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I heard quite often about Charles’s three lessons. When he said ‘Pull in for those sheep’ and I ran the car up a bank.

When I passed another car and he thought I shouldn’t have done. Whenever I tried to start our car on a hill.

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He’d never had any difficulty said Charles as we rolled inexorably backwards. He just couldn’t understand it. For heaven’s sake why didn’t I let in the CLUTCH!

It was over a hill-start that my lessons came to an abrupt conclusion. There we were approaching a country crossroads, on an uphill gradient, nothing else at all in sight. ‘Stop,’ said Charles. ‘Look right… look left... look right again... NOW you move out carefully...

gently in with the clutch...’ The inevitable happened.

We went backwards. And, just as inevitably, when I did as Charles said and let in the clutch, we jerked as if we’d been suddenly lassoed, went forward in a series of jumps like a kangaroo – and stopped with a sickening thump.

After that I couldn’t start the engine. There was too much petrol in the carburettor. And it was all right for Charles... his legs were so long... mine, sloping uphill, barely reached the pedals. Backwards we rolled, forwards we jumped – and by this time we were no longer alone.

Buses to the right of us, lorries to the left of us, a stream of traffic behind us, all held up by me.

People were looking at us, said Charles. (Boy, was that an understatement!) Why on earth didn’t I get it moving! (I hauled fruitlessly on the starter again.) He’d never had this trouble said Charles, and he’d only had three lessons. Where was I going? he asked as I got out of the car.

‘To have some blasted lessons!’ I said as I marched off round the corner... where, before about fifty interested spectators, I sat down on the bank and jammed my elbows on my knees.

This isn’t unusual, of course. There are probably dozens of learner-driver wives fuming by roadsides at 117

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Double Trouble this very moment while their husbands get their cars out of jams. Not so long ago a friend of mine, now an excellent driver, told me what happened to her when she was practising up for her test.

Almost ready for it she was, she said – though of course her husband didn’t think so. And there they were, driving along, and he’d said ‘When I say stop, you stop’... an emergency stop she thought he meant; she’d been practising on that. So when he said ‘Stop!’

she slammed on the brakes, tremendously pleased with her reaction – and he, poor man, having merely meant there was a junction ahead, knocked himself silly on the windscreen.

He was furious when he came round, she said, which she thought was most unreasonable. She’d got out of the car and walked all the way home, with him driving along behind her. Six miles, she said, roaring at the memory, pleading every few yards for her to get in – and her saying she’d never set foot in his old car again until she’d passed her test.

Six lessons at a driving school and she passed all right, and her husband was thrilled to bits. I bet he’d be, too, I said to Charles, when I could drive him in an emergency.

‘What emergency?’ asked Charles suspiciously. Well – if his ulcer blew up, I said... or he broke his leg or anything, working on the building…

‘Thanks very much,’ said Charles. From the way he spoke you’d think I intended personally pushing him off the scaffolding. The trouble with men is that they don’t face up to things. The time in fact did come...

But that is jumping ahead of events. He relaxed a little when he found I didn’t intend learning in our car.

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I wouldn’t be touching it for ages, I assured him. He relaxed even more when, meeting me from my first lesson, he found I’d brought the driving school car back in one piece.

‘Do you think she’ll be all right?’ he asked the instructress.

Did she hesitate as she said ‘Yes’?

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Thirteen

I’D PICKED MISS PRINCE as my instructress for two reasons. She had a reputation as a first-class teacher, and she operated from a village three miles from where we lived. If, as seemed likely, it was going to take me months to learn, I preferred that nobody locally should know what I was doing.

I might as well not have bothered, of course. If I’d taken driving lessons in Timbuctoo, somebody from the village would have turned up by the next plane. I managed just two lessons incognito in Briddar... crawling cautiously around its narrow streets, stopping dead with alarm when anything came towards me... and on my third time out, there was Father Adams, coming as large as life out of a shop.

I hoped he wouldn’t see me. He always wore his trilby so far down over his eyes it was a wonder he could see anything. It was hardly likely, either, that he’d expect 120

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me to be in a driving school car. Furthermore I was in disguise. I don’t wear glasses in the normal way but I’d got some, being short sighted, for driving. With big tortoiseshell frames behind which, with any luck, he wouldn’t recognise me in a month of Sundays.

He did of course. I had a feeling at the time that it was a bit overdone, the way he stood on the edge of the pavement, gazed hard up the street towards the village cross, hard in the other direction towards the supermarket, and apparently didn’t for one moment notice that there was a car right under his nose. Sure enough, up he came that very evening and questioned Charles in his usual tactful way. ‘Whass she doin’ –

learnin’ to drive?’ he asked. (I hardly supposed I looked as if I was flying.) ‘Think she’ll make it?’ I heard him enquire. I didn’t hear Charles’s reply.

He is an old friend of ours, however, and once Charles had explained matters – particularly when Charles said people were so inquisitive and Father Adams commented

‘Ah, specially old Mother Wellington’... once he envisaged this as a plot to keep it from her... followed later by the triumphant moment when Miss Wellington would say fancy me having learned to drive and he could say he knowed about it all along... once all that had passed before his vision we had full co-operation from Father Adams. He didn’t even admit to me that he knew what I was up to. Just looked knowing whenever we met and, when he saw me again in Briddar, gazed even harder in the opposite direction.

Unfortunately he wasn’t the only one who saw me.

It so happened that there was a shop in Briddar – I hadn’t known this before – which sold a special type of 121

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Double Trouble working trouser. A sort of brick-coloured heavy twill which was apparently all the local rage. All the village men were wearing them and you couldn’t get them anywhere else. That was what Father Adams had been buying when I saw him that day on the pavement...