Jeffrey Archer
Politics can be a challenge; so can writing novels. But for the prolific English author and former MP, neither proved as hair-raising as a car trip with Grandma.
During a school holiday, not long after the war, I travelled from Weston-super-Mare, a seaside town in Somerset, south-western England, to Leeds, 225 miles north, to spend Christmas with my aunt Eileen and uncle Paul. I had never before travelled beyond Bath or Bristol so was looking forward to the experience with much anticipation and a great deal of excitement, which quickly turned to trepidation.
My grandmother Nell was one of those self-taught motorists who, not unlike Toad of Toad Hall, had never acquired a driver’s licence and, had she taken the test, would undoubtedly have given her instructor a heart attack long before she failed.
We left Weston-super-Mare early one Friday morning in her British racing green Morris Oxford. My grandmother was behind the wheel, my grandfather and mother were in the back and I had the honour of sitting in the front, decades before anyone had given any thought to seatbelts.
My grandmother, like myself, rarely ventured beyond the borders of Somerset but her introduction to traffic islands didn’t seem to inhibit her natural sense of direction. We came across the first such unnecessary obstacle long before we reached Bristol, 24 miles away. Grandma happily drove straight across it and carried on without comment. We encountered 23 such irrelevant detours between Somerset and Yorkshire and my grandmother crossed all of them in a manner that would have delighted Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who famously invaded Italy via the Alps.
My grandfather, who had learned years earlier never to offer an opinion while Nell was behind the wheel, my mother, who would have been ignored had she done so, and I, who did not murmur a word, breathed more than a sigh of relief when we eventually pulled up outside my uncle’s front door in Leeds in one piece.
Safely inside the house, I ventured to suggest, “Surely, Grandma, one is meant to drive around roundabouts and not across them?” To which she replied, with British self-assurance, “You may well be right, young man, but it’s not of any importance because, I can assure you, they will never catch on.” It was a degree of logic with which I was quite unable to find fault.
I would prefer not to describe our journey back to Weston-super-Mare but my grandfather did remark that he had survived two world wars, three financial crashes and four monarchs. He died peacefully in his bed at the age of 83. My grandmother gave up driving at 80, when she would have had to take a driving test.
And so, 70 years later, I overheard one of my grandsons remark to the other after I’d driven them home one afternoon, “Doesn’t Grandad know about bike lanes or does he still think they’re meant to be shared?” I will soon turn 80.