Driving my grandfather’s car
Thursday, July 10, 2025
My grandfather stretched his left arm across the passenger seat and looked out of the back window of his ancient Renault as he reversed into the undertaker’s yard. I looked up from my book on the back seat and watched his right arm reaching away from me, towards the steering wheel. I was twelve years old.
My grandfather helped the village undertaker with his ‘Books’, which were the huge ledgers where he recorded payments, and, far more interestingly, by painstakingly applying small cardboard letters to brass coffin plates to spell out the name and dates of the dead person. It was a similar process to my Letraset transfer letter but he took far more care than I ever did. I had watched him do this on the dining table, the tea-tray at his elbow. Now we were taking the Books and the coffin plates into the undertaker’s office in the village.
My grandfather stopped the car, and pulled on the handbrake. He got out of the car, and casually asked me to move it down the hill while he was inside the office.
“Oh, yes,” I said, nonchalantly. He left the keys in the ignition and disappeared into the office, holding the Books and a bag containing a couple of meticulously annotated coffin plates
I sat alone in the car, my book limp in my hand. Was he just assuming that as a male, I had the innate sense of What To Do With Cars, just as he seemed to?
I had no such thing, despite watching males of the family struggling to start our succession of secondhand cars, twisting ignition keys, wriggling gear levers (they were levers, in those days in England), shifting feet between the three pedals. I’d watched as they mended, replaced, sworn. I’d interrogated and earwigged, trying to understand what was going on.
But I had never, ever been behind the wheel of anything more than my pedal car. And that had been many years ago when I had been a lot younger.
Now my grandfather had handed over a full ton of metal car to me with the implicit confidence that I could be trusted with it. I was thrilled and scared.
My grandfather felt like the centre of the village. He was a teacher at the local school. He was chairman (still a chairman in those days) of the parochial church council, he ran a drama group which toured local village halls, which he compered as a stand up Farmer Giles, amusing the local Mothers Unions and Women’s Institutes. Shopkeepers knew him. Everybody knew him. He’d taught them, or he’d been helping them with their Books, or dealing with officialdom. He knew everyone, and I trailed round in his wake.
And now he was assuming I could do this man-thing.
I scrambled between the front seats and sat behind the wheel. I was not a tall child but if I sat on the very edge of the driver’s seat, I would just be able to see over the steering wheel, and the tips of my toes would just about reach the pedals.
I eased off the handbrake, and waited for it gravity to overcome inertia. The car stayed put. I replayed in my mind the car-starting I’d watched dozens of times, and captured that grip of the gear lever, the quick loose push left and right. I hadn’t done that. I tried it, and felt something ease free. Gears, I guessed.
The car started to roll slowly down the hill towards the road, at less than walking pace.
My grandfather had left it in first gear, the result of a cautious mind and decades of cars with ageing brakes.
The car rolled down the slope in a straight line, towards the archway at the bottom of the slope, next to the road.
My foot hovered over the middle pedal. The brake, I knew, from my interrogations.
My hands gripped the steering wheel. The car needed know steering, but this too was what you did when you drove.
Which was what I was now doing for the first time. Even without the engine running. On private land. And very slowly. Downhill. Ten yards. It was enthralling.
The front of the car drew level with the archway, the entrance to the road.
I pushed down on the middle pedal, holding my breath, feeling the resistance against my foot, pressing down further and the car slowing jerkily, twitching me forward.
And the car stopped.
I kept holding my breath.
My fingers closed round the handbrake, pushing the button on the end in, which took my strength than I’d expected, and I pulled the lever up, listening to the ratchets click, till it wouldn’t go any further. I let go of the button, released the brake.
The next move was to lift my foot off the brake pedal, but what if the handbrake needed the gears to be in first, as my grandfather had left it? What if the handbrake wasn’t good enough to keep the car in place on this slope?
I grabbed the gear lever and pushed it forwards to the position I’d pulled it away from a few seconds ago, but it wouldn’t click back into the place where it had been. I had no idea how to solve this.
I would just have to trust the handbrake. I lifted my foot off the footbrake.
The car stayed put.
I breathed out and lent back in the seat, the way I’d seen drivers do after a long, stressful journey.
My grandfather emerged from the undertaker’s office, this time without the Books and the bag of coffin plates. I scrambled between the front seats into the back of the Renault.
My grandfather bowed into the driver’s seat again and twisted the ignition. “You managed then Freddo.”
“Yeah.” I had. I had managed. I knew more than I thought I did, as it turned out.
He clicked the handbrake button in and pushed it down. His right foot pushed the brake pedal down. Then, his left foot pressed the clutch down and he eased the gear lever into first.
I remembered this for future use.