Driving schools are ubiquitous these days, and they cater to new drivers and old, first-time licencee or old-timer retest. At the tender age of fifteen, all I needed was an older brother, a beater of a car and the Humber River flats. I took two attempts at the drivers test before I passed.

It usually fell to the oldest child to teach younger siblings how to drive and we were no exception. Farm kids learned as soon as they could reach the pedals so that they could drive the tractor or pick-up around the hay field while older and stronger family members threw bales up onto the load.

I don’t remember when Bob acquired his first car, but I do know that he loved auto mechanics in grade nine at Weston Collegiate and it was the one school subject to hold any interest for him. I also recall his taking Dad’s car for a few spins around the block when Father was out of town on a construction safety job. Why the old man didn’t take his car I can’t remember, but it was fair game for a kid eager to have a set of wheels of his own. Then he got his licence and there was no stopping him, Brother Bob that is.

Bob taught me to drive his first car, a 1948 Prefect I think. It looked like a short cereal box on wheels. There were no radial tires in those days and fixing flats was part of the game. Dismantling engines on front lawns and replacing suspension systems was not supposed to be a normal pastime for car owners, but then brother Bob was not your average car owner although I’m sure he was quite a normal teenager for the time. Back to the Humber River flats.

Off Islington Avenue, a concession-road western village boundary, were pasture lands along the river just before an iron bridge over our swimming hole. There were a few car tracks through these meadows where farmers had hauled equipment, and we decided they would make a safe training area for my first lesson.

The main skill in driving a stick-shift vehicle is the engagement of the accelerator as one releases the clutch pedal. If one executes this procedure smoothly, the car moves ahead with a (usually) corresponding smoothness in first gear. At a certain speed one repeats the clutch-to-accelerator process as second gear is engaged. Experienced drivers learned to tell by the pitch of the sound from their engine just when they could shift gears without even using the clutch, but that was a skill I never really acquired. Just getting smoothly into first was a major accomplishment. We began lesson one.

I could focus completely on the order of the gears without any distraction of seat belts which wouldn’t be required for another twenty-five years or so and I got the beast started up in no time as it was summer and we didn’t need to crank a sluggish engine over to get it to fire up. I claim that if we hadn’t parked on the grass but on the rutted track, everything would have gone off smoothly.

As it was, Bob’s yelling at me that I was revving the engine too much, got me all upset and I took my foot off the clutch a trifle un-smoothly and the car lurched ahead like a jack rabbit. I was moving! I was actually driving a car! I was driving that car at a good clip too — did I mention I had revved the engine rather vigorously? I was also driving that car straight for the river, as Bob mentioned, also somewhat vigorously. Well, hell, you can’t steer and try to shift gears and listen to advice all at the same time, so I just hung on to the steering wheel and jammed on the brakes. Of course my foot wasn’t on the brake was it?

We accelerated towards the river, bounced over many rocks, crossed it (summertime trickle that it was) and were heading for the steeper bank on the far side when I suddenly mastered the art of steering. We swung around and headed back through the stream, back over those same infernal rocks, and up onto the pasture before I found the brake.

Of course suddenly removing my foot from the gas pedal had the effect of stalling the vehicle and the sudden absence of power combined with my (again) vigorous application of the brake brought us to a rather sudden halt just about where we had started out. I’m sure if we had had seat belts on they would have only bruised our tender ribs, and the windshield never even sustained a crack. Bob gave a lengthy, vivid, detailed report on the errors I had committed, took over the driver’s seat and we went home.

It was a few years later that I took my driver’s test and failed. Damn test area didn’t have any rivers on it.