In spite of her having had only two days and no help from Polly, she’d learned not only how to get into the Bentley, but how to start it and how to work the gear stick and the hand brake. Just before she’d come back, she’d driven it along the High, up Headington Hill, and safely back again. “I rather think these lessons will be fun,” she told Una and went out to the car. But it wasn’t the Bentley, it was the vicar’s battered Austin.
“Her ladyship had a WVS meeting in Daventry,” the vicar explained.
And she didn’t want her car damaged, Eileen thought.
“But driving one car is much like driving another,” the vicar said.
Not true. The clutch pedal on the Austin seemed to operate on an entirely different principle. It stalled no matter how slowly Eileen let it out—if she could get it started in the first place. Either the engine refused to turn over, or she flooded it. When she finally did succeed in starting it and putting it in gear, it died before she’d gone ten yards. “The old girl’s rather temperamental, I’m afraid,” Mr. Goode said, smiling at her. “You’re doing very well.”
“I thought clergymen weren’t supposed to tell lies,” she said, and after three more tries managed to nurse the Austin all the way to the end of the drive. But compared to Una, who couldn’t even remember which foot to put on which pedal and burst into tears every time the vicar attempted to coach her, she was positively brilliant.
Samuels was even worse, convinced he could master “that bloody car” by brute force and blasphemy, and Eileen was surprised the vicar didn’t abandon the whole project, Lady Caroline or no Lady Caroline. But he kept grimly on, in spite of his students and the Hodbins, who’d decided it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen, and who raced home from school on lesson days to sit on the steps and heckle.
“What do they think they’re doin’?” Alf would ask Binnie in a loud voice.
“Learnin’ to drive, for when the jerries invade.”
Alf would watch the proceedings for a moment and then innocently ask, “Whose side are they on?” and they would both collapse in merriment.
I must get back to Oxford on my next half-day out and practice on an Austin, Eileen thought, but she didn’t make it. On Monday morning four new evacuees arrived, and she had no chance to get to the drop, and a week later evacuees they’d had before began to come back—Jill Potter and Ralph and Tony Gubbins—all of whom joined the Hodbins on the steps to watch the driving lessons and shout taunts. “Get a ’orse!” Alf yelled during a particularly bad lesson of Una’s. “You’d ’ave better luck teaching it to drive than this lot, Vicar!”
“I think the vicar should teach me to drive,” Binnie said. “I’d be heaps better than Una.”
No doubt, Eileen thought, but a Hodbin version of Bonnie and Clyde, with Binnie driving the getaway car, was the last thing the vicar needed. “If you truly want to help win the war, go collect paper for the scrap drive or something,” she told the Hodbins, only to find out the next day they’d “collected” Lady Caroline’s appointment book, a first folio of Shakespeare, and all of Mrs. Bascombe’s cooking receipts.
“They’re impossible,” she told the vicar when he came for her next lesson.
“Our faith teaches us that no one is beyond the hope of redemption,” he said in his best pulpit manner, “although I must admit the Hodbins test the limits of that belief,” and proceeded to show her how to reverse the car. She felt guilty that he was spending so much time teaching her. He should be working with someone who’d be here when the war began in earnest, and she only had a few weeks left. She comforted herself with the knowledge that Backbury had had almost no need for ambulance drivers. It hadn’t been bombed, and only one plane had crashed—in 1942, a German Messerschmitt west of the village. The pilot had died on impact and hadn’t needed an ambulance. And at any rate, petrol rationing would soon prevent anyone from driving anything.
She doubted extra lessons would help Una or Samuels, and Mrs. Bascombe was still staunchly refusing to be taught. “I’m willing to do my bit to help win the war same as the next one,” she told the vicar when he tried to persuade