John Griffiths went up behind her and took her hands in his, till between them they were indeed holding an imaginary steering wheel. Then with a toot-toot! and various noises of screeching and skidding (he had a fine variety of sound effects in his repertoire), he started driving Mum from room to room. ‘Watch out, there’s a cow on the road!’ he would say, or ‘Not very well anticipated there, Laura, I’m afraid …’
The dance started in the kitchen. After they had traipsed outside and back to the bedroom which I shared with Peter, and round again to where they started, John Griffiths was telling Mum what an excellent driver she was. ‘After all that driving,’ he said, ‘don’t we deserve a little dance in celebration?’ He twirled her round to face him, and the next minute they were waltzing. A minute after that, whether by the sort of signal that only dancers can detect or some welling-up of sensual syncopation, Mum’s feet were moving to a quicker tempo and her hips were launching into the distinctive jink of the cha-cha-cha.
I didn’t know where to look, so I looked at Dad. All this time he had been sitting in his chair, with the Telegraph open in front of him. Even after all my years of Dad-watching I didn’t know whether he really was scrutinising world affairs by reading the newspaper, or wearily cursing his witch of a mother-in-law for bringing this plump and waltzing madman into the house.
Mr Griffiths ended up by saying that Mum should do for me exactly what he had just done for her. Dad gave a little cough which probably meant, ‘Apart from the ballroom dancing, I expect.’ Dad’s coughs were Service coughs, messages sent in a dry RAF code far more mysterious than Morse, one that I could never quite tune into. He’d been working for BOAC for a number of years by this time, and still the last word you would ever apply to him would be civilian.
John Griffiths formally declared that my physical difficulties were compatible with driving a car, and endorsed my choice of a Mini. It would have to be an automatic model, and somewhat modified, which would be attended to by the BSM nerve centre in London, and then John Griffiths would be returning to give the second lesson. The first practical one. The first real one.
The wounds known to mapmakers
All in all it was a very promising start to my motoring life, though driving lessons seemed to be little different from dancing lessons, and I wasn’t an obvious candidate for those. Before John Griffiths left he produced a book called Your Car: Its Care and Maintenance. It was published by the BSM and written by John Griffiths, none other. In the front he wrote, in a large and confident script, ‘For John — and all the Tomorrows on the Road of Life, from John Griffiths’, signed with a great flourishing swash of an autograph. I took a quick look inside the book. There were diagrams of all the parts of the engine, with instructions for taking them to bits and putting them back together again. I told him I’d have a hard job managing that, but he said never mind. ‘If you know what goes where, in an emergency you can always tell other people what to do.’
I have to say my heart sank at that. I’d heard it before. At Vulcan I did a First Aid certificate, and the chap from the St John Ambulance had taken very much the same line. Man dying by the roadside? Corrosive poison? Train crash? Nothing to it! Just so long as you know what to get passers-by to do! I seemed to be a sort of human pamphlet or tape recorder, an elaborate device to store information, on the off-chance that I coincided, at the scene of an earthquake or the escape of deadly fumes, with able-bodied folk who had failed to acquire the proper skills.
Still, John Griffiths had given me his blessing. A fresh breeze had passed through a house that could be stuffy in all weathers. Though perhaps it was only Granny, beyond the horizon, riffling through the pages of her mighty cheque book.
The household had been benignly shaken up by John Griffiths’ visit. Mum had a bit of colour in her cheeks for once. It wasn’t that she found him attractive, exactly. He was rather roly-poly, for all his animation, not most women’s cup of tea. But it isn’t every day that a woman in her middle years (Mum had been in her forties for a year or two) is chauffeured bodily round her home, under her husband’s very eyes, by a man who knows how to cha-cha. The British School of Motoring seemed to have merged, on the sly, with Arthur Murray, who would teach you to dance In A Hurry.
John Griffiths had left a sort of glow with me too. I didn’t spend much time looking over the car maintenance guide he had left, but I was fascinated by the design of the BSM leaflet that went with it.
Someone had been given the task of representing the British School of Motoring in visual terms. The result was charming. There was a collage of photographs showing drivers under instruction, and there was an oval space in the middle where a map of Britain had been reproduced. Additional lines had been added to the map, to turn it into a sort of cartoon of a man driving. Britain’s bottom was London and Kent — the whole south-east region. His leg and foot was formed by the Cornish Peninsula, whose pronged bit had always reminded me of a two-toed sloth. Anglesey provided the shape of his little hands at the end of reassuringly short arms, and the gear lever was in south-west Wales. Britain’s head was northern Scotland — and a very bumpy head it was too. It looked as if someone had taken an axe to the back of the driver’s head, striking three separate blows to open the wounds known to mapmakers as the Dornoch, Cromarty and Moray Firths. And still he drove merrily on, despite being so hacked about.
I don’t think, now, that there was any intended connection between the BSM’s drive to get disabled people on the road and the way its design department had rendered the map for advertising purposes. As an impatient student of the John Griffiths method, though, I didn’t doubt it. I saw what I wanted to see, just as everyone else does, and what I saw was a cheerfully non-standard body.
For a few moments here and there, I have been proud to be British. It adds up to perhaps half an hour in total. I have some sort of sporadic identification with the look of these islands on a map. It was the design of the BSM leaflet which dug the foundations of this feeling, by alerting me to the fact that the map of the United Kingdom, if you look at it with an open mind, does look so very disabled. If I was any kind of nationalist, I’d claim that as my country. That’s where I’m from.
Silence that tingled with icicles
I had fallen in love with John Griffiths and his ideas of bringing the road into the house, and even into my bed at night. I couldn’t wait for the car to be delivered. The visit to the dealership in Slough had been straightforward, if anticlimactic. I said I was interested in a Mini with automatic transmission and was shown a red one. ‘What colours does it come in?’ I asked. ‘Red,’ I was told. I wondered why. ‘It has to be like that one, does it?’ Yes it did. More than that. It had to be that one. This was the one it was going to be.
After that, all I had to do was to trip the mechanism that released the flood of money, by telephoning Granny. While we were waiting for the cheque to clear, Mum and I tried to practise driving around the house once or twice, according to the Griffiths method, but we felt rather self-conscious about it. Our hearts weren’t in it. It took two to tango, and not these two. I would get a proper dose of the Griffiths method at our first lesson, which was arranged for the Monday after the arrival of the car.
On the Friday morning before the scheduled lesson the British School of Motoring rang, to say they were sorry to inform us that Mr John Griffiths had had a heart attack and died. Could we give them a few days to make fresh arrangements for me?