Over to Gramps …
For the past year I have been training to be a Driving Instructor. Like many people who are not public servants or Ministers of Parliament, my dreams of retirement are exactly that. Just dreams. So I am now, aged 60, a Trainee Driving Instructor waiting to pass the dreaded part 3 exam which, worryingly, has only a 30% pass rate.
Working as a trainee instructor I have a diary filled with pupils of all nationalities or who have some connection with countries other than the United Kingdom. Some examples; Elfreta, British born but with Nigerian parents and, for a reason I forget, a German forename. Chloe, a Parisian, whose father is American and mother Scottish. Petra, Czech not Czechoslovakian, I am corrected with the hard look of a Scot mistaken for an Englishman. Carlos has a Mexican mother and English father and Suresh an Indian who relates colourful stories of driving in Delhi. Other pupils have connections with South Africa, Uganda, Wales and my latest pupil, judging by the name is probably Turkish – German.
This experience, late in my life, has unearthed a memory of teaching your sister and, years later you to drive.
When your sister reached the appropriate age I readily agreed to teach her to drive. Now, as a trained driving instructor I can, within the first two hours lesson, have even the most useless pupil driving around with some confidence. Looking back it seemed to take a long time and endless patience to get both of you beyond the kangaroo hopping stage.
My only clear memory of teaching your sister was of being pestered into taking her out one evening. Despite having had a very stressful day I reluctantly gave in, forgetting entirely that I had taken a couple of Kalm pills, pills that claimed to reduce stress along with any other vital signs of life. Your Sister was fairly competent at this point but still needed occasional prompting. Of course, inevitably, a crisis developed. Hurtling towards a line of parked cars with a car coming towards her she asked in an increasingly shrill voice for advice. Eventually, her shrieking penetrated my Kalm pill induced coma and I famously told her to ‘do what you like’ nowadays encapsulated in the phrase ‘whatever’. Surprisingly, despite a noisy clattering of door mirrors your sister and the car survived.
Nearly ten years later it was your turn to experience my amateur driving instruction techniques, techniques that had not progressed over the decade. You took your first tentative moves at the same place as your sister; the site, at the time occupied by the abandoned offices and factory premises of the John Collier tailoring company and now replaced by a leisure complex. After the mandatory period of hops and engine stalls you started to progress quite well and within a few weeks you were confidently motoring around the industrial site roads, which included a small roundabout. One evening, at the end of our session, impressed with your confidence I told you to drive us home. You did remarkably well until we arrived at the infamous four lane Otley roundabout.
Of course, in retrospect, the responsible and sensible thing to do was to stop you before the roundabout and take over the driving. But you seemed so calm; I completely missed the white knuckles, the beads of sweat on the brow and staring eyes. You did well and negotiated the chaos of the late rush hour traffic and amid a cacophony of car horns and squealing tyres to emerge safely on the other side. It was a while before recovered from the trauma and asked me to take you out driving again.
I often relate this story to my pupils as a ‘don’t run before you can walk’ parable. It always raises a laugh; something you certainly didn’t do at the time.
4 Comments on "Guest Post From Gramps – Are We Nearly There Yet Daddy?"
This reminds me of when my dad was taking me out between lessons
You want to talk roundabout fear. Drop one of those in the path of someone from the midwestern states of America. Having never seen one before, the first thought is, “What the heck does that sign with the circle mean?”
There was one in my area of the suburbs, and when giving dirrections, if you did not warn the driver and tell them exactly what to do, they were within their legal rights to punch you in the throat.
My driving instructor Mr Apothacary (!!) used to slap my hands if I did anything wrong……that was more than 25 yrs ago, I may add…….Seemed quite normal at the time, but then again I did go to a Catholic Convent School…..
God, I HATED learning to drive. For a long time I hated driving too but I’m not so bad now.