Driving lessons can be a lot of fun â if youâre the instructor and you get pupils like Timmy found when he changed jobs.
Mrs. Bendon liked to make her boarders really comfortable. Dawn was more interested in the back seat than the lessons.
Mrs. Dent had her own unusual treatment for injuries. Mrs. Carstairs liked to paint â and got very closely involved with her subjects.
All things considered, Timmy found that being a driving instructor was even more enlightening than cleaning windows.
CONFESSIONS OF A DRIVING INSTRUCTOR continues the autobiographical saga of the erstwhile Timothy Lea begun in CONFESSIONS OF A WINDOW CLEANER.
I donât know how you would react to finding your brother-in-law knocking off your fiancée in the potting shed, but I can tell you that I was annoyed. Not annoyed so much as bloody choked. I mean, what a liberty. My own brother-in-law! The horny bastard who was living in the room below mine at the ancestral home of the Leas in Scraggs Road. It would have broken my sisterâs heart. Poor Rosie thought the sun went in every time he pulled up his trousers. But what about me? Why was I being so generous with my sympathy? The cunning of the bitch. All that âbutter wouldnât melt between my legsâ innocence. The reproving looks every time I used a four-letter word, her little hand sneaking over the top of her glass after the second Babycham. Well, she certainly had me fooled.
Thatâs what annoyed me most of all, really. Iâd been fooled. It wouldnât have been so bad if Iâd reckoned her as being a bit on the flighty side, but Iâd never had an inkling. Sheâd really made a mug out of me.
I must confess that when Iâd stalked off into the night, leaving them clambering out of the wreckage of the shed, I though seriously about going straight home and sobbing the whole story to Rosie. But as I strode through the drizzle and my blood cooled a bit, two things stopped me. One was the praiseworthy desire to spare my sisterâs feelings already alluded to, and the other, and much stronger emotion, the fear that everybody in the neighbourhood would soon know that I had been shat on by sexy Sidney, Balhamâs answer to the piston engine. If I dropped Sidney in it, he wouldnât be slow to make sure that everybody in S.W.12 knew that my fiancée preferred him in bed, in a shed, or anywhere, and I couldnât have stood that. Some of the things Iâd heard her whispering to him in the shed fair made my blood curdle; mainly because I had a horrible suspicion that she had never felt like that with me. I didnât want to think about it, but I couldnât help it.
Mum and Dad had gone to bed when I got home and I tiptoed up to my attic room and lay there staring at the roof (I didnât have much alternative because it was about three inches above my head) and wondering what I should do. As is my normal habit in situations like that, I eventually decided: nothing. Apart from Rosie and my reputation, there was the job (Sid and I were partners in a window-cleaning business) and though we went pretty much our own ways, I didnât want to rock the boat too much there.
The more I rationalised it all the more I put the blame squarely on Lizâs shoulders. I hated her, but at the same time I wanted her more than Iâd ever done in the past. Not with any shred of affection, but with a desire to batter her to death with my body so that she died gasping âYou are the greatestâ with a look of unspeakable contentment etched across her glazed eyeballs. It had been this ability to look on the brighter side that has been my salvation in many chastening situations.
Not that I was prepared to give Sid a book token or anything. The bastard would be dead scared that Iâd spill the beans to Rosie and I decided to let him sweat on it. I didnât hear him come in before I fell asleep and the next morning when I got down to breakfast early, there was no sign of him or Rosie. Dad was sitting there studying his form book and Mum was frying bread. Dad is very working-class because, though he never does anything, heâs always very punctual about not doing it. He gets down to the Lost Property Office where he works a quarter of an hour before they open and then spends forty minutes in the cafe opposite before he strolls in and bleats like buggery about some kid who comes in five minutes late and gets down to work immediately.
âMorning,â I say cheerfully.