Mr Griffiths ended up by saying that Mum should do for me exactly what he had just done for her. Dad gave a little cough which probably meant, ‘Apart from the ballroom dancing, I expect.’ Dad’s coughs were Service coughs, messages sent in a dry RAF code far more mysterious than Morse, one that I could never quite tune into. He’d been working for BOAC for a number of years by this time, and still the last word you would ever apply to him would be civilian.
John Griffiths formally declared that my physical difficulties were compatible with driving a car, and endorsed my choice of a Mini. It would have to be an automatic model, and somewhat modified, which would be attended to by the BSM nerve centre in London, and then John Griffiths would be returning to give the second lesson. The first practical one. The first real one.
The wounds known to mapmakers
All in all it was a very promising start to my motoring life, though driving lessons seemed to be little different from dancing lessons, and I wasn’t an obvious candidate for those. Before John Griffiths left he produced a book called Your Car: Its Care and Maintenance. It was published by the BSM and written by John Griffiths, none other. In the front he wrote, in a large and confident script, ‘For John – and all the Tomorrows on the Road of Life, from John Griffiths’, signed with a great flourishing swash of an autograph. I took a quick look inside the book. There were diagrams of all the parts of the engine, with instructions for taking them to bits and putting them back together again. I told him I’d have a hard job managing that, but he said never mind. ‘If you know what goes where, in an emergency you can always tell other people what to do.’
I have to say my heart sank at that. I’d heard it before. At Vulcan I did a First Aid certificate, and the chap from the St John Ambulance had taken very much the same line. Man dying by the roadside? Corrosive poison? Train crash? Nothing to it! Just so long as you know what to get passers-by to do! I seemed to be a sort of human pamphlet or tape recorder, an elaborate device to store information, on the off-chance that I coincided, at the scene of an earthquake or the escape of deadly fumes, with able-bodied folk who had failed to acquire the proper skills.
Still, John Griffiths had given me his blessing. A fresh breeze had passed through a house that could be stuffy in all weathers. Though perhaps it was only Granny, beyond the horizon, riffling through the pages of her mighty cheque book.
The household had been benignly shaken up by John Griffiths’ visit. Mum had a bit of colour in her cheeks for once. It wasn’t that she found him attractive, exactly. He was rather roly-poly, for all his animation, not most women’s cup of tea. But it isn’t every day that a woman in her middle years (Mum had been in her forties for a year or two) is chauffeured bodily round her home, under her husband’s very eyes, by a man who knows how to cha-cha. The British School of Motoring seemed to have merged, on the sly, with Arthur Murray, who would teach you to dance In A Hurry.
John Griffiths had left a sort of glow with me too. I didn’t spend much time looking over the car maintenance guide he had left, but I was fascinated by the design of the BSM leaflet that went with it.
Someone had been given the task of representing the British School of Motoring in visual terms. The result was charming. There was a collage of photographs showing drivers under instruction, and there was an oval space in the middle where a map of Britain had been reproduced. Additional lines had been added to the map, to turn it into a sort of cartoon of a man driving. Britain’s bottom was London and Kent – the whole south-east region. His leg and foot was formed by the Cornish Peninsula, whose pronged bit had always reminded me of a two-toed sloth. Anglesey provided the shape of his little hands at the end of reassuringly short arms, and the gear lever was in south-west Wales. Britain’s head was northern Scotland – and a very bumpy head it was too. It looked as if someone had taken an axe to the back of the driver’s head, striking three separate blows to open the wounds known to mapmakers as the Dornoch, Cromarty and Moray Firths. And still he drove merrily on, despite being so hacked about.
I don’t think, now, that there was any intended connection between the BSM’s drive to get disabled people on the road and the way its design department had rendered the map for advertising purposes. As an impatient student of the John Griffiths method, though, I didn’t doubt it. I saw what I wanted to see, just as everyone else does, and what I saw was a cheerfully non-standard body.
For a few moments here and there, I have been proud to be British. It adds up to perhaps half an hour in total. I have some sort of sporadic identification with the look of these islands on a map. It was the design of the BSM leaflet which dug the foundations of this feeling, by alerting me to the fact that the map of the United Kingdom, if you look at it with an open mind, does look so very disabled. If I was any kind of nationalist, I’d claim that as my country. That’s where I’m from.
Silence that tingled with icicles
I had fallen in love with John Griffiths and his ideas of bringing the road into the house, and even into my bed at night. I couldn’t wait for the car to be delivered. The visit to the dealership in Slough had been straightforward, if anticlimactic. I said I was interested in a Mini with automatic transmission and was shown a red one. ‘What colours does it come in?’ I asked. ‘Red,’ I was told. I wondered why. ‘It has to be like that one, does it?’ Yes it did. More than that. It had to be that one. This was the one it was going to be.
After that, all I had to do was to trip the mechanism that released the flood of money, by telephoning Granny. While we were waiting for the cheque to clear, Mum and I tried to practise driving around the house once or twice, according to the Griffiths method, but we felt rather self-conscious about it. Our hearts weren’t in it. It took two to tango, and not these two. I would get a proper dose of the Griffiths method at our first lesson, which was arranged for the Monday after the arrival of the car.
On the Friday morning before the scheduled lesson the British School of Motoring rang, to say they were sorry to inform us that Mr John Griffiths had had a heart attack and died. Could we give them a few days to make fresh arrangements for me?
John’s death hit me surprisingly hard, considering I only met him the once. He was the only person I had come across to date who saw teaching me as a piece of fun rather than a solemn duty. The road was for everyone – he excluded no one from the festival. And hadn’t he danced his last dance with Mum? Unless he gave his wife a twirl every time he came in the front door, which admittedly seemed quite likely.
I thought I had better phone Granny at once to tell her about the setback in our plans. Harshly her voice intoned, ‘Halnaker 226. Good morning.’ A formal politeness that would deter even the most presumptuous of tradesmen. She pronounced the exchange name in the local way, as Hannukah, like the Jewish festival.
I put as much drama and emotion as I could muster into my voice. All that came down the line from Tangmere was silence – a silence that tingled with icicles. Finally, standing in her hallway where the phone was, Granny formed syllables. She sent them as electrical impulses down the wire. The heavy receiver at my ear in Bourne End reassembled those little pulsing packages as ‘How … very … inconvenient!’ At that moment I disliked Granny intensely and redoubled my grieving over poor John Griffiths.
I asked God to make sure that John Griffiths had plenty of roads and plenty of cars with unlimited fuel in Heaven, and above all an endless supply of hopelessly disabled pupils, who would benefit from the chance of becoming expert drivers under his care. I felt sad that no one else in my disabled country was marking the passing of this hero, whose heart was so big that in the end it choked him.
The red Mini, with the number plate OHM 962F, arrived in May, on the 11th. It was Peter’s birthday, but he was unresentful of any eclipse suffered by his special day. He thrilled along to my thrill. Dad pushed the driving seat as far forward as it would go. Then he fetched cushions. Since the roads on the Abbotsbrook Estate were technically private, I was able to drive a few fe
et that first day. When the engine stalled I felt relief. I was afraid my heart too would burst from sheer joy, and I would go the way of my master in driving. Death I didn’t mind, but I wanted the bits of paper in the proper order – driving licence first. Death certificate later.
After that, of course, it was hard slog. Mirror-Signal-Mirror-Manœuvre: M-S-M-M. What it spells is neck-ache.
The substitute John Griffiths found for me by the BSM was called Colin Chivers. He was no substitute in any real sense. Obviously I was looking for an excuse to take against him from the first, out of loyalty to that dancing-master of the road (not that I ever so much as sat in a car with him), John Griffiths. I didn’t have to wait long to be estranged. It wasn’t the length of his hair which bothered me, falling onto the collar of his shirt, nor the shirt itself, which had a floral pattern, though both were noted by Mum with muted alarm. It was when I was installed in the car, with the seat in the most forward position possible, the concertina of cushions behind my back, my built-up shoes on terms of distant acquaintance with the pedals, and Colin Chivers said, ‘I realise that you have certain physical difficulties, but I’m going to treat you just the same way as everyone else.’ Oh really? What a hypocrite. No one else got that little speech, did they? He was already treating me differently, in the very act of announcing the opposite.
I grant him his good points. When he saw the difficulty I had actually gripping the steering wheel, he arranged for a sensible alteration to the controls of the car. He installed a dolly, a sort of twirly knob for me to grip clamped to the steering wheel, which spared me the struggle of undertaking vigorous arm movements in a plane that was hostile to them.
After that bit of modification, Colin didn’t have a lot to teach me of what I wanted, which was confidence rather than mere technique. His attitude was consistenly downbeat rather than inspirational. One of the first things he said was, ‘I never forget that we are putting you in charge of a deadly weapon – I suggest you never forget it either.’ Another time he said, ‘That’s amazing! Take a look at the cow in that field,’ and then gave me a good old scolding when I did. I had taken my eyes off the road, in obedience to Granny’s advice (never pass up an opportunity to inspect your surroundings – the major cause of driving accidents is boredom) but in violation of the Highway Code. I would have to wait until I was a qualified driver before I could risk enjoying ‘the privilege of the view’.
When Granny’s cheque ran out (its depletion helped along by the bill for the dolly) I assented cheerfully enough to Dad’s suggestion that he should take over teaching duties. I wasn’t going to re-apply to the fountainhead of cash, even though I was authorised to do so. Granny was still in my bad books for her coldness and I was sending her at least partway to Coventry (to Bicester or even Banbury) – not that she was likely to notice. Dad had reasons of his own for not wanting to deal with the tyrant of Tangmere.
Meanwhile the Wrigley was sold. The cheque was sent to Granny, perhaps with a cubic millimetre of self-righteousness sharing the envelope with it, though it made sense for her to absorb the proceeds since she had funded it in the first place. There was no point in having two motorised vehicles at my disposal. Enough is enough.
Finally my test date arrived. August the 8th, 1968. Red car, red-letter day. My examiner was a woman who made no eye-contact with me at any point, which certainly made it easier for me to read the name on her clipboard unobtrusively – Cynthia Davies. She looked the way I would have imagined librarians to look – distant, disapproving – if I had never known Mrs [Sophia] Pavey. I had discovered Mrs Pavey’s first name, which I loved, but I wouldn’t have used it in a million years. I didn’t say it, but I mentally supplied it in square brackets.
I’d not met a Cynthia before, and if she had seemed willing to talk, inside the tiny car, I would have asked about that lovely moony name. Turning a blind eye may have been all part of her professional technique, but it was very disconcerting just the same. She was so remote in her manner that I took it for granted that she was going to fail me. My three-point turn seemed to take for ever. The seasons changed while I was wrestling that manœuvre into submission. There was marked precession of the equinoxes.
Later on in the test, while I was doing some straightforward if despondent driving, I heard an odd sound, like a slow puncture. I wondered if a tyre was going flat, and what would happen if it did, in the middle of my driving test. Would the whole farrago be cancelled, so that I had to wait for another appointment, or would I end up reciting instructions from John Griffiths’ book on car maintenance while Cynthia got busy with the jack, or hung back conscientiously to let me solicit passers-by?
Cub Scout access to the road
Of course it wasn’t a puncture at all. The sound resolved into an articulate hiss: ‘sssssSSSTOP!’ Cynthia Davies was telling me to make an emergency stop – to stop without warning – by giving me plenty of warning. A Galapagos tortoise would have given less notice of a pounce. Space probes have been launched with a shorter countdown. Even so my reactions were slow and my braking was spongy. I resigned myself to more lessons in suffering from Dad. The harvest called a driving licence would require more of the rain called tears. I couldn’t even claim that I had been discriminated against. Cynthia had been more than fair, she had leant over backwards, and still I had fallen short of the required standard.
She still didn’t look at me at the end of the test, and when she said, ‘Congratulations, Mr Cromer’ and told me that I’d passed, it was in a very neutral tone. I didn’t feel any immediate triumph. She kept her eyes to herself as she passed across my pink slip. There was still no acknowledgement that she’d seen me in the first place. But then she came round to my side of the car, opened the door and shook my hand very gently, as gently as if I was royalty, and there seemed to be a smile hidden in her face somewhere, near her ears perhaps. Then I made contact at last with my own latent elation.
Mum wasn’t so sure. She wasn’t convinced that a female driving instructor’s pass was valid in law. At best it must amount to a junior entitlement, a Cub Scout access to the road.
Perhaps Cynthia’s failure to fail me was based on the assumption that I would make a sensible, cautious sort of driver, who would never get into the sort of trouble from which an emergency stop is the only exit. If that was her thinking, she was far off the mark – tragically deluded. The taste for speed that had been piqued by my racing Wrigley, after the NHS-approved plod of the Everest & Jennings, could now be indulged to the limit and beyond. The weeks on the road between passing my driving test and the start of the new term were a carnival of velocity for me. I may not have broken the 70-mile-an-hour national limit, but I didn’t need to take things to that extreme to run risks on the roads, many of them steep or winding (or both) around Bourne End.
It was bliss to be able to explore my environment. There was a choice of roads for me to take as I turned out of the Abbotsbrook Estate. Turning left I would come to Marlow (and the Compleat Angler) and High Wycombe, while turning right would bring me to CRX, Burnham, Maidenhead and eventually London. The left turn seemed naturally boring, the right turn inherently exciting. One factor which may have contributed to this was the uneven flexibility of my arms, which made left turns relatively easy and right ones much more difficult. I gather there’s something similar in Proust – the A4155 was my Swann’s Way. The other direction, the Guermantes Way leading on to the wider world and its temptations, was the A4094.
One day early in my driving career I made to turn right and handled the turn (if I may say so) beautifully. Unfortunately as I did so the dolly somehow snagged itself inside my shirt. Miss Pearce the dressmaker’s dummy at Trees made a contribution to this little crisis – the shirts that Mum made me were now closely tailored, and the dolly snagged between two buttons, effectively gluing my chest to the steering wheel in its full right lock. The result was that after I had reached my desired destination, on the far left side of the road to Maidenhead, the car went on turning,
still with full right lock, so that it ended up going round and round, as if I was dithering between Maidenhead and Marlow, Guermantes and Swann, while vehicles bore down on me at speed from both sides, sounding their horns and slamming on their brakes.
I managed to tug myself free, to the detriment of the shirt, and stopped safely facing Maidenhead. It had been a bad moment, though once I had got my breath back I found it oddly thrilling to have been on the receiving end of such a fusillade of horn blasts. A twenty-one-horn salute. Only something tremendous in its iniquity would be tooted so royally, at a time when most drivers didn’t lay their hands on the horn from one year’s end to the next. Mum and Dad, certainly, regarded the use of the horn as inherently foreign.
I felt I had been blooded, initiated into the rough fellowship of the road, far more truly than by any mere licence. I also had a wonderful new secret to keep from Mum. If she had known about my shirt-sleeve snagging on the dolly, her worrying would really have gone into overdrive.
It was a lovely drive from Bourne End to CRX at Taplow. Because the hospital was at the top of a hill, the road up to it was very twisty and dangerous. It was all as steep and scary as Edie-was-a-Lady Lane, full of witchy presence to Peter and me as children. It took real skill to negotiate those bends, and I had done a fair amount of practice there before I took my test.
When I was a qualified driver I loved driving alone up the steep gradient to Hedsor Hill. Perhaps part of the thrill was being so free, so much my own master, bowling along in a red Mini so near to the hospital where my life had been so confined. I should probably have been practising the Satipatthana Sutta, breathing in and out in full consciousness, but my promiscuous mystical reading had given me the idea of identifying with the Creator, on the theory that ‘as I think, so shall it become’. Aleister Crowley has a lot to answer for. I was reckless, confident that my luck was a blank cheque which could never bounce.
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