Tag: learning to drive

Reckless Youth

In the year I turned twenty-two – two is my favourite number for reasons my analyst once suggested had something to do with my preference for the couple – I went into a crazy phase whereby I threw everything once familiar on its head. 

My boyfriend, a gambler and unemployed for most of the four years we spent together, began training with the Commonwealth Police. Fortuitous in some ways. It offered a steady income for one, and for another there was a time he and I were driving along the back streets of East Melbourne when by chance he failed to halt at a stop sign before taking off into the next side street and an unmarked police man off duty saw and stopped us.

‘You went over a stop sign without braking,’ he said after Paul wound down his window. 

‘I’m sorry officer. I didn’t realise.’

‘Your driver’s licence?’ Paul dragged out his wallet and proceeded to explain; he was in leave from training with the Commonwealth police. He flashed his ID card, and the police man waved us on. 

As simple as that. No ticket and no further explanation needed.

This was one of my first experiences in the world in which certain behaviours are overlooked by virtue of your status. But Paul’s status as a Commonwealth policeman was not enough to keep me with him. 

When he was shipped to Sydney for several weeks for training and I was left alone I began to reassess my commitment to him.

He seemed more dedicated than ever from a distance and arranged that I join him one weekend and visit the Blue Mountains. We stayed in an old chalet in Katoomba. Years later, Delia Falconer’s In the Service of Clouds transported me back there. 

At the time, the trip seemed onerous and without colour. I was restless and on my return to Melbourne and my first Social Work job at Prince Henry’s hospital where every day I trudged down to our basement department and tried to make sense of this career into which I had been launched, already longing for change. 

It came in the form of an invitation to dinner from one of the resident doctors. At first, I said ‘no’. I was in a relationship after all, but then with Paul away I changed my mind and the doctor and I met for pizza in St Kilda and later for sex. 

We continued to meet over several weeks until his rotation ended and the doctor fell out of life as easily as he had fallen in. 

By then the idea of continuing my relationship with Paul had cemented as a no-way in my mind and in time we found ways of splitting up.

It was a tortured break up as these things go with Paul reluctant to say goodbye. We separated but also hung on for several months with occasional get togethers for comfort and more sex until someone told him they knew I had been unfaithful while we were still together and he was furious.

‘Everyone knew but me,’ he yelled from below stairs and threw the last of my possessions from his place at my doorstep. This clinched it. The idea he was in the dark. The tables had turned so fast and far. When we met I chased him. He was the fancy-free bachelor and I naïve and a 19-year-old fully besotted to the point I once stowed away interstate on the Southern Aurora overnight train to be with him.

This is a long story. Save to say, I had declared myself loud and strong until I no longer felt the fire. It burned out and my crazy 22-year-old life began in earnest.

I think of it as the loneliest year of my life. I had moved into an apartment, chocolate brown brick modernist from the 1960s. We rented on the second floor with a small veranda and huge loungeroom, which we furnished with one long red fabric covered couch we bought second hand. 

I moved in with my four years younger sister, ill equipped for life away from home, but desperate to leave the craziness of our father. She had imagined, she told me years later that we would bond together and spend our nights away from work enjoying each other’s company and doing things together. 

She worked at the Commonwealth Bank and although in her teens she was the most rebellious of all the girls in my family, she soon settled into domesticity and longing for a quiet life while I grew wilder and more reckless. 

I picked a stranger up on a tram one night returning home invited him and he stayed for sex then went on his way. I have no recollection of his name or his appearance. But I was fortunate he seemed kind if not bemused by this weird young woman inviting him home. 

In any case, my younger sister was unimpressed. He could have been an axe murderer while she had met a fellow bank employee and fallen in love with him, although he was several years older. 

By the time our life in the apartment reached the end if its one year lease, she was married  (a marriage that did not last) and I had begun in the relationship that was to last the next fifty years of my life and beyond. 

But not before I enjoyed or should I say endured many other assignations with men, young and old, in my search for love. I was as dissociated as a person could be, I see now in retrospect. Finally managing to change jobs from the hospital to a counselling service in Glen Waverly where the work and my colleagues made more sense and offered greater job satisfaction. 

But my personal life tormented me like a stone in my shoe and I could not settle at home other than to go on trips to what in these days were called pick up hotels in search of company. The Anchor and Hope in Richmond jumps out in my memory and clubs like the Love Machine in South Yarra. The nights filled with possibility enthralled me more than the need to learn to drive for my counselling job where domestic visits were mandated and I needed to get wheels. 

But I was terrified of driving. Phobic my instructor told me one day. It took me over a year of weekly driving instructor lessons, at huge cost to my poor purse, to get the hang of it –  clutch, declutch, accelerate – all of it in his turquoise Datsun 120Y through the streets of Caulfield. 

It took me three attempts to pass my driver’s exam and even on the third my instructor felt sorry for me and let me by even though my ability at reverse parking was a joke. I have never tried to reverse park since. Though I can now reverse into car spaces allocated clearly, but trying to squeeze myself off the street between two cars still terrifies me and my daughter’s laugh at my ineptitude. ‘It’s easy,’ they say and offer to teach me.  But there are some things I refuse to master, life being as it is filled with other endless challenges.

I shall never repeat my twenty second year, but aspects of that young woman lie deep inside of me. I think of Jung’s shadow side, the disavowed parts of myself reflected in this story in so many ways I can only pluck at a few. 

You often hear people react in horror at the waywardness of their youth. The things they did which they would never contemplate now. The reckless abandonment of safety in the search for adventure, or he hope that someone will come along and sweep you under their wings and you might fly off together into a life of endless joy. Which never happens  we know but we can always dream.

On learning to drive

The driving instructor blasted his horn outside my flat as arranged at 8.00 am on a Thursday morning with the intention I drive him to work. I came out flustered. He took one look at my platform heels. 

‘Go back inside and get some proper shoes,’ he said. ‘You can’t drive in those.’ So I went back inside the flat which I shared with my boyfriend who was away in Sydney, slipped my platforms off into a plastic bag, and then dragged on my runners. 

I had driven in my boyfriend’s automatic, but this was to be a whole new experience. The stuff of pushing in the clutch and slowly easing it up in conjunction with a small purr of acceleration. 

I was never one for physical coordination and felt sure my instructor regretted taking me on from the get-go. He was an old man from my twenty-three-year-old perspective, as old as my father, and just as gruff. He was also determined.

‘Once you’re in first gear, you indicate. When the coast is clear weave your way out. Then turn left onto Dandenong Road.’ 

The man was out of his mind. Whatever gave him the idea I could take this yellow streak of fire into peak hour traffic on Dandenong Road where trams rushed by like roaring elephants and pedestrians held up drivers at every traffic light. 

I gripped the steering wheel at quarter to three on the clock face as instructed and planted my feet, one on either side, accelerator, and break. The stop start movement crippled me. Sweat poured from under my arm pits and my heart rate shot to the sky. 

By the time we pulled into the side street at the far end of the Prince Henry’s Hospital I had done a day’s work anxiety-wise and was ready to turn around and go back home to bed. ‘We’ll do this again next week,’ my instructor said. 

Repeat it we did for all the remaining weeks I worked at the hospital. But life has a way of waylaying our best plans and by the time I had failed my driving licence for a third time, this time under the care of a new instructor – I had sacked the first one – I moved into a different flat in Caulfield, said goodbye to my boyfriend of four years and was living with a younger sister. I also had a new job in a counselling agency in Glen Waverly where I was to hone my skills as a counselling social worker helping disadvantaged families who lived in and around Brandon Park. 

The year I turned twenty-four was the worst year of my life. What makes this one year stand out so boldly from others? This year when I was finally living as an independent woman, no longer in the thrall of a boyfriend I once thought I could not live without. Away from a family home from which l once longed for escape from the time I was fourteen.

This was the year when I lay alone in my double bed in a room opposite my younger sister’s often empty room. She, almost five years younger than me, left school early and took a job as a teller with the Commonwealth Bank. in what felt like a heartbeat soon after we moved in together, she had found a boyfriend. Within a year they launched into marriage. Years later, she told me she had imagined that she and I would spend our spare time together. We’d party together, cook together, make friends together. But it never happened. Not in this brown box second floor flat, rented from a wealthy landlord in Caulfield. The place was unfurnished beyond a long red couch we bought around the corner from a second-hand store; our beds; a television; a table, two chairs and fridge in the kitchen. The fridge was empty except for cheese, milk, butter and wine and the cupboards hollowed out to hold only half eaten packs of Salada crackers and vegemite jars, which my sister ate topped with her favourite plastic cheese. 

I ate elsewhere, if at all. The worst year of my life. The loneliness that snaked through my body like a poison and left me after work each night in search of companionship. 

I stood one Saturday morning in the laundromat on Inkerman Road and watched the washing machine cycle through its paces. The swish of clothes reminded me of the endlessness of my life. Somewhere out there, there was someone who would want to be with me as much as I wanted to be with them. 

At night I set a tape recorder within arm’s reach so I could replay Janis Ian’s sad voice. She learned the truth at seventeen that love was meant for beauty queens and high school girls with fresh skinned smiles who married young and then retired. Jonie Mitchel set my tears flowing with her laments to the men who had wronged her. All the mystery men in her life, while I longed to find someone just for me. And I was scared of invasion. Even though this apartment had a stairwell that was sealed off from the ground by a closed door system at the entrance, I still imagined someone sneaking through and climbing the stairs to get in through my locked door. 

Once a week in the morning my new driving instructor honked his horn to alert me to our trip this time to Glen Waverly, and this time in his turquoise Datsun 180Y. I liked him for his casual approach. 

‘You’re phobic about driving,’ he told me one day as I bunny hopped my way out of the driveway. You just need to relax.’

How to relax when the monster beneath my body had a life of its own, entirely outside of my understanding and control. I had learned to do things by rote at school. Learning the movements without understanding the why of things. It leaves an uneasy relationship to experience. As if you’re scooting through, going through the motions, but at risk of something shifting unexpectedly in the process and not knowing what to do. Once on a roll I was okay, into fourth gear, if no objects impeded. But I hated to stop unexpectedly. I hated any requirement to shift down the gears. 

It was not until years later when I turned myself inside and out on my analyst’s couch that I began to understand the why of things. The way things worked. Even the way bodies worked. I had completed two years of biology by the time I left school. I had rote learned every part of the body and its essential purpose but even then, I could not understand the female reproductive cycle. All these curious follicle stimulating hormones, oestrogen, progesterone, the purpose they served. 

Not until I came to recognise my fears of my body on my analysts’ couch, when I came to understand why I might avoid so much knowledge, as of it was too much of a threat to the one inside of me who had met difficult concepts of sexuality and human bodies well before her time, that I came to realise it was safe to go into understanding. That I would not lose my mind in the process. 

The third time I went for my driver’s licence, again I could not fathom the dimensions of parallel parking. Again, I could not calculate the rule of turns and calculations necessary and from what angle to wriggle the car into the space, but the examiner took pity on me. 

Perhaps he saw how timid I was behind the wheel. Perhaps he figured I would not be a danger out there on the road, too slow and feckless. Perhaps he decided I needed a break or that I was basically a good enough driver. 

He gave me my licence and I drove of home. Then in a state of terror at the thought of driving my car alone through the streets of Melbourne with no one at my side telling me what to do, I loaned my car to a man I had met a few weeks earlier at a party. 

This man had crashed his own car and needed wheels. He could have mine for a time I told him. I was okay on public transport. It took months before I was able to get the strength to reclaim my car and begin the long slow process of getting control of my own ability to drive.