THE HARROWING ADVENTURES OF THE ROAD TEST
The driving test: the final frontier, the High Noon of exams. I was eighteen years old, and I enrolled at the British School of Motoring to prepare for it. I was to drive in a Morris 1100, the Alec Issigonis–designed car with a sideways mounted engine with an 1100-cc (or 1.1-liter) power plant. It was powder blue, unlike my instructor’s nose, which was end-of-cock purple. He had what I thought was a tiny mustache, but on closer inspection turned out to be nose hairs that looked like two hairy pussies side by side. His eyebrows were like a relief map of the Himalayas. They just went everywhere. He wore a three-quarter-length coat and a five-and-three-quarter-size trilby hat on his head. He was constantly blowing his nose and checking the contents of his handkerchief. He was as friendly as a male gorilla with nothing to shag! And lucky me had him all to myself for one whole hour.
“Get in the vehicle.”
Christ, “the vehicle”—what the hell?
“You will address me as Mr. Mephistopheles at all times. You will follow my instructions and you will not deviate from them. You will not turn to face me when you are driving. You vill obey my orders at all times, and YOU VILL BE SHOT IF YOU GO OVER THIRTY MILES AN HOUR!”
Now, he didn’t look German (well, not with those nose hairs). The lesson itself was a blur. All I remember is that he shouted a lot and said “No! No! No!” all the time. Basically, he was as bad at instructing as I was at driving. And I still had five more lessons.
In between lessons, I read the driver’s bible—The Highway Code. You had to memorize every bloody thing in it, for the theory part of the test.
After my sixth lesson, “Hair Face” turned to me and said, “You’ve no chance of passing your test.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you’re shite.”
Ah, nothing like a gentle letdown! Of course, he was right. I sat the test and failed. And yup, it was the questions that I screwed up.
Examiner: “Right, when should you never overtake?”
Me: “Erm . . . on the brow of a hill.”
Examiner: “I need two more.”
Me: “Erm . . . on the brow of another hill?”
He was not a humorous man and it all went downhill from there. Dejected and hurt, I sloped off home. I applied for another shot at it the next day. I suddenly realized what I had been doing wrong, twit that I was. At home, I had been practicing with a Ford Popular with its three gears and then spending only one hour a week in the more modern Morris 1100 with its four gears, so I never really got used to it. At that time, I was in my first band (The Gobi Desert Canoe Club). Our guitarist, Trevor Chance, had a four-gear Mini Minor, so I asked him if I could drive his car when we were having band practice and sit my test in it. He said yes, no problem, Brian—after I’d handed him some money.
The upshot was that I sat my test six weeks later. The examiner was a nice guy. He told me we were going to Dunston to do the test—that was my own backyard. At the end, he said, “You’ve passed, Mr. Johnson. Well done!” I drove straight to the pub to celebrate.
It was one of those days that your youth gobbles up, an achievement that youth deserves, and being young you drink it in like fine wine—a bit like losing your virginity. I know I’m waxing lyrical, but shit! You’d overcome machinery. You were “the man.” You were flying solo. You could go anywhere you wanted, on your own—all the things I’d dreamt of as a kid (though I was still a kid, really, at eighteen). I’ll bet there’s not one of you out there reading this who doesn’t remember that day, that feeling of freedom.