Limousines
I'll take a back seat
Petronella Wyatt
DOROTHY PARKER, who yearned her living, used to complain about what gifts love brought her: 'Why is it no one ever sent me yet/One perfect limousine, do you sup- pose?/Ah no, it's always just my luck to get/ One perfect rose.' Spot on, Mrs Parker. Not that one has anything against flora, gift- wrapped and accompanied by stiff card- board, but nothing beats the back of a well-sprung limo.
Consider Ken Livingstone. Wise Ken has never learnt to drive. As Talleyrand used to say, the secret of life is to delegate. Driving definitely falls into this category. After all, when one gets on to a train one does not take over from the man in the engine-box. From the moment locomotion was invented to transport man from A to B the smart people employed someone to sit up front. The idea that one would drive oneself, except in sport, was bizarre to the middle and upper classes. If one couldn't afford one's own carriage, one took that equivalent of a bus, the stagecoach.
It is very agreeable moving at high speed but not, I find, if I am in charge of the wheel. Like my late father I tend to drift off into a daze. I begin to think about some- thing else or to read a letter. My father once began to read a love letter from a girl while speeding down a motorway and crashed straight into the barriers. He was lucky to escape alive.
As a child, driving seemed to me to be something deeply dangerous and inadvis- able. On family holidays Father occasionally insisted on taking me to see Tuscan church- yards. Suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, he would drive off the edge of the road, often into a ditch. Once he badly damaged the wing of the car. When we arrived home he claimed, outrageously, to my mother, that it wasn't his fault — the road had col- lapsed. From then on I was determined not to drive. It was obviously something at which the Wyatt family did not excel. This suspicion was confirmed when my brother wrote off a series of cars.
There were various advantages, it seemed to me, to being driven. First, there were all sorts of things one could do in the back of a roomy car. No, I don't mean that. What dirty minds you have. Reading, napping, stretching, eating, drinking, indeed all the things that can be done at home — almost. To this, add the freedom from the hideous stress that modern driving entails, especially in London where there is never anywhere to park. On arrival at a dinner party, the block has to be circled six or seven times before a space can be found. The walk to the house then takes 15 minutes and is crucifying to the hair. Then, of course, there is the prob- lem with drinking, or not, and the arguments about who is driving back. When I tell peo- ple I don't run a car they sometimes ask me, `But wouldn't you prefer to be indepen- dent?' Well, I suppose riding across the Sahara on a camel would be a form of inde- pendence, but I'll give that a miss as well.
An increasing number of people don't drive themselves. Bernard Levin has never learnt, neither did Kingsley Amis. No one in New York seems to drive any more: the proportion of taxis to cars is now four to one. The first time I rode in the back of a limousine was in New York. It was the acme of glamour and comfort. The seats appeared to have been constructed along the same principles as the brassiere designed by Howard Hughes for Jane Rus- sell; that is, they supported in all the right areas. From then on I decided that my ambition was not to own a large house, a yacht or to travel first-class, but to have a car and someone to drive it for me.
Second only to a limousine is the vintage car. I have lusted after these ever since see- ing Chao, Chitty Bang Bang. There is noth- ing like a vintage car to set off large black sunglasses. They are unfailingly attention- grabbing, vital to exhibitionists like myself] both car and glasses, that is. I had the good fortune last weekend to be collected frorn.a railway station in a 3-litre Bentley built In 1925. After someone called Captain John Duff entered a 3-litre in the 1924 Le Mans 24-hour race, Bentley Motors decided to make a car for the following year's competi- tion. My ride was in the actual model driven in the race by Bertie Kensington-Moir and Dr Dudly Benjafield. Unfortunately it ran its allowed of petrol one-and-a-half laps short of allowed pit stop. Fortunately, its present owner was better prepared. Remember the vintage car Steed drove in The Avengers? The one in which you have r°,7 put your arms out to signal left and right., This was obviously a hint to buy a pair 01 long, leather motoring gloves to go with the black sunglasses. But drive myself? As Ebre Doolittle said, 'Not bloody likely.'
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