Confessions of a Driving Instructor. Timothy Lea
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could weep just thinking about it. What are they going to do without me? What am I going to do without them?
Added to that, there is the money.
“Are you positive?” I gulp.
“Absolutely. Of course, you don’t have to take my advice but you’d be a damn fool to get on a ladder again.”
So there I am, redundant at 22. Lots of blokes would envy me but there is a crazy streak of ambition in the Leas and I’m too patriotic to go on National Assistance—at least for a few years yet. What am I going to do?
Broken-hearted, I manage to get pissed and return to the family home. As I have already indicated relations with Dad have been strained since Sid’s departure and my accident has not drawn forth the sympathy one could expect from a father figure. I suspect that this may be due to some of the rumours that have been circulating. “Look Mother,” he sings out as I come through the door. “It’s the Birdman of Alcatraz!”
This is really witty for Dad and besides confirming my suspicions is an unkind allusion to a few months I once spent at reform school.
“Shutup, you miserable old git!” I say.
“Don’t raise your voice to me, sonny,” says Dad, “otherwise I’ll start asking you when you first began to clean windows in the all-together. Got a nudist camp on the rounds, I suppose?”
Dad and Doctor Murdoch would make a wonderful comedy team, and I’m wondering what Hughie Green’s telephone number is when Mum chips in.
“Do leave him alone, Dad, he’s told you enough times what happened.”
“Oh, yes, Mother. I know all that. He was stretched out on the roof, wasn’t he, having a little sunbathe. Then this bloke opens a window, dislodges the ladder. Timmy grabs at it, slips, loses his balance and does a swallow dive into the street. Sounds very likely, doesn’t it?”
“I really can’t be bothered—” I begin.
“I suppose that bird got a black eye when you landed on top of her?”
“I wonder what your excuse is going to be, Dad?”
“Don’t adopt that tone with me, Sonny Jim. I could still teach you a few lessons if it came to the pinch.”
“Well, prove it, or shut up.”
I mean it, too. Every few weeks or it is probably days now, Dad and I are squaring up to each other and sooner or later I am going to dot the stupid old bugger one. Nothing happens this time because mum throws a tantrum and sister Rosie arrives with little Jason.
“I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it,” Mum is wailing when little dribble jaws shoves his jam-stained mug round the door and her mood changes faster than a bloke finding that the large lump in the middle of his new cement path is his mother-in-law.
“Hello darling,” she coos. “Who’s come to see his Grand-mummy, then? Ooh, and what a nasty runny nose we’ve got. Doesn’t naughty mummy give you your lovely cod liver oil, then?”
Honestly, Rosie must feel like belting her sometimes. She still exists in a world of cod liver oil, cascara and milk of magnesia. Open your bowels and live might be her motto.
Mum and Rosie go rabbiting on and little Jason rubs his filthy fingers all over the moquette. Just like old times. I haven’t had a chance to tell anyone about my problem, and nobody would be interested, anyway.
“How are the lessons going, dear?” says Mum.
“Oh, smashing Mum. I’ve got this lovely fellah. Very refined, lovely even white teeth. I think they’re his own. You 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