ENDPAPERS
Law of the Jungle
By MARY HOLLAND
But then the whole countryside from the A40 on out seems like a picture postcard for a festival of spring just now. Spring comes smug and soft in Bucks, a bit bolshy in Worcestershire, where the trees hedging the rollingly prosperous farms are posted with bills reading, 'Don't let THEM strangle British farming.' It is complacent in the Cotswolds, slightly too sure of itself in the Vale of Evesham, with signs directing the traveller `Blossom Route, commence here,' startled in Shropshire, and quite simply amazed in Wales, where the spindly lambs huddle into their mothers in the rain and caper in blinking astonishment at the sudden sunshine.
Thus the joys of a green Bank Holiday driver, a newly recruited member of the masses in their minis, defacing the countryside, crowding the roads, a menace to ourselves and everyone else. I think it's the best thing the masses have caught on to in years and like most pleasures I've been taught to discount I only wish I'd known about it sooner. This weekend was my first venture on the roads outside London and it was an initiation not without incident. Luckily I was able to start early and get my quota of accidents over on Wednesday when the roads were still empty. There was the puncture this side of Oxford, and a heart-stopping brush with an ambulance of all shaming things on the other. Praise be, no harm was done and in retrospect the incidents seem salutary since they shocked me by direct experience and, given the present methods of preparing drivers for the roads in this country, there doesn't seem to be any other way to learn.
Driving on the roads at Bank Holiday is an alarming experience for most of us masses who don't drive much outside our cities, and rather more than alarming for the new driver. The Ministry of Transport test, of course, has left us dangerously ill-fitted to drive in any con- ditions at all, let alone these unfamiliar ones. By now the driving test is probably harmful to the country's safety as a whole since so much of-the learner's time is taken up with driving in a way he will never do again once he is on his own. While he is obsessively giving hand signals and reversing perfectly around corners to pass the test, no learner I have ever met has been taught how to park, how to judge when it's safe to overtake at speed on a country road, when and how to use his lights at night. And even if the new driver does know and care about the rules, the first thing he learns when he is actually driving is, that no one else gives a fig for them. The solid white lines are there to forbid over- taking but might be invisible for all -the notice most drivers take of them. There are speed limit signs in every one of that pretty procession of Cotswold villages on the road between Worcester and Oxford, but no driver I followed slowed down to obey them. And you may spend hours on 'a dark road conscientiously dipping your lights but it won't stop you being dazzled by every car coming the other way.
All of which is obviously more or less all right for the experienced drivers (at least with the exception of the dead), but is a cause for con- stant terrors to a new driver who can't yet cope with any situation by a reflex action other than jamming on the brakes. For all our sakes would it not be possible for the driver who has just passed the test to be labelled in some way, for the recently abandoned L plates to be replaced for, say, six months with another sign indicating that this is an inexperienced operator more prone to blind panic than instant safety? It would warn other drivers, cut down on their irritability and, no-less important, on the novice's constant worry about their irritability. One of the hardest things to get used to when the driving test is passed is that all the wary consideration with which road users treat the learner driver is immediately withdrawn.
But as well as the new drivers there are the others. It is not for a newcomer like myself to criticise the way the roads are run. Articles which start, 'how to stop the murder on our roads,' always seem very dissatisfied with them and go on about lights and road signs and rules. These seem to me to be remarkably helpful: what is wrong is that no one takes any notice of them nor seems to feel the least compulsion to di- so. The law of the road is surely pointless unless it is ruthlessly enforced, and safety regulations which are regularly ignored with impunity are more dangerous than no regulations at all. They give a feeling of false security that there are well-known rules and that people will obey them, whereas the truth is that on our roads the law of the jungle is the only one that counts.
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