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 the 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
