and leave Minto and his lot to me.”
His tone suggests I don’t argue with him, so I stand there humbly like I used to do in front of my old schoolmaster.
“Right, off you go,” he says. “I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt this time, but watch it! Miss Boswell will tell you who you’re with today.” I turn for the door. “Oh, by the way,” he adds, “what did you do about paying for the damage to the Morris?”
“I told them to send me the bill.”
“Well, we’ll get the insurance to cover it this time. I’ll tell the garage.”
“Oh, thanks a lot.”
“One more thing.” He ignores my grovelling and drops his voice confidentially. “You probably noticed that when you were out with Cripps that he fancies his tipple. It’s not a good habit to get into and I don’t recommend you to try to keep pace with him. He’s had a lot of practice, if you know what I mean.”
I nod wisely.
“Keep an eye open for him, because he’s a good bloke really, and he may need your help one day.”
“You were in the army with him, weren’t you?” I say casually to draw him out.
“That’s right,” says Cronk firmly and finally. “Now, you’d better be getting on with the job.”
I soon find that army service with Cronk is a common bond between all the instructors. Even Petal, who hardly comes over as an advertisement for the Royal Marines, was a cook and occasionally makes wistful references to it. “Totally untrue what they say about the army food, duckie. Considering the conditions I was working under, I was performing bloody great miracles every day. Nobody ever grumbled about my food.”
“Few of them lived to.”
Interjections like this usually come from John ‘Garth’ Williams, who stands about six foot four on other people’s stockinged feet and needs a shoe horn to get into his Triumph Herald. He is the clumsiest man I have ever met and is always apologising for knocking things or people over, and running his fingers through his tousled hair in gestures of helpless self-exasperation. Despite that, he is a handsome bloke in a craggy, beefy way that went out of fashion the day they opened the first male boutique, and I can imagine women fancying him.
I am glad to see him, because I don’t reckon that either Petal or Cripps go much on birds and it’s nice to have someone to compare notes with occasionally. Now that I’ve got through my first day and am beginning to feel the lay of the land, my normal appetites are returning and a bit of nooky seems just what the doctor ordered. I look at Dawn and she crosses her legs and looks straight back at me.
“What have you got lined up for me today?” I say, “or can I choose?”
“You can do what you like,” she says wittily, “but you’ll be going out with Lester and a few of the old faithfuls this morning. In the afternoon you’re solo with Miss Frankcom.”
Miss Frankcom. The very name reeks of sex. I can see already, five foot eight and a half inches of insatiable nymphomaniac. Hardly outside the 30 m.p.h. limit and she’s abandoned all pretence of handling the gear stick and is rampaging across the front of my cords. “Miss Frankcom, please! Miss Frankcom, you mustn’t! Not here. Oh, no, oh!!!!” I can hardly wait.
Poor Dawn, if only she’d moved a bit faster, she might have been in with a chance.
“What’s Miss Frankcom like?” I ask Garth. Garth reflects for a moment. “Mature,” he says. He winks at me and I reckon I must be on a good thing.
The thought of what is to come keeps me going through a very dreary morning. Lester Hewett is the fourth member of the instructors’ pool and is a silent, spotty youth I imagine to be about the same age as myself, though without any of my physical magnetism. There are white sweat patches under the armpits of his sports jacket and nobody would even think of asking him to do a Colgate commercial.
Not surprisingly, his pupils seem to have been selected on the basis that if Lester pongs a bit they will never notice and it is not just for the hand signals that I keep the windows well down. Lester sniffs in the back and occasionally whispers unhelpful comments into my left ear, thus undermining my authority and alarming some of the pupils, who I can see suspect him of being a potential hi-jacker: “O.K. Start driving towards Cuba.”
In the course of the morning I get lumbered with three real draggies. Firstly, a middle-aged schoolmaster type who grips the wheel with such feverish concentration that I expect to see additional mouldings on the plalstic when he releases it and yelps “Oh, my God!” at moments of tension—which occur pretty regularly. He has considerable difficulty judging the space into which the Morris will fit and steers down the middle of Cromingham High Street as if transporting a load of nitro-glycerine across a bumper car track. Faced by an approaching vehicle, his first impulse is to stop and wave the madcap oncomer to the side of the road.
No sooner has he staggered away shaking his head than I am stuck with the colonel’s lady, who calls me ‘young man’ only because she suspects I would not understand the Hindu for ‘hey you’: “Young man, I have arthritis and it is impossible for me to hang my arm out of the window”; “Young man, the gear lever does not appear to be working properly”; “Young man, my seat belt is cutting into my shoulder.” She is dead ruthless and I would not fancy my first pupil’s chance if he met her coming the wrong way up a one-way street. She is also incapable of accepting anything as being her fault. “Wretched car!” she hisses every time she mangles the gears. “Witless ingrate,” she levels at some old age pensioner taking his life in his hands by stepping on to a zebra crossing thirty yards ahead. All in all, she is pretty exhausting company, but I can see how we got our Empire.
My third pupil is the enormously pregnant Mrs. Owen, who can hardly get behind the steering wheel and rabbits on continuously about how she is having lessons to take her mind off the baby. It may take her mind off it, but every time she leans forward I expect the little bleeder to come popping out under pressure. She keeps making jokes about how it might be safer if we practised three point turns outside the Maternity Hospital and that doesn’t do much for my state of mind, either. I am well pleased when it is time for dinner.
Lester offers me one of his crust-free salad spread sandwiches but I refuse with ease and leave him slopping his hot Bovril into the plastic top of his thermos flask. By my standards it has been a successful if fairly tedious morning and I want to compose myself for going ‘solo’. I have tried hard not to think about Miss Frankcom in the belief that things thought about never come up to expectations but this has proved impossible, so I now think about her continuously in the hope that this double bluff will fool fate into making her everything I want her to be. I sit in one of the shelters on the front and marvel at the amazing softness of her skin, the exquisite whiteness of her teeth seen through lips half-parted by the outward symtoms of acute ecstasy, the fawn-like gentleness of her exploring fingers …
It is therefore something of a surprise at two o’clock to find that Miss Frankcom is about seventy-five and nutty as a fruit cake. To think of her in relation to sexual intercourse seems as crazy as entering Charlie Drake for the Olympic high jump.
“Thirteen times she’s taken her test,” says Garth, “and on one occasion the examiner was crying at the end of it.”
“You bugger!” I hiss at him as we watch her innocently studying the Highway Code as if she had never seen one before. “You never told me she was like that.”
“I said ‘mature’,” says Garth innocently. “You can’t argue with that.”
“‘Mature!’ By the cringe, she’s obsolete. There must have been a bloke with a red flag in front of the car when she first took the test.”
“Look on it as a challenge,” says Garth, trying to sound reassuring. “If you can handle her, you can handle anything. You’ve got to watch her all the time, because she can do some very funny things. I remember when she drove straight into the fire station—luckily