Mum wasn’t so sure. She wasn’t convinced that a female driving instructor’s pass was valid in law. At best it must amount to a junior entitlement, a Cub Scout access to the road.
Perhaps Cynthia’s failure to fail me was based on the assumption that I would make a sensible, cautious sort of driver, who would never get into the sort of trouble from which an emergency stop is the only exit. If that was her thinking, she was far off the mark — tragically deluded. The taste for speed that had been piqued by my racing Wrigley, after the NHS-approved plod of the Everest & Jennings, could now be indulged to the limit and beyond. The weeks on the road between passing my driving test and the start of the new term were a carnival of velocity for me. I may not have broken the 70-mile-an-hour national limit, but I didn’t need to take things to that extreme to run risks on the roads, many of them steep or winding (or both) around Bourne End.
It was bliss to be able to explore my environment. There was a choice of roads for me to take as I turned out of the Abbotsbrook Estate. Turning left I would come to Marlow (and the Compleat Angler) and High Wycombe, while turning right would bring me to CRX, Burnham, Maidenhead and eventually London. The left turn seemed naturally boring, the right turn inherently exciting. One factor which may have contributed to this was the uneven flexibility of my arms, which made left turns relatively easy and right ones much more difficult. I gather there’s something similar in Proust — the A4155 was my Swann’s Way. The other direction, the Guermantes Way leading on to the wider world and its temptations, was the A4094.
One day early in my driving career I made to turn right and handled the turn (if I may say so) beautifully. Unfortunately as I did so the dolly somehow snagged itself inside my shirt. Miss Pearce the dressmaker’s dummy at Trees made a contribution to this little crisis — the shirts that Mum made me were now closely tailored, and the dolly snagged between two buttons, effectively gluing my chest to the steering wheel in its full right lock. The result was that after I had reached my desired destination, on the far left side of the road to Maidenhead, the car went on turning, still with full right lock, so that it ended up going round and round, as if I was dithering between Maidenhead and Marlow, Guermantes and Swann, while vehicles bore down on me at speed from both sides, sounding their horns and slamming on their brakes.
I managed to tug myself free, to the detriment of the shirt, and stopped safely facing Maidenhead. It had been a bad moment, though once I had got my breath back I found it oddly thrilling to have been on the receiving end of such a fusillade of horn blasts. A twenty-one-horn salute. Only something tremendous in its iniquity would be tooted so royally, at a time when most drivers didn’t lay their hands on the horn from one year’s end to the next. Mum and Dad, certainly, regarded the use of the horn as inherently foreign.
I felt I had been blooded, initiated into the rough fellowship of the road, far more truly than by any mere licence. I also had a wonderful new secret to keep from Mum. If she had known about my shirt-sleeve snagging on the dolly, her worrying would really have gone into overdrive.
It was a lovely drive from Bourne End to CRX at Taplow. Because the hospital was at the top of a hill, the road up to it was very twisty and dangerous. It was all as steep and scary as Edie-was-a-Lady Lane, full of witchy presence to Peter and me as children. It took real skill to negotiate those bends, and I had done a fair amount of practice there before I took my test.
When I was a qualified driver I loved driving alone up the steep gradient to Hedsor Hill. Perhaps part of the thrill was being so free, so much my own master, bowling along in a red Mini so near to the hospital where my life had been so confined. I should probably have been practising the Satipatthana Sutta, breathing in and out in full consciousness, but my promiscuous mystical reading had given me the idea of identifying with the Creator, on the theory that ‘as I think, so shall it become’. Aleister Crowley has a lot to answer for. I was reckless, confident that my luck was a blank cheque which could never bounce.
One time, on the way back down from CRX, I was a little cocky. Going too fast, I misjudged the curve and charged up the bank. The car started to tip up. It almost reached the vertical and came within a whisker of tipping over. I tried to lean the other way. Then my little Mini thought better of its rush towards the orgasm of destruction and pulled back from the brink. I had a bumpy landing and was very much shaken.
I just sat there trembling. My neck hurt. I knew I must put on a good show, though, when I got home. I was terrified that if Mum and Dad found out what had happened they would forbid me to drive, licence or no licence, and all my effort would be wasted. I had to saunter back into Trees Abbotsbrook Bourne End Bucks as though nothing had happened. I couldn’t really do much in the way of sauntering, but I tried to imagine I was whistling and had my hands in my pockets.
A secret unless proved otherwise
I couldn’t even confide in Flanny our GP about the shaking-up I’d had. Mum was always ganging up on me with her. Flanny disapproved of my being a vegetarian, though at least she pronounced the word properly, while Mum always said ‘Vegeteerian’, putting a sneer in the middle of the word to match the one in her heart.
The first passenger I took in the Mini was Peter. I was greatly in his debt in the matter of transport. Now I could pay him back for all his weary pushing of the Tan-Sad. Mum never asked for a lift, and I never offered. I did invite Dad to come for a ride, but he said he’d rather wait until I’d had more practice. The vote of confidence was never really part of his repertoire as a parent.
The first two times I had come a cropper in the Mini there were no witnesses. The third time, Peter was with me and we came a cropper together.
The previous accidents hadn’t taught me much. That close shave on Hedsor Hill had made me take extra care, but I couldn’t keep away from those steep and twisty roads. We were even on the same deadly bend, only this time there was another car involved. For some mad reason, the driver behind chose to overtake, forcing me off the road in the process.
Again I just sat there shaking, but Peter with his flexible neck had recognised the driver from the back of his famous head. Michael Aspel the broadcaster — a hero of his until that exact moment. We knew he lived locally, but this was our first actual sighting.
‘Nobody does that to my brother!’ Peter said, in a wonderful outburst of fraternal love. ‘If I see him in any of the shops I’ll give him one!’ All the fearfulness instilled in him at Lord Wandsworth had been melted away at Sidcot School. In our hearts Aspel was instantly reduced to the ranks, from honorary uncle to local villain, callous roadhog and reckless menace. From then on we could hardly bear to be in the room when Mum listened to Family Favourites.
Peter had to help me wrench the steering wheel round before we could get on the move again. I didn’t need to swear him to silence about Michael Aspel’s endangering of our lives. By now we had lost the reflex of sharing things with Mum and Dad, and everything was a secret unless proved otherwise.
The first day I turned up at school in the Mini I more or less provoked a riot. My schoolmates surrounded the car and begged to be given rides. My status slumped a bit when I had to transfer from car to Tan-Sad, but my image was certainly boosted overall. If only the school’s porterage scheme had extended to carrying me around on school premises, up and down stairs, in and out of lessons, in my nice new Mini! I could have attracted attention, when there was something I didn’t understand, by discreetly sounding the horn.