Confessions of a Driving Instructor
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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 me.
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.
“I had a letter from him afterwards saying that it had all come out and that they now knew I was innocent. I said ‘forget it’ in case they took me back in again. I remember at the time thinking that it was good of the old bugger to write to me.”
“What’s all this got to do with me?” I say, because Sid can go on a bit once he starts his army reminiscences.
“Well,” says Sid, “he owes me a favour; said as much in his letter. I reckon if I dropped him a line and reminded him, he might see you alright.”
“Where is this school?” I ask.
“I dunno. Place called Cromingham, I think. Somewhere in Norfolk.”
“Norfolk! Bloody heck. It’s not exactly round the corner, is it?”
“No, but I believe it’s very nice up there. Very good air, your Mum always used to say. She went up there for her honeymoon, didn’t she?”
“I don’t know where she went. Look, I don’t know if I want to go all that way. It’s flat as a pancake, isn’t it, and there’s nothing there but a load of swede-bashers. What am I going to do in the evenings?”
“What do you mean? It’s a seaside resort, isn’t it? The place will be crawling with birds. It’ll be like a permanent holiday.”
“But it’s November, Sid.”
“Well, all the local birds will be dying for a bit of spare, won’t they? I went to Rhyl in October once and all the local tarts who wouldn’t have looked at you in the holiday season were roaming the streets in packs.”
“I’d have thought they’d have been better off out of season because their blokes weren’t knocking off all the new birds.”
“It works both ways. By Christ, but you’re hard to please. You don’t just look a gift horse in the mouth, you kick its bleeding teeth down its throat.”
“You’ve got a vested interest in seeing me out of the way, Sid. You can’t blame me for being cautious.”
And so we go on until I agree that he should write to Cronk and lend me two quid, the latter negotiation being a bit more difficult to effect than the former. A week later a very official looking letter arrives with “The East Coast Driving School” tattooed all over it. It is from Walter Cronk, Managing Director and Chief Instructor, and informs me curtly that the writer has reason to believe that I wish to become a licensed instructor at the above-named establishment and would be grateful for my verification of this fact and a statement of my availability. I write back saying that my availability is immediate and receive what Mr. Cronk calls a movement order, stating that upon acceptance of my application for a licence to give instruction in the driving of a motor car, provision will be made for me to board with a Mrs. Bendon at 17 Ocean Approach, and will I inform her and the E.C.D.S. of my intended date and time of arrival. Mr. Cronk, or someone, has also thoughtfully enclosed a postcard of the Esplanade at Cromingham which looks not unlike the Esplanade of 132 other resorts, though achieving a certain distinction by the quality of the colour register which is such as to give the effect of a 3D film seen without glasses.
I make my arrangements quietly and secretly and can then achieve total surprise and discomfiture when I announce that I am pushing off. Mum can’t believe it and even Dad looks a trifle cast down. The night before I go he takes me out for a drink, which is totally unheard of, and hardly says anything the whole evening, which is likewise.
“Good luck, boy,” he says, squeezing my arm as we say goodnight. “I’ll miss you.” I think the miserable old sod really meant it.
The next morning I take my sandwiches which Mum has wrapped in grease-proof paper, refuse her tomatoes because I know they will get squashed, and stride off to Clapham South tube station.
It’s funny, but now that I’ve fixed everything, I don’t want to go.
CHAPTER THREE
I change trains at Norwich and up till then the landscape has been flatter than a witch’s tit. After that it is flatter. Ploughed fields stretch away to the horizon and there are occasional lines of straggling trees pinning down the hedgerows. Farm buildings glint from behind the trees but they seem outnumbered by church towers. There must be one for every man, woman and child in Norfolk. Above all looms the sky, totally dominating the earth, the clouds sweeping in like waves on a vast and deserted beach.
The effect on me is depressing. Without a few houses around I feel as exposed as a spare prick at a whore’s wedding and there is something about the increasingly bare landscape and slow unhurried progress of the train that makes me feel I am coming to the edge of the world. Now the fields give way to marshes, pock-marked by brackish pools, and the trees disappear. Soon, I think to myself, the marsh will disappear and we will continue over, into and under the sea without anyone making a move to save himself. We are on the train of the doomed! (It just shows what watching all those late-night horror movies can do to your imagination.) I had hoped that the trip would be enlivened by the presence of a nymphomaniac lady of quality going up to visit her titled husband who had been paralysed from the waist down in a car accident. Unfortunately, once again we seem to have got on different trains and I am forced to blunt my imagination on hordes of yacking schoolgirls who invade the train as it approaches Cromingham. If not desirable, they are at least reassuringly not of the spirit world.
“So I says to ’im, git you your ‘ands off my knicks,” says one of them enthusiastically to a friend in an accent I can hardly understand. With them chattering like starlings and increasing evidence that man has contributed to the landscape, I begin to cheer up and look out hopefully towards the sea. I have been a few times with Mum—day trips to Brighton, Eastbourne and Hastings when I was a kid—and I remember the kick I used to get when I suddenly realised that the great blue line running along the horizon was the sea. Unfortunately, today it is a great grey line and what I see through a sudden dip in the landscape is barely distinguishable from the sky. I know Cromingham is next because British Railways have thoughtfully provided a map to which someone has added a piece of chewing gum and the word ‘dump’ next to my destination; no doubt one of my fellow-travellers who is now confiding to a local friend that one Clint Seago, fortunate owner of a Honda motor bike, “be a bit of all right”.
The marsh gives way to dry land again, thus ending my last fears, and buildings begin to appear beside the track as the brakes slam on. I notice that the trees cower away from the sea and their topmost branches are twisted in on themselves like the arms of a beaten boxer trying to protect himself from a hail of blows. When I flick the sandwich crumbs off my lap and struggle out onto the platform I can see why. The wind has an edge on it like a razor and must have been gathering speed ever since it left Norway. I can understand why all the locals scuttle off at an angle of 45º to the vertical. Also why their skins are tanned a kind of golden brown not far short of mahogany. You don’t have to breathe here. Just open your mouth and let the wind rush through every hole in your body.
When I get to the station entrance it is in time to see what I imagine is the only taxi in East Anglia disappearing inland and the last schoolgirl paddling away down the hill towards the town. An inquiry about buses is met with the same puzzled amazement that might have greeted a request for a camel.
I eventually manage to ring for another taxi and settle down to wait, looking over the rows of flint-studded cottages to where clumps of caravans sprout along the cliffs like toadstools. Very few of them seem to be occupied and I’m not surprised. You could freeze to death up there if this weather is anything to go by.
All in all, speaking my mind, and not mincing my words, the place has about as much appeal as an old age pensioners’ nudist camp and I’m seriously considering catching the next train home when my taxi arrives. The driver takes one look at my Hardy Amies original and has me summed up immediately.
“You want the camp?” he says.
“Holiday or army?”
“You can have either.”
“I don’t want either, thanks.”
“Python’s, then?”
“Pythons?” I query, my mind boggling.
“Python’s Pesticides. Look, what do you want?”
He seems irritated, as if there are only three reasons for coming to Cromingham in November and he has mentioned all of them.
“15 Ocean Approach, please.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Bendon, isn’t it? You a relation of hers?”
“No. I’m going to lodge with her.”
“Oh, I didn’t think you looked like family. From London, are you?”
“Yes.”
“We don’t get many folk down from London at this time of year.”
“Maybe they don’t like getting the third degree from complete strangers.”
If this ruffles him he doesn’t show it.
“What are you here for?” he says, letting out the hand-brake slowly.
“I’m joining the driving school.”
“You’ve come all this way to learn to drive?”
“Yes. Princess Margaret told me it was the best in the world.”
His expression doesn’t change and he nods his head.
“Which one?”
“The Queen’s sister, of course; which one do you think?”
“I mean which driving school?”
This is a surprise because I hadn’t thought of there being more than one.
“The East Coast Driving School.”
“Oh yes.” He nods his head again and suddenly lapses into silence.
“How many driving schools are there here?” I ask eventually, unable to restrain my curiosity.
“Just the two. The East Coast and the Major.”
“Which one do you reckon is the best?”
“I dunno,” he says, his expression not changing by the flicker of a muscle. “You’d better ask Princess Margaret.”
We are driving along the front now and below me the sea stretches away like cold porridge, only less enticing. The beach has a generous helping of shingle and is divided into sections by an orderly procession of breakwaters disappearing into infinity as if the effect has been achieved with mirrors. I can see one lunatic sitting against a concrete ramp with a thermos flask in his hands, otherwise the beach is as empty as the collection plate at a Jewish wedding. Quite where all the birds that Sid was talking about are I don’t know, but maybe word hasn’t got around that I’m in town yet. We pass a few shelters built in the style of Japanese prefabs and turn off beyond a row of seedy hotels with names that promise rather more than they look likely to deliver. 15 Ocean Approach is one of a row of what must once have been fishermen’s cottages and has a fading ‘Bed and Breakfast’ sign in the parlour window.
‘You’ll be all right there,” says the driver with meaning as he watches me struggle out with my case. “She’ll look after you.”
I pay him and advance towards the front door, which opens as I reach out for the knocker. When I see what I presume to be Mrs. Bendon, I can understand what the driver was getting at. She must be knocking forty and she has a nice pair of knockers to do it with. Her hair has been freshly permed, possibly for my benefit, and she pats it genteelly as she extends a hand.
“Mr. Lea? I thought so. Do come in. Can you manage? Good. Don’t bother about that. I’ll pick it up later. It is cramped in here, isn’t it? Put your case down there. I’ve got the kettle on. Would you like a cup of tea—or coffee, perhaps? Are you sure? It doesn’t make any difference to me. Really it doesn’t. Give me time and I’ll find out all your little likes and dislikes. Did you have a good journey? It’s a drag from London, isn’t it? That change at Norwich and all those stops afterwards. Of course, Norwich is quite a pleasant city. I go and shop there sometimes. Not like London, though. I was born and bred in London, you know. Within the sound of Bow Bells, though I bet you can’t tell it from my accent. Still, I mustn’t ramble on like this. You must be dying for that cup of tea—or was it coffee? It really doesn’t matter, you know. It’s no trouble. You just say what you’d like. I’ll soon get to know all your little likes and dislikes.”
I can’t get a word in, so I take a cup of tea and sit in the front room, listening to her rabbiting on while I look at the horse brasses and the frilly lampshades and the lace headrests and the painting of three horses running into the rising sun, and her legs. Mostly it’s her legs, which are not at all bad for a woman of her age and have a delicious little swelling rising from her thigh which suggest that she is wearing suspenders. Suspenders! The very thought of it sends new life surging through my jockey briefs. Her complexion is good and though she is a trifle on the plump side it suits her. Her teeth are a bit crooked but this must mean that they are her own and I rate that. I’ve never fancied birds who start dismantling themselves at bedtime. The one big disadvantage I can see at the moment is her non-stop rabbiting, which could well get on my nerves over the next few months, or weeks, or days, or hours.
“… so I married him,” she goes on. “There I was with the world at my feet. A pretty girl—though I say it myself—with a good many beaux to my string, and I marry a penniless fisherman after I’ve known him a week. Foolish, romantic chit of a girl that I was.”
I nod understandingly.
“Not that I had anything to complain about—Ted was a wonderfully kind man. He didn’t say much but you always knew he meant well. Never denied me anything that we could afford. But he wasn’t a thinker. We never talked about things. Do you know what I mean?”
I know all right. The poor bastard couldn’t have got a word in edgeways even if he knew any.
“I’d fallen in love with a dream, you see. When he came in on the boat all bronzed and handsome he used to look like some Viking god. He’d leap over the side and thrust the boat up the beach,” Mrs. Bendon bristles at the thought of it, “and his waders would be slapping together, and the fish dancing and the crabs scuttling.” She licks her lips quickly. “I was so proud of him, I wanted to turn to people and say ‘He’s mine.’” Mrs. Bendon’s voice sinks down below the ecstatic level. “But when we were at home he’d just sit staring at the television or go to bed. I never saw him even look at a newspaper. He was a different man. Of course he wasn’t really. He was the same man but it was just the way I looked at him. Do you know what I mean?”
I nod gamely. Of course I do. She wanted a mixture of Oliver Reed and David Dimbleby. Don’t they all?
“Still, that’s enough of me, going on like this. You’ve only been here half an hour and I’m telling you my life story. Must be very boring for you. You’re probably dying to see your room and get unpacked. Would you like a bath after your journey? The trains these days are so dirty, aren’t they? I don’t think anybody ever cleans them. You’d think those diesel things would be cleaner than the old steam ones, but they aren’t.”
My bedroom is at the back of the house and looking obliquely left over a series of tiny back gardens. I can see a chunk of sea between the gap thoughtfully bequeathed by two boarding houses. In the middle of it nestles a small boat and I think of Mr. Bendon. Mrs. B. has not yet told me what happened to him and it’s a bit early to ask. Maybe he was drowned or maybe he couldn’t stand the sound of her voice any more and kept his boat pointed out to sea.
It is cold so I close the window and switch on the electric fire thoughtfully provided. Five minutes later I realise that nothing has happened and notice a small meter which exchanges warmth for 5p pieces. Mrs. B. is not Nelson Rockefeller in drag. I unpack, wash from the rose-patterned china jug and bowl set—idly wondering whether I’m supposed to throw the dirty water out of the window—and lay down on the bed. I’ve almost dozed off when there is a light tap on the door and Mrs. B. tells me that supper will be ready in half an hour and that I can watch the television if I want to.
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