Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

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.

The wounds known to mapmakers

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.