I hated driving with my mother. She would take forever to get the car into first gear. With much grinding and grating she would force the lever into first, leaving the cog with a few teeth missing and bad toothache. Having coaxed first gear into submission, she would quickly slam it all the way down into fourth. She loved doing this and would announce with great glee, that she had learnt how to double de-clutch!?
The poor car would go from a screaming first to a stuttering fourth, with nothing in between. She also had another annoying habit of driving in a stop start sort of way. I could never understand it. Accelerator, brake, accelerator, brake. it was enough to leave one carsick for days.
I had the great misfortune once, to be driven through the busy streets of Johannesburg by my mother. We were going to visit my father who was recuperating in hospital after having had a major operation. My sisters and I literally took our lives into our hands when we accompanied her on this hair raising trip. My big sister was the navigator, while my middle sister and I sat at the back praying fervently.
We stop-started, and screeched, and stuttered our way through Joburg, narrowly missing fleeing pedestrians, while cutting in front of large trucks and buses. How we ever arrived at our destination in one piece, is a mystery to me.
I spent most of the trip curled up on the floor behind the passenger seat. I was convinced that everyone was staring at this strange little maroon coloured car, with it's wild eyed occupants. My mother seemed quite oblivious to anything beyond her white knuckled determination to reach our destination. What sort of destruction she left in her wake was of no concern to her. Eventually with a great sigh of relief, we reached the hospital.
Always the eternal optimist, she got out of the car and said "See, that wasn't so bad was it?" All that occupied my mind throughout the entire hospital visit was, how can I endure yet another one of those terrible journeys back to my aunt's house?
From that day onward, I vowed and declared that I would never drive like my mother, and so I made a concerted effort to copy the way my father drove, which probably wasn't ideal either, seeing as he had moments when his concentration completely deserted him. He spent a lot of time craning his neck this way and that, in order to see what the crops looked like, and what had been planted. My mother was always admonishing him "Keep your eyes on the road, and stop looking at the mealies" to which he would reply, "Well then, you look at them." It was always the same, he looked at the scenery, while she looked at the road.
As a small child, I went with my mother to the local little
village to do some shopping, and on the way home, she took a wrong turn and we started to drive to another town about thirty miles away. " Why are we going this way?" I quietly inquired. She gave me a long look, stopped the car, turned it around and said, "Don't tell your father." This was a great game my parents often played. " Don't tell your father," coupled with, "Don't tell your mother." I found all this crazy secrecy, to be a dreadful weight to be carrying around on my small young shoulders.
