Early Driving Experiences

The first car I ever drove was a Mini Cooper which belonged to a friend whose family owned large farming interests in Kent. He must have been very confident in me as I was sixteen at the time, the 'lesson' took place in an orchard where there were plenty of trees to bump into, and driving a high-performance Mini Cooper was.... exciting.

The next vehicle I drove was a one-and-a-half ton Bedford truck - picture shows the sort of thing though the one I drove was dented, dusty, dirty and grey. This was in Southern Rhodesia where I spent two terms working in a school out in the bush, and was told by the lovely man who was my 'boss' for the 50% of my time that I spent working on the estate - the other 50% was time spent teaching - that I was no use to him until I could drive; and the only vehicle available for me to learn and practise on was the Bedford. It was a pig of a machine in which I spent almost as much time veering off the road and bashing uncontrolledly through the African bush than on the road. One of the joys of the beast was that one had to double-declutch in order to go down the gears.

Once I had the hang of how to drive, the first job I had was to convey one of the estate staff's wives in to hospital in the nearest town as she was having trouble giving birth to her first child. She screamed all the way. So did I.

The next car I drove, back in England, was my parents' Morris Traveller, in which, at the age of 17, I took my test. That I passed was something of a miracle as I stalled the car in the middle of a roundabout, managing to get it going again but in the certainty that I had failed. The examiner passed me: the stall had occurred in torrential rain and he was impressed with my sang froid, learned, of course, from driving a Bedford truck.