Confessions of a Driving Instructor. Timothy Lea
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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.
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