Crash Course

I had never met the lad before but he was intent on passing on to me some momentous news. 

It is a natural thing to do. 

Many a time I have approached a complete stranger in the street to convey a football score or the latest in global information on just about anything. I appreciate that some people cannot cope with an impromptu announcement in this way and I apologise but if it is good and memorable then why not let everyone and, as they say, his or her dog in on it. 

In this particular instance the lad just wanted to let me and everyone know that he had, that very morning, passed his car driving test. This was accompanied by his waving about of an official looking Certificate and the badgering of his Dad to let him go out straight away in the family car. 

The anticipation and excitement of that young man brought back to me the emotions that I had experienced way back in 1984 when at the age of twenty one,  and at the third attempt, I had reached that same heady achievement. 

I was actually quite a late passer, if indeed that is an actual word, mainly down to a family pact that siblings could only learn to drive when their immediate elder had got through the test and was on the road. 

I did start to learn straight away when the law permitted but any concentrated effort was constantly disrupted by the pressures of studying both at school and in Polytechnic education but mainly because of lack of funds. 

There was also the rather off-putting behaviour of various driving instructors in the first round of formal lessons. 

The name of the first driving school – Genesis- was to my mind a positive and determining factor in my choice in that it suggested a new start and the first day of a life behind the wheel. I had not considered any negative connotations such as the likelihood of a Phil Collins et al soundtrack during any lessons but was very much taken aback when the instructor started to preach the Gospel in between giving instruction on mirror-signal-manoeuvre. 

I expected a sermon on the relevance of the three point turn to the Holy Trinity or emergency braking as being similar to renouncing sin. Suffice to say I took just the one of a taster course of ten lessons (and carols?). 

The next instructor was, as I found out within a few minutes of taking the driving seat ,embroiled in a messy separation from his long term girlfriend. 

I began to wonder why my lessons seemed to be on an increasingly familiar circuit of city roads until I realised that the guy was spying on the house where his estranged partner now lived with someone else and that route gave him a view of it every fifteen minutes or so. 

He became increasingly embittered in those early sessions and would seek my opinion and endorsement on how unreasonable his girlfriend had been in her treatment of him. I was, after finishing that short, unproductive course, just grateful that those laps of town did not actually include a physical siting of the subject of his animosity. 

I did continue lessons whilst away at college in an East Midland city but in unknown territory and neighbourhoods I could not get settled or into a learning routine and so gave up for a couple of years. 

A job placement starting in the autumn in my third college year was on the condition that I had a full driving licence and so the summer prior was one of regular practice with my father and then a crash course (always a strange bit of alliteration relative to driving) with a local instructor. 

I was confident in my road skills but not so my ability to read a distant number plate which, in the 1980’s, was an integral part of the actual test. I began to pace out distances in the street as per the eyesight requirement but even at the minimum I had to really squint in order to read a licence plate and that was also in my prescription spectacles. 

The actual test went pretty well or so I thought until the final series of Highway Code questions whilst parked kerbside back at the Test Centre. 

The examiner showed extreme patience as I struggled with a simple question about how to let other road users know that I was slowing down. I ventured with “step on the brake pedal”, “flash the headlights” and “just wave” before the realisation that he wanted me to answer that the correct signal was an outstretched right arm and a circular movement from the elbow. 

My instructor who had accompanied me to the test but then went for a cup of tea for its duration had to drive me home as the news that I had passed had put me into a mental fuzz and state of disbelieving shock. 

These thoughts flashed past my eyes in an instant as I congratulated the new driver on his success. 

I was excited for him and what the freedom of the road would mean to him and his future.