Cedilla (24 page)

Then she did something surprising. She took me backstage. She
let me watch as she washed her hands and face carefully with her favourite glycerine soap. I say ‘let me watch’ but I suppose I mean ‘had me watch’, since she pushed the wheelchair into the bathroom for the purpose. It was strange. She wasn’t exactly putting on a show for me. She was showing me what lay behind the show she put on.

She explained that glycerine soap was a vulnerable luxury. It was a fugitive jewel of fragrance which would melt away to nothing in minutes if dropped into a bath. So she was meticulous at the basin, following a drill to avoid exposing the precious translucent bar to running water.

I don’t enter a room without being invited or noticed, so Granny wanted me to be there, but if she had something to tell me it wasn’t in the words. She was saying, ‘You know, John, in the War I couldn’t get face cream, so I made my own! I used the top of the milk and added some salt. Everyone said it gave my complexion a glow. Perhaps I should never have gone back to shop cosmetics. Still, it’s too late to change now, and they haven’t done too badly by me. You just have to follow certain rules.’

She wet her hands and then caressed the lather from the soap like a conjuror, just as I had once conjured bubbles from nothing at CRX. The glycerine bar spun its precious veil of foam. ‘My mother, John,’ she said, as she anointed herself, ‘would have been horrified at the idea of putting soap on the face. She scrubbed herself all over with a wire brush every day – and yes, all over does include the face. She believed it removed dead cells of skin and stimulated the circulation. She got the idea, believe it or not, from a newspaper article about the scandalous Elinor Glyn – but that may be a name that means nothing to you. Perhaps in any case we were both just lucky in what nature gave us. Perhaps we would have looked much the same whatever we did to ourselves.’

After the crisis there was a mood of truce, almost of carnival. I felt that Granny was showing me some of her mysteries, not just about age and beauty and resignation but also the thrift of the rich. Above all she was showing me something she may not have known herself – the secret cost of having had things so much her own way, of making the world dance to her tune. As by and large it had. She dried herself, using the towel with a delicate, rolling motion, like someone blotting
a fragile manuscript. Then she said, ‘Giving in to the temptation to take a nap is one of the worst vices of those very vicious people, the old. Nevertheless I fear I may yield. I find I am very tired. Let me know of your progress with the Mini people and the School of Motoring.’ She phoned reception for a taxi to be summoned, and with the last of her strength pushed me out of the door for collection. It broke the mood only a little to be left in the corridor like a pair of shoes in need of polishing.

Granny wasn’t the only one to be feeling tired. I could hardly keep my eyes open in the taxi home. Mum wasn’t unkind when I told her about the lecture I had been given about the shame attaching to large drinks, as if I had embarrassed Granny with a fit of delirium tremens at table. Mum didn’t rub my nose in it for being so wrong about Granny’s character and its workings. ‘We did try to tell you what she was like, and now you’ve found out for yourself’ – that was all she said, and I was grateful for the light touch.

At some level she must have been delighted, as she made me a cheese and pickle sandwich, that lunch had contained elements of fiasco. She did look very thoughtful when she heard about the successful part of the day, Granny’s agreement to an embassy I hadn’t announced in advance, but perhaps only because she thought my quest was hopeless, that the Holy Grail of the steering wheel would always be beyond my grasp.

Mum and Dad discussed my driving scheme a certain amount. Dad said, in my full hearing, ‘He’ll never forgive you if he doesn’t get this chance, m’dear … life won’t be worth living!’ There was nothing I could say to that. Better to keep my mouth shut than to complicate matters, by entering in person a discussion where I already figured as a sort of effigy. I still don’t know (as often with Dad) whether he thought he was calming the situation or subtly inflaming it.

That night in our bedroom I told Peter that if there was one thing certain on earth it was that I would never again accept a drink from Granny, though he told me not to be too hasty. For his part he claimed not to be in any hurry to learn to drive. It was hard to believe this, since his mechanical bent was so pronounced, and perhaps there was some renunciation in progress. Perhaps he was giving me a head start, letting me get established on four wheels before he entered the competition,
or perhaps he realised that without Granny’s help there was no alternative to a long wait.

It happened, though, that just when I was reaching out to the British School of Motoring, the BSM was reaching out to people like me. They were organising a small campaign, a little push to get the handicapped on the road. There was a specialist unit. When I called the local office I said that I might present ‘a bit of a challenge’ to an instructor, and itemised the difficulties that made me think so, to none of the usual consternation. It’s true I’m rather good on the phone, warm and clear, and can often wangle all manner of concessions. This was different. I wasn’t sure that the nice lady at the other end of the phone had grasped the seriousness of my case. I asked her if she had all the details she needed.

‘I think so,’ she said. ‘No movement in knees, one knee fixed out of true, short of stature, some movement in right elbow, limited mobility of neck. Is that the lot?’

That was the lot. I was left feeling disappointingly limber, from a BSM point of view, hardly worth the trouble of special help and a separate initiative. It was such an unfamiliar sensation I couldn’t even tell if I liked it or not. ‘This sounds just the sort of thing that our Mr Griffiths enjoys. Mr John Griffiths. He’ll be in touch.’

Some of my classmates at school, though younger than me, were already taking driving lessons. The Savage twins were trying to get two licences out of a single course of ten lessons, by pretending to be a single person. A single person with erratic performance, able to grasp techniques with impressive speed, only to forget them by the next session.

Their way of going about things was complicated enough, but a lot simpler than the approach I would have to take. I couldn’t learn to drive on any old car – I would never be able to manage a gear stick, for instance. I would need to get a car first, and then get lessons – and yet there seemed no point in getting a converted car without some assurance that I would qualify as a driver. That was the problem, and John Griffiths was the solution.

Mr Griffiths was every bit as positive when he telephoned. He would come to Bourne End for a preliminary session to assess my prospects. A home visit! He was certainly an antidote to the mood of stagnation and stultitude which could swoop on that household when the hobbies lost their grip.

He was very jolly and dumpy. From the moment he entered the house it was as if he was preaching a sermon, on the text
Lay down thy
crutches and drive
. He was a true believer. As far as I was concerned he was preaching to the converted, but Mum had no faith. She was the one who needed to be won over, and John Griffiths pulled out all the stops. Heavens, how he wooed her!

He came rolling and bubbling into the house in Bourne End, saying, ‘We’re going to put you on the road with a full driving licence, John, and we’re going to help you stay on the road for many happy years. Your First Lesson Is Free and I’m going to give it to you right now.’ It turned out the first lesson didn’t involve the use or even the presence of a car. Just as well he didn’t charge – Granny might have had something to say if he had expected payment for instruction that was essentially mimed.

‘We’re going to put you on the road, John, but we also want you to bring the road into the house. Yes, into the house. By that I mean that when you go to bed at night you must close your eyes and imagine you’re holding the steering wheel in your hand. Imagine the road. Instead of counting sheep as you drift off, count something else … What, John? No, not cat’s-eyes, don’t count
them
, whatever you do! You’ll hypnotise yourself if you do that … Imagine traffic lights. Imagine road signs. Imagine a policeman holding up his hand and telling you to stop. Spend all your mental time on the road.

‘But don’t think that you’re only going to be driving at night, John! You can bring the road into the house during the daytime too. Mother can help you … See here, Mrs Cromer, what’s your first name? Laura? Now, come on, Laura, this is what I want you to do with your son while I’m not here … Turn round please.’ She seemed rather dazed, but she did as she was told.

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.

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.