over that dainty inverted scallop so that the cream didn’t dive into the black liquid but seemed to float on the surface, revolving in spiral scrolls.
Granny had to look at what she was doing, which made me feel that the pressure on me was less. I almost thought her hands were shaking, but I knew better than to consider feeling sorry for her. She made her voice soft when she spoke. ‘Ivo, who wasn’t of course your grandfather though we call him so, liked his coffee like this.’ We had never in our conversations referred to the squire or the birth certificate. Perhaps she simply divined that I had been told Mum’s side of events. Granny had the knack of having the last word without even opening her mouth. ‘If anything he liked coffee more than coffee liked him, as his adventure in East Africa tended to shew.’ ‘Shew’ was the archaic spelling she used in her letters, and I felt sure that was the form of the word fixed in her mind. ‘Even before he left on that silly sojourn I told him that I personally would not consider him a success unless Messrs Fortnum & Mason accepted him as a supplier.’
‘The top people,’ I managed to croak.
‘Precisely. In the event he fell short of his own rather modest ambitions. But perhaps you would like me to add cream to your cup in the same way? The taste is quite different, or perhaps it is the texture which is altered. For some reason a little sugar in the coffee helps the cream to float – and I speak as someone who in the normal run of life abhors sugar in coffee. If I can break my own rules so I’m sure can you. It is something which every young man, however stubborn, should try at least once.’
Somehow she had managed to get me off the hook without budging an inch. Even when she made concessions she held firm. ‘Thank you Granny,’ I was able to say, ‘that sounds delicious.’
I’m not sure it was, really. That style of drinking coffee has never caught on with me personally. Perhaps people whose hands have more control than mine can make the cream flow over a sort of miniature weir of coffee as the cup tips, liquid gliding over liquid, so that the elements remain in suspension within every sip, but I couldn’t manage that. The demitasse was light and easy to lift, but its small size made it awkward for me to make it travel the last couple of inches to my lips. I had to push my head uncomfortably far forward to bridge the gap. Still, I appreciated the gesture, if not the treat it delivered. Granny with her coffee spoon might seem to be watching over the separation of cream and coffee, but in another way she was stirring incompatibles diligently together, restoring between us some sort of social emulsion.
Passive resistance had served me well, but I can’t help thinking it’s most effective when it isn’t your only option. After all, Gandhi wasn’t strongly built, but he could certainly have given you quite a smack with his charkha – his portable spinning wheel – if he had wanted, and he would certainly have benefited from the element of surprise.
Flinging biscuits blindly at the orifice
When we had finished our coffee, Granny said, ‘Normally a two-course table d’hôte at a reputable restaurant is enough to satisfy even a teenager’s ravening belly, but perhaps you are still hungry?’ In fact my teenager’s ravening belly might be heard protesting its emptiness at some distance. ‘I believe I have some biscuits in my room, if that would allay the pangs.’
They might. Granny’s preference was always for a room on the ground floor, for reasons of her convenience rather than mine, but I reaped the benefit. She even pushed me there. There was a lip on the threshold of her room, not a true step but a rounded edge of metal which gave her some little difficulty to negotiate.
The biscuits were in the same category of presenting a little difficulty. Biscuits in general aren’t the easiest things for me to eat, but if I break them into rough quarters I can get them to my mouth without seeming to fling them blindly at the orifice.
‘Unless I’m imagining things, John,’ Granny said, ‘you had something to ask me. I am trying to find a new way of talking to you, since you are clearly no longer quite the person I have assumed. You don’t much resemble your mother, or your father either. Perhaps in fact it is me whom you resemble.’ I disputed this but gave no sign. ‘Is it about the electric wheelchair? Does it need attending to in some way? Perhaps a new battery is required.’
For someone who had helped to fund my adventures in locomotion she was rather in the dark about the details. Perhaps she thought it was in the shed, on blocks, with Dad frantically tinkering in every spare moment. Perhaps she thought I should make a point of coming to see her in the wheelchair she had paid for, just as she would expect me, if she had bought me a smart tie as a present, to wear it when invited to lunch with her. ‘The electric wheelchair is at home, Granny, and it’s in perfect working order. This is the old pushing chair which it replaced – it’s just that the Wrigley you were so kind as to help to buy doesn’t fold up very easily. It doesn’t fit in a taxi. I don’t use it at school either.’
‘Oh? And why is that?’
‘I have to be carried up and down stairs in it, and I can’t keep my balance in it. At school I use the Tan-Sad – you remember, the trolley thing. You’ve seen it.’
‘You’re still spending your days in that baby carriage? That overgrown pram? No wonder you wanted to see me, John. What is the alternative?’
‘I’m stuck with the Tan-Sad, Granny, and really I don’t mind.’ Here it was, then, the only chance I would ever have to make my case, to explain that I was hoping to do without the expensive wheelchair altogether, to trade it in for something with a roof and doors. ‘But at the moment I’m driven to school in a taxi.’
‘Really? How odd. How do your parents afford that?’
‘They don’t. The local authority pays.’
‘How perfectly extraordinary.’
‘Granny, I want to learn to drive myself.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘I think so.’
‘I rely on you to make very sure before committing me to expense. So it is lessons you want?’
‘I thought the British School of Motoring would be the right choice, Granny – they’re the top people, after all. I also need a car to take the lessons in. It will need to be modified.’
‘Well, John, I quite see why you wished to talk to me. Am I to buy you a Rolls-Royce? I believe that is still the top people’s car, though I have heard of the Aston Martin for a more headstrong style of person.’
‘Neither for me, thanks, Granny. I thought a Mini would be more practical.’
‘Quite right. It is rather a stylish little toy, designed by Signor Annigoni, I believe. People seem to be able to do everything these days.’ I didn’t think the name was quite right, though my information about cars was second-hand, a dilution of Peter’s expertise. Even if I had been surer of my ground, I would have been foolish to correct her, not just on general principles but because her mistake worked in my favour. If Signor Annigoni was good enough to paint
portraits of the Queen, he might be good enough to build cars for her grandson. ‘Why not look into the matter and give me the figures later. You can take it that I am not opposed on principle.’
Then she did something surprising. She took me backstage. She let me watch as she washed her hands and face carefully with her favourite glycerine soap. I say ‘let me watch’ but I suppose I mean ‘had me watch’, since she pushed the wheelchair into the bathroom for the purpose. It was strange. She wasn’t exactly putting on a show for me. She was showing me what lay behind the show she put on.
She explained that glycerine soap was a vulnerable luxury. It was a fugitive jewel of fragrance which would melt away to nothing in minutes if dropped into a bath. So she was meticulous at the basin, following a drill to avoid exposing the precious translucent bar to running water.
I don’t enter a room without being invited or noticed, so Granny wanted me to be there, but if she had something to tell me it wasn’t in the words. She was saying, ‘You know, John, in the War I couldn’t get face cream, so I made my own! I used the top of the milk and added some salt. Everyone said it gave my complexion a glow. Perhaps I should never have gone back to shop cosmetics. Still, it’s too late to change now, and they haven’t done too badly by me. You just have to follow certain rules.’
She wet her hands and then caressed the lather from the soap like a conjuror, just as I had once conjured bubbles from nothing at CRX. The glycerine bar spun its precious veil of foam. ‘My mother, John,’ she said, as she anointed herself, ‘would have been horrified at the idea of putting soap on the face. She scrubbed herself all over with a wire brush every day – and yes, all over does include the face. She believed it removed dead cells of skin and stimulated the circulation. She got the idea, believe it or not, from a newspaper article about the scandalous Elinor Glyn – but that may be a name that means nothing to you. Perhaps in any case we were both just lucky in what nature gave us. Perhaps we would have looked much the same whatever we did to ourselves.’
After the crisis there was a mood of truce, almost of carnival. I felt that Granny was showing me some of her mysteries, not just about age and beauty and resignation but also the thrift of the rich. Above all she was showing me something she may not have known herself – the secret cost of having had things so much her own way, of making the world dance to her tune. As by and large it had. She dried herself, using the towel with a delicate, rolling motion, like someone blotting a fragile manuscript. Then she said, ‘Giving in to the temptation to take a nap is one of the worst vices of those very vicious people, the old. Nevertheless I fear I may yield. I find I am very tired. Let me know of your progress with the Mini people and the School of Motoring.’ She phoned reception for a taxi to be summoned, and with the last of her strength pushed me out of the door for collection. It broke the mood only a little to be left in the corridor like a pair of shoes in need of polishing.
Granny wasn’t the only one to be feeling tired. I could hardly keep my eyes open in the taxi home. Mum wasn’t unkind when I told her about the lecture I had been given about the shame attaching to large drinks, as if I had embarrassed Granny with a fit of delirium tremens at table. Mum didn’t rub my nose in it for being so wrong about Granny’s character and its workings. ‘We did try to tell you what she was like, and now you’ve found out for yourself’ – that was all she said, and I was grateful for the light touch.
At some level she must have been delighted, as she made me a cheese and pickle sandwich, that lunch had contained elements of fiasco. She did look very thoughtful when she heard about the successful part of the day, Granny’s agreement to an embassy I hadn’t announced in advance, but perhaps only because she thought my quest was hopeless, that the Holy Grail of the steering wheel would always be beyond my grasp.
Mum and Dad discussed my driving scheme a certain amount. Dad said, in my full hearing, ‘He’ll never forgive you if he doesn’t get this chance, m’dear … life won’t be worth living!’ There was nothing I could say to that. Better to keep my mouth shut than to complicate matters, by entering in person a discussion where I already figured as a sort of effigy. I still don’t know (as often with Dad) whether he thought he was calming the situation or subtly inflaming it.
That night in our bedroom I told Peter that if there was one thing certain on earth it was that I would never again accept a drink from Granny, though he told me not to be too hasty. For his part he claimed not to be in any hurry to learn to drive. It was hard to believe this, since his mechanical bent was so pronounced, and perhaps there was some renunciation in progress. Perhaps he was giving me a head start, letting me get established on four wheels before he entered the competition, or perhaps he realised that without Granny’s help there was no alternative to a long wait.
A little push for the handicapped
It happened, though, that just when I was reaching out to the British School of Motoring, the BSM was reaching out to people like me. They were organising a small campaign, a little push to get the handicapped on the road. There was a specialist unit. When I called the local office I said that I might present ‘a bit of a challenge’ to an instructor, and itemised the difficulties that made me think so, to none of the usual consternation. It’s true I’m rather good on the phone, warm and clear, and can often wangle all manner of concessions. This was different. I wasn’t sure that the nice lady at the other end of the phone had grasped the seriousness of my case. I asked her if she had all the details she needed.
‘I think so,’ she said. ‘No movement in knees, one knee fixed out of true, short of stature, some movement in right elbow, limited mobility of neck. Is that the lot?’
That was the lot. I was left feeling disappointingly limber, from a BSM point of view, hardly worth the trouble of special help and a separate initiative. It was such an unfamiliar sensation I couldn’t even tell if I liked it or not. ‘This sounds just the sort of thing that our Mr Griffiths enjoys. Mr John Griffiths. He’ll be in touch.’
Some of my classmates at school, though younger than me, were already taking driving lessons. The Savage twins were trying to get two licences out of a single course of ten lessons, by pretending to be a single person. A single person with erratic performance, able to grasp techniques with impressive speed, only to forget them by the next session.
Their way of going about things was complicated enough, but a lot simpler than the approach I would have to take. I couldn’t learn to drive on any old car – I would never be able to manage a gear stick, for instance. I would need to get a car first, and then get lessons – and yet there seemed no point in getting a converted car without some assurance that I would qualify as a driver. That was the problem, and John Griffiths was the solution.
Mr Griffiths was every bit as positive when he telephoned. He would come to Bourne End for a preliminary session to assess my prospects. A home visit! He was certainly an antidote to the mood of stagnation and stultitude which could swoop on that household when the hobbies lost their grip.
He was very jolly and dumpy. From the moment he entered the house it was as if he was preaching a sermon, on the text Lay down thy crutches and drive. He was a true believer. As far as I was concerned he was preaching to the converted, but Mum had no faith. She was the one who needed to be won over, and John Griffiths pulled out all the stops. Heavens, how he wooed her!
He came rolling and bubbling into the house in Bourne End, saying, ‘We’re going to put you on the road with a full driving licence, John, and we’re going to help you stay on the road for many happy years. Your First Lesson Is Free and I’m going to give it to you right now.’ It turned out the first lesson didn’t involve the use or even the presence of a car. Just as well he didn’t charge – Granny might have had something to say if he had expected payment for instruction that was essentially mimed.
‘We’re going to put you on the road, John, but we also want you to bring the road into the house. Yes, into the house. By that I mean that when you go to bed a
t night you must close your eyes and imagine you’re holding the steering wheel in your hand. Imagine the road. Instead of counting sheep as you drift off, count something else … What, John? No, not cat’s-eyes, don’t count them, whatever you do! You’ll hypnotise yourself if you do that … Imagine traffic lights. Imagine road signs. Imagine a policeman holding up his hand and telling you to stop. Spend all your mental time on the road.
‘But don’t think that you’re only going to be driving at night, John! You can bring the road into the house during the daytime too. Mother can help you … See here, Mrs Cromer, what’s your first name? Laura? Now, come on, Laura, this is what I want you to do with your son while I’m not here … Turn round please.’ She seemed rather dazed, but she did as she was told.
John Griffiths went up behind her and took her hands in his, till between them they were indeed holding an imaginary steering wheel. Then with a toot-toot! and various noises of screeching and skidding (he had a fine variety of sound effects in his repertoire), he started driving Mum from room to room. ‘Watch out, there’s a cow on the road!’ he would say, or ‘Not very well anticipated there, Laura, I’m afraid …’
The dance started in the kitchen. After they had traipsed outside and back to the bedroom which I shared with Peter, and round again to where they started, John Griffiths was telling Mum what an excellent driver she was. ‘After all that driving,’ he said, ‘don’t we deserve a little dance in celebration?’ He twirled her round to face him, and the next minute they were waltzing. A minute after that, whether by the sort of signal that only dancers can detect or some welling-up of sensual syncopation, Mum’s feet were moving to a quicker tempo and her hips were launching into the distinctive jink of the cha-cha-cha.
I didn’t know where to look, so I looked at Dad. All this time he had been sitting in his chair, with the Telegraph open in front of him. Even after all my years of Dad-watching I didn’t know whether he really was scrutinising world affairs by reading the newspaper, or wearily cursing his witch of a mother-in-law for bringing this plump and waltzing madman into the house.
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