Neither the very young nor the very old are good drivers. My first lesson was in a farmyard at Barmeath in my grandmother’s Morris 1000.
I reversed briskly into a wall. While my technique has improved a little when moving forward, my reversing skills are still inadequate, as Mrs VOF (Very Old Friend) recently pointed out in the car park at Strawberry Hill. When I was learning to drive my grandmother was an indulgent passenger; her usual comment: ‘I think the hedges are going past too fast, dear”. I will draw a veil over some quite spectacular bad driving on my part over the ensuing years.
So let’s turn to the older driver. Lady Diana Cooper’s erratic driving is immortalised in Scoop. Her son, John Julius Norwich, either wrote or told me why his mother stopped driving. She collided with a bollard in central London (Wigmore Street?) and immediately gave up, explaining it might have been a child not a bollard – time to stop.
My grandfather and uncle both prized the independence that driving gave them and continued into their nineties. One of my grandfather’s idiosyncrasies was to stop dead in the middle of a main road – he remembered a tractor had once shot out from a field in front of him fifty years ago at that very spot. My grandfather both drove and shot clay pigeons the day before he had a heart attack. The Duke of Edinburgh, as you may have read, is behind the wheel aged 97 and also still doing non-competitive carriage driving. If he were to ask my advice, something he seldom does even from his nearest and dearest I imagine, it would be that on public roads he should drive with a protection officer beside him. A 57 year old man was stabbed beside his car in Kew on Sunday morning. He is lucky to be alive. Prince Philip is too high profile a target to drive round Norfolk unaccompanied.
I was rather hoping that the piece would see you name drop unashamedly about your own contact with Prince Philip and his carriage driving.
This one , Christopher, will stir up memories from many of your dedicated readers. My father drove (a generous application of the term) well into his nineties. One fine California morning he backed his Cadillac out of the driveway without looking and was hit from behind by 90-something year-old Mr. Lorenzetti from down the street, also lumbering along in a Sedan de Ville. Both gentlemen exited their cars (unblemished due to their customary crawling pace) shook hands, and chatted about the fall weather and the promising cotton crop. At parting, Mr. Lorenzetti was heard to say, “Nice running into you, Floyd!”
Thank you, that is a gem.
The stats speak for themselves: younger drivers have more accidents than older ones. Unfortunately, when you look at fatalities from RTA’s, the ratio of older versus younger drivers, vindicates the older driver. The stoical Duke of Ed is quite right to continue behind the wheel and I was glad to learn he was back on the road again.
Living in rural Ireland having your own wheels is most essential, and one of the worries of advancing years is what would happen if one could not pop in to town to do ones own messages?
Perhaps the author should take the Beamer for a spin more often as this may improve his driving skills. Conversely, Bru is an expert pilot. He can corner the Mondeo as briskly as Lewis Hamilton, as he completes his Sunday steeplechase to get to three Matins in three and a half hours.