RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30580, 24 October 1964, Page 40

RANDOM REMINDER

LOGIC

Among man's less agreeable tasks is teaching his wife to drive. It is a horrifying business, for with every shake and shudder there is the realisation that he will see less and less, in future, of the vehicle he bought with his life-blood. But the occasional man is fortunate, such as the one who went overseas and left his wife to be taught by a friend. The pupil was a very little woman indeed; the tutor extremely tall; the car mere beetle size. But even if the vehicle was once described as a mobile golf trundler, the little woman needed two cushions to allow her access to the pedals. They made a strange combination —the one propped up high, the other all inelegance, with her knees under her chin, her head touching the roof. During the first few lessons they covered, and jumped, a lot of ground, both frontwards and back-

wards. They ran through the gears as nimbly as a plough through iron-works and the pupil discovered there were four separate gears, as well as a brake. They met all the customary checks —the immovable tree, the back bumper of a car belonging to their local service station, a badly-misplaced telegraph pole, a gate and a gutter. Sometimes they cruised across stop signs and sometimes they hesitated before making a flying leap into the middle of a busy intersection, where they would make a sudden and upsetting halt The speed of other cars worried them, so they put up a notice on the back of the car announcing that they were a learner driver, and inviting the hoi-polloi to pass. They even frightened their children, when they took them along, so much that they decided that the driving lesson was the best sort of threat against misbehaviour.

The most memorable moments of this campaign occurred while they were learning stop signals. They practised on a deserted back road, with not another vehicle in sight. A gentle easing of the car, a hand out of the window In the correct fashion—and suddenly, another car beside them, with the driver anxiously asking if they needed any help. They politely explained the situation. But the same sort of thing happened a second time, then a third. So they decided that only two courses of action were open to them —(a) not to stop or(b) not to signal.

All of which explains, In part, why there are women drivers in Christchurch who earn the wrath of men behind the wheel. But they are unconcerned. They ask, with true feminine who is to blame for it all? And explain that why, of course, its the men themselves.