Driven To Learn. Review on Learning to Drive

Any fool can learn to drive. The skill is learning to drive safely. Any fool can jump into a car and career down the round as if all the demons of hell were after him/her. It takes skill to slow down and stop safely before a convenient wall does the job for you and wraps the car around your ears.

As a kid I would stand at the front of the bus and watch as the bus driver did his stuff expertly and I listened to the roar of the engine as we tootled along the road and took note of the change in engine noise as he changed gear. Then at home using a convenient Colgate toothpaste box(it was long and red and single decker buses were long and red) as a bus I would re-enact the drive from school making all the right engine noises to correspond with the gear changes etc. much to the annoyance of my father and mother who were trying to listen to the 6 o’clock news on the radio. In my mind I could drive, totally forgetting about steering the vehicle.

That I learned on the “dodgem” cars at the fair as I raced around trying to avoid everything in sight. So by the age of 12 I was the best driver in the world. Well I thought so anyway. Once I had got a bicycle and was let loose on the near empty roads I learned the art of survival on those roads. In those days, late forties and early fifties it was a notable event to see a car actually moving on a Sunday, even then the chances are it was a doctor’s car as he dawdled along on some errand of mercy.

I never forgot my driving skills until one day I lurched the company van into a telegraph pole and put a dent in the wing. My driving career had ended before it had started although it was briefly resurrected in 1958 on a Triumph Thunderbird 650 cc twin motorbike. On that monster I learned road sense until a mad dash for a hamburger on Southsea front late one Sunday evening saw a speed cop cruise alongside my 60 mph dash, touch me on the shoulder and indicate that I should stop. The crash down through the gears was a classic manoeuvre which left the speed cop on his Triumph Trophy, a mere 500 cc machine, coming to a stop 30 yards down the road ahead of me. I waved my licence a temporary goodbye and learned to use my legs again and re-learned the art of jumping onto and off of buses whilst they were still moving.

My next official chance came in 1961 in Capetown where a shipmate had got himself disqualified for driving without a licence and I was given the use of his Morris Minor. I sailed through the test in Capetown but it was only a local licence, which would not be valid in England, yet was accepted in other countries around the world. So over the years in foreign climes my road sense and skill improved and once out of the Navy I took my English test and passed first time. But I did take a few driving lesson first and it was these and not my worldwide road experience that enabled me to do so although that must have helped too. In fact it wasn’t so much that I learned to drive, but I learned to pass the test and there is a vast difference between the two.

Nowadays the driving test is much more complex and stringent than in days gone by and there is only one way to pass the test. Take lessons from a bona fide driving instructor. They may well cost an arm and a leg but one day they could save you your very own arm and a leg.

Avoid at all cost having your spouse try to teach you even if s/he is a driving instructor. Ask dad to pay for the lesson rather than try to teach you himself. In the majority of cases it just doesn’t work and can cause family rifts that can last a lifetime.

Just remember that when you have passed your driving test all you have done is learned to pass the test with sufficient skill not to get killed on the way home. The real learning to drive bit comes during the next 12 months where you no longer have the protection of an “L” plate and you are fair game for white van man and buses that pull out regardless of the fact that you are half way past. That’s when you learn to drive.