Bonzer Words!: A Driving Lesson
It took Tom Kearney 17 years to once again get behind the wheel of a car after his irascible Irish father had given him his one and only driving lesson.
Tom writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au
On the matter of Irishmen being pugnacious by nature, it is true that a few come into that category. Indeed, my own father was such a man and took a pride in it.
He was physically very strong but also on the short side and, like many in that category, was quick to rise to anger or to take offence.
He frequently vented his spleen on us children, usually, I must confess, with good reason.
I vividly remember the occasion he gave me my first (and last) driving lesson.
At the time, motor racing was an annual and international event in Cork. Of the many celebrities who participated, none was better known than Prince Bira of Siam (now Thailand). He was young, handsome and daring; he and his entourage were clad in pale-blue silk overalls and he drove an extremely powerful pale-blue car—from memory an ERA.
Being aware of my father’s tendency to erupt on the slightest provocation, I was a bundle of nerves on the historic occasion when I put the car, a large and heavy Sunbeam Talbot, into gear, stepped on the accelerator and lurched forward at a death-defying five miles an hour.
My father gave a roar of anger, slammed on the brakes, switched off the ignition and bellowed, “Who do you think you are? Bloody Bira?”
Seventeen years were to elapse before I had sufficiently recovered my nerve to have my next lesson. That was in an ‘A’ Model Ford. I taught myself to drive in it, in the early hours on deserted roads in Tasmania without help from anyone, particularly my father who, luckily, was thirteen thousand miles away at the time.
