by Timothy Lea
We are looking at the front page of the East Coast Echo which carries a picture of me silhouetted against the half-submerged Morris under the caption “New driving instructor loses his way on the first day.” The E.C.D.S. sign is clearly recognisable in the photograph and the school is mentioned again in the jokey story below.
I am double choked because I have skipped one of Mrs. B.’s excellent breakfasts in order to be at the garage since eight o’clock—holding my breath while they give the Morris the once over and picking pieces of duckweed off the chassis. To my relief, there is nothing seriously wrong with it apart from a broken headlight and a few more bends on the front bumper, and once I have had the headlight fixed and wiped over the bodywork with a damp cloth it would take a keen eye to notice that anything has happened. With a bit of luck, Cronk need never know, and I can settle up with the bleeder in the Viva later. I have a faint fear that the police will suddenly start getting interested but—
All ‘buts’ are swept aside by the poxy little shit from the Echo. Now I have no more chance of keeping my little mishap dark than Raquel Welch has of being mistaken for Twiggy.
As if to confirm my view, Cronk comes in looking as if he is about to announce the outbreak of World War III.
“Into my office, lad,” he snarls without looking at me and marches on ahead so that the papers on Dawn’s desk skip and dance in his slipstream.
“Ooh, you’re for it,” squeals Petal, obviously relishing the thought. “He’s in one of his real paddys. He can be a tartar when he likes, can’t he, Dawn?”
Dawn nods and it may be my imagination, but I think I can see a trace of sympathy wrinkling her make-up.
“Just tell him what happened,” she says. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Too true, dear,” says Petal. “Those bastards have tried it on with me before now. This place is getting like Chicago. I remember one day down by the pier—”
I leave him rambling on and go into Cronk’s office wondering what time the next train leaves town. Cronk wheels round on me.
“Right,” he says. “I’ve heard it from Mr. Padgett and I’ve read it in the papers. Now, what’s your version?”
“P-Padgett?” I stutter.
“He runs the Clifftop Garage. Rang me up at home this morning.”
Bloody marvellous, isn’t it? The Russians have nothing on this lot, I can tell you.
“I wanted to make sure there wasn’t any serious damage,” I whine.
“Very considerate of you. Now, tell me about the accident.”
So I tell him that it wasn’t an accident and that this crinkly-haired bugger in a Major Driving School Viva has tried to force me under an oncoming car and the expression on his face does not change by one twitch of a muscle.
“Did either of the other cars stop?” he says.
“No.”
“Did you get their numbers?”
“No.”
“Were there any witnesses?”
“I didn’t see any.”
“So the fellow in the Viva could say that you were trying to overtake him and misjudged the distance?”
“Yes, I suppose he could, but it would be—”
“Shut up! Did you have anything to drink when you were out with Cripps?”
“A few halves. Surely you don’t think I was—”
“Shut up! I won’t tell you again. You were bloody lucky the police didn’t breathalyse you. They’re getting very hot on it round here.”
“I wasn’t drunk!”
“I know, I know. But don’t you see what I’m getting at? It’s your word against the fellow in the Viva and, if I suspect rightly, that’s Tony Sharp and he’s a darn sight better known that you are—and that counts for something around here, I can tell you. Even if you could find the chap in the other car, he probably didn’t see anything conclusive. Face up to it, lad. You haven’t got a leg to stand on.”
“You know the bloke that did me?”
“I think I do. Look, lad; let me explain. I served in the army under a man called Major Minto. We didn’t get on well then and we get on a bloody sight worse now. The problem is that he runs the Major School of Motoring, so the situation has to be watched very carefully. He’s on the council and has quite a few friends around here—that little creep from the Echo was probably one of them. If we put a foot wrong we’re in trouble, but they can ride us and get away with it. I’ve said the man you describe as running you off the road was probably Tony Sharp, their chief instructor. He’s a cocky sod and it isn’t the first time he’s tried something like this.”
“So what are we going to do about it?” I shout, showing him that the red blood runs thick in my veins.
“You aren’t going to do anything, lad. You concentrate on your instruction and leave Minto and his lot to me.”
His tone suggests I don’t argue with him, so I stand there humbly like I used to do in front of my old schoolmaster.
“Right, off you go,” he says. “I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt this time, but watch it! Miss Boswell will tell you who you’re with today.” I turn for the door. “Oh, by the way,” he adds, “what did you do about paying for the damage to the Morris?”
“I told them to send me the bill.”
“Well, we’ll get the insurance to cover it this time. I’ll tell the garage.”
“Oh, thanks a lot.”
“One more thing.” He ignores my grovelling and drops his voice confidentially. “You probably noticed that when you were out with Cripps that he fancies his tipple. It’s not a good habit to get into and I don’t recommend you to try to keep pace with him. He’s had a lot of practice, if you know what I mean.”
I nod wisely.
“Keep an eye open for him, because he’s a good bloke really, and he may need your help one day.”
“You were in the army with him, weren’t you?” I say casually to draw him out.
“That’s right,” says Cronk firmly and finally. “Now, you’d better be getting on with the job.”
I soon find that army service with Cronk is a common bond between all the instructors. Even Petal, who hardly comes over as an advertisement for the Royal Marines, was a cook and occasionally makes wistful references to it. “Totally untrue what they say about the army food, duckie. Considering the conditions I was working under, I was performing bloody great miracles every day. Nobody ever grumbled about my food.”
“Few of them lived to.”
Interjections like this usually come from John ‘Garth’ Williams, who stands about six foot four on other people’s stockinged feet and needs a shoe horn to get into his Triumph Herald. He is the clumsiest man I have ever met and is always apologising for knocking things or people over, and running his fingers through his tousled hair in gestures of helpless self-exasperation. Despite that, he is a handsome bloke in a craggy, beefy way that went out of fashion the day they opened the first male boutique, and I can imagine women fancying him.
I am glad to see him, because I don’t reckon that either Petal or Cripps go much on birds and it’s nice to have someone to compare notes with occasionally. Now that I’ve got through my first day and am beginning to feel the lay of the land, my normal appetites are returning and a bit of nooky seems just what the doctor ordered. I look at Dawn and she crosses her legs and looks straight back at me.
“What have you got lined up for me today?” I say, “or can I choose?”
“You can do what you like,” she says wittily, “but you’ll be going out with Lester and a few of the old faithfuls this morning. In the afternoon you’re solo with Miss Frankcom.”
Miss Frankcom. The very name reeks of sex. I can see already, five foot eight and a half inches of insatiable nymphomaniac. Hardly outside the 30 m.p.h. limit and she’s abandoned all pretence of handling the gear stick and is rampaging across the front of my cords. “Miss Frankcom, please! Miss Frankcom, you mustn’t! Not here. Oh, no, oh!!!!” I can hardly wait.
Poor Dawn, if only she’d
moved a bit faster, she might have been in with a chance.
“What’s Miss Frankcom like?” I ask Garth. Garth reflects for a moment. “Mature,” he says. He winks at me and I reckon I must be on a good thing.
The thought of what is to come keeps me going through a very dreary morning. Lester Hewett is the fourth member of the instructors’ pool and is a silent, spotty youth I imagine to be about the same age as myself, though without any of my physical magnetism. There are white sweat patches under the armpits of his sports jacket and nobody would even think of asking him to do a Colgate commercial.
Not surprisingly, his pupils seem to have been selected on the basis that if Lester pongs a bit they will never notice and it is not just for the hand signals that I keep the windows well down. Lester sniffs in the back and occasionally whispers unhelpful comments into my left ear, thus undermining my authority and alarming some of the pupils, who I can see suspect him of being a potential hi-jacker: “O.K. Start driving towards Cuba.”
In the course of the morning I get lumbered with three real draggies. Firstly, a middle-aged schoolmaster type who grips the wheel with such feverish concentration that I expect to see additional mouldings on the plalstic when he releases it and yelps “Oh, my God!” at moments of tension—which occur pretty regularly. He has considerable difficulty judging the space into which the Morris will fit and steers down the middle of Cromingham High Street as if transporting a load of nitro-glycerine across a bumper car track. Faced by an approaching vehicle, his first impulse is to stop and wave the madcap oncomer to the side of the road.
No sooner has he staggered away shaking his head than I am stuck with the colonel’s lady, who calls me ‘young man’ only because she suspects I would not understand the Hindu for ‘hey you’: “Young man, I have arthritis and it is impossible for me to hang my arm out of the window”; “Young man, the gear lever does not appear to be working properly”; “Young man, my seat belt is cutting into my shoulder.” She is dead ruthless and I would not fancy my first pupil’s chance if he met her coming the wrong way up a one-way street. She is also incapable of accepting anything as being her fault. “Wretched car!” she hisses every time she mangles the gears. “Witless ingrate,” she levels at some old age pensioner taking his life in his hands by stepping on to a zebra crossing thirty yards ahead. All in all, she is pretty exhausting company, but I can see how we got our Empire.
My third pupil is the enormously pregnant Mrs. Owen, who can hardly get behind the steering wheel and rabbits on continuously about how she is having lessons to take her mind off the baby. It may take her mind off it, but every time she leans forward I expect the little bleeder to come popping out under pressure. She keeps making jokes about how it might be safer if we practised three point turns outside the Maternity Hospital and that doesn’t do much for my state of mind, either. I am well pleased when it is time for dinner.
Lester offers me one of his crust-free salad spread sandwiches but I refuse with ease and leave him slopping his hot Bovril into the plastic top of his thermos flask. By my standards it has been a successful if fairly tedious morning and I want to compose myself for going ‘solo’. I have tried hard not to think about Miss Frankcom in the belief that things thought about never come up to expectations but this has proved impossible, so I now think about her continuously in the hope that this double bluff will fool fate into making her everything I want her to be. I sit in one of the shelters on the front and marvel at the amazing softness of her skin, the exquisite whiteness of her teeth seen through lips half-parted by the outward symtoms of acute ecstasy, the fawn-like gentleness of her exploring fingers …
It is therefore something of a surprise at two o’clock to find that Miss Frankcom is about seventy-five and nutty as a fruit cake. To think of her in relation to sexual intercourse seems as crazy as entering Charlie Drake for the Olympic high jump.
“Thirteen times she’s taken her test,” says Garth, “and on one occasion the examiner was crying at the end of it.”
“You bugger!” I hiss at him as we watch her innocently studying the Highway Code as if she had never seen one before. “You never told me she was like that.”
“I said ‘mature’,” says Garth innocently. “You can’t argue with that.”
“‘Mature!’ By the cringe, she’s obsolete. There must have been a bloke with a red flag in front of the car when she first took the test.”
“Look on it as a challenge,” says Garth, trying to sound reassuring. “If you can handle her, you can handle anything. You’ve got to watch her all the time, because she can do some very funny things. I remember when she drove straight into the fire station—luckily there weren’t any fire engines there at the time.”
“Why the hell do we take people like that?”
“Use your common. Miss Frankcom must have poured thousands into this place through the years. There’d be no future in the business if everybody passed their test after three lessons. You need the right balance between people who whip through fast and act as a good advertisement, and all those poor sods that Crippsy and Lester take who pay the bills.”
“Crippsy and Lester and me,” I say bitterly as I see Dawn giving me her ‘You’re on’ nod.
“Just at the beginning,” says Garth cheerfully. “It’s all good practice.”
I say something unprintable to him and am introduced to Miss Frankcom, who feels certain she has seen me before but can’t place me. She has a deep booming voice and a body like a dust sheet over a grand piano, and she is eager to go.
“Now we’ve number thirteen out of the way, I’m certain I’m going to pass. I never felt happy coming up to thirteen. Fourteen seems a much happier number, don’t you think?”
She nearly proves herself wrong by driving into the back of a bus with that number plastered across it, but I just get my foot down in time.
One thing I have to give Miss Frankcom—she does not let little things like that put her out of her stride.
“Whoops! That’s how I failed number ten,” she says cheerfully. “Can we practise emergency stops today?”
I can see little chance of us doing anything else, but I concentrate on getting her out of town and along the coast road. It is amazing that a woman who has had so many lessons can still mistake her clutch for her brake pedal and our progress is one of fits and starts—most of the fits being thrown by me.
“I think having a new instructor is making me nervous,” she confides as I nearly go through the windscreen for the tenth time. “I’m trying so hard to impress you I’m becoming tense.”
I know the feeling and eventually come across an entrance to a disused airfield where we can practise reversing with comparative safety, though even then she nearly has the car over me when I step out to arrange a few bricks.
“Dangerous to bend down,” she sings out cheerfully. “I nearly didn’t see you.”
In no time at all she has reduced the bricks to rubble and I wouldn’t lay odds on her being able to reverse through the doors of an aircraft hangar.
“I think I’m getting the hang of it now,” she chortles. “I’m feeling much more relaxed. My trouble has always been that I concentrate too hard.”
So saying, she knocks down the only sign on thirty thousand square yards of tarmac. There is no doubt about it—preparing her to be unleashed on the public highway is like raising ferrets in a chicken run.
“Clumsy me,” she squeals. “But you don’t expect anything to be here, do you?”
I agree with her and suggest that we make our way back to town. This we achieve without mishap but it is where I make my fatal mistake. Coming towards us along the pavement is a blonde bird wearing black woollen hot pants with a red butterfly motif patched on one thigh. By local standards she is a knock-out and I watch her, wishing I had my drool cup within reach.
“What’s the time?” I hear Miss Frankcom saying, but I am watching the girl’s swelling crutch quivering above white lace-up boots.
This i
s how I had imagined Miss Frankcom and the sight of this tasty dolly grips my attention like a 32A cup on a 40-inch bust. But not for long! Suddenly the scenery changes through 180 degrees as Miss F. wrenches the wheel over and we skid across the road, narrowly missing a Guinness tanker. My foot plunges down—but nothing happens. The dual control has chosen this moment to pack it in or die of heart failure.
“Brake, brake!” I scream desperately and Miss F. stamps hard on the accelerator. Not that she need have bothered because we are poised at the head of a steep slipway and the car starts to plunge down towards the beach like a pair of lead knickers. Over the cobble stones we go with old men in waders and blue jerseys scrambling out of the way and shouts of fear and warning fading away behind us. Miss F. is hunched over the wheel like a plaster cast and I lunge for the wheel as we head straight for an upturned fishing boat. Lobster pots scatter like a flock of sparrows as we take a layer of paint off the boat and career on downwards. I haul on the handbrake which comes away in my hand and stamp desperately between Miss F’s feet in the hope of locating some means of stopping us. Miss F. obviously shares my belief that we are going to die because she emits a high pitched “wheeeeeh!” noise from between her clenched gums and her eyes are tight shut. The next thing I know is that the ground begins to level out, my head makes a dent in the roof and we are bowling across the beach, narrowly missing an ancient salt with a paint brush in his hand, whose eyes open wider than serving hatches as we speed by. Fortunately, the tide is just on the turn and the wet sand slows our progress until the car slides to a halt in a flurry of small wavelets. Gazing out across the grey ocean I compose a few prayers whilst Miss Frankcom remains hunched over the wheel muttering, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” under her breath until I could belt her.
“Tell me, Miss Frankcom,” I say eventually, marvelling at how calm I can make my voice sound, “why did you do that?”
“I was trying to tell the time, dear.”
‘Trying to tell the time,” I repeat wearily. “You mean you suddenly remembered where there was a clock and turned right to find it?”
