There are those who wrongly believe that I have a fuse as short as Guy Fawkes's and will detonate at the mere touch of an irritation. This, of course, is a base calumny, refuted only this very month when I was driving a car-load of motoring cognoscenti and was cut up and then cut out again by a damsel wearing (with, of course, other garments) an L-plate. She sneered en route and signalled a right turn but almost instantly moved over into the left lane. I slowed down and smiled at her indulgently; my passengers could scarce believe it. "We all have to learn," I explained, "and every learner deserves consideration from us all."
This moment of sweet charity was prompted by my recollection of my own essay into the stream of motoring life - a series of exercises initiated by my father, who taught me to drive and, as he humorously said on many occasions, had the scars on his id to prove it.
Clean machines
No motor car was ever clean enough for him. He would arrive home usually in a different one every day, for cars were then his business; and though it seemed to me they were all in what the salesmen would describe as immaculate, showroom condition, he would order me to drop whatever I was doing, take out the mats, shake and brush them thoroughly, then clean the windows inside and out. If the car had any chrome on any fixture, I was required to raise these to an even higher degree of glitter.
As a reward he would give me a driving lesson, during which he sharpened my concentration with our dog's lead wrapped round his wrist; this he unrolled and applied to my bare knee at any transgression or sloppiness. A sorry sight I must have seemed at the end of these sagas - one knee its normal, grubby white and the other like fillet steak.
On one, never-to-be-forgotten day, the car concerned was a heavy and ponderous saloon which, in retrospect, seems to me to have been made of quarter-inch boiler plate. The engine was not going well and my father, no mean hand with a spanner, decided this he would diagnose and cure for himself. So, pristine sleeves rolled up, he plunged beneath the bonnet - which was probably one of the first to be hinged at the windscreen end and supported in front by an iron stay.
Being the man he was, my father could not work in one place and not have me working in another. So I was banished to the interior and sat making perfunctory movements with a duster over anything within easy reach. As I rubbed the steering wheel I came, in a series of concentric circles, to its hub, which held the horn button. I stared at it for a long moment, envisaging where the actual horn itself sounded. It was located, I imagined, not far from where my father was wrestling in the depths. What would happen, I wondered, if by some mischance it was sounded? And, as I wondered, I watched in fascination, as if detached from the actual scene, as my right hand pressed the button firmly.
Shuddering thud
The horn went off very close to my father's starboard ear, though "went off" is too pallid a description; it exploded. He reared up like a terrified stallion, striking his head with a dull, shuddering thud against the underside of the bonnet lid. Instinctively, he bent down again quickly but his upwards convulsion had dislodged the iron stay so that the lid followed him down and struck him sharply, in what I was to learn later was the occipital region, trapping him in the machinery. Worse still, for some reason, I kept pressing the button and so the horn blared away - perhaps fortunately, since it drowned the things he was saying amid his cries of pain. I left instantly via the passenger door and by the time he was vertical I was disappearing rapidly in the general direction of the Mull of Kintyre.
When these physical and spiritual wounds had healed, there came the day I was to "go solo". We climbed aboard the car, me behind the wheel and he complete with dog-lead ready for instant use. "Keep your eyes on the road straight ahead," he admonished me a few dozen times. "Stop this gawking from side to side to see if everyone's admiring you."
Eventually he signalled me to pull into the entrance of a driveway and dismounted. "You can do the rest yourself," he said, "but if you so much as scratch this car - and I'll examine it very closely when you return - your motoring for the next 12 months will be confined to the passenger seats." With this warm valediction he walked off to, I fancy, a small caravanserai, there to ingest some nerve-healing nostrums of one sort or another.
Careless ease
Delighted to have him and the dog-lead out of my way, I edged into the traffic, shifted quickly into top gear and hey ho for the open road and a circular tour of friends, my right elbow resting with careless ease on the door sill. I received the warm welcome I expected - so warm, in fact, that I took selections of them for short canters round the neighbourhood, as close as possible to the homes of any of the nubile inhabitants who engaged our fancy, even if we didn't engage theirs.
It began to rain as I turned for base and got steadily heavier as I reached the last half-mile from home. En route I could see the sole bus-stop in the area, surrounded by a small group of disconsolate, would-be passengers. My father was one of them ; but, having been warned ad infinitum to keep looking to my front, I passed on, affecting not to notice any signals for succour and shelter. I parked in front of our door, dashed in, grabbed a raincoat from the hallstand and took off, on foot, for the hills.
Which is why I have great patience with learner drivers. Who knows what anguish and turmoil they are enduring from an irascible tutor, fiance or parent?