The Driving Test

Introduction

This is an example story for my "Sunshine After The Rain Challenge" that you can find here:

One of the things I have noticed about my backup account is I get a lot less comments than I do on my main accounts, as well as, seemingly a lot less reads. One story has five comments and one read, but I suppose, in reality, it is early days, and hopefully, I can let this fade into the background when my main account is restored.

So on to the story, which are my thoughts on what happened and it is from the nineteen seventies, so I may have got some things wrong.

The music is "Driving In My Car" by Madness.

The Driving Test

When I was eighteen, my mum bought me a mini for £50 and a course of driving lessons. I learned the highway code and I could drive and hated hand signals as you had to steer, wind your window down by hand, stick your arm out the window, while keeping one hand on the steering wheel and controlling your gearstick. You had to do this, and the car had indicators, but no electric windows. I never worked that out and my driving instructor couldn't tell me why.

Then came the day of my first test.

I was slightly nervous but got through it perfectly, bar one incident.

The instructor told me to turn left at the end of the next street. As I turned, there was a big van illegally parked right on the corner, so I had to try and overtake, but as I did, there was another car coming down on the other side of the road, so I slammed on.

The driving instructor wasn't wearing a seatbelt and dropped his pen and papers and hit his head on the windscreen. He was not happy, but I was confident, as you needed three incidents to fail you.

When I got to the end, he told me that I had failed because I was driving too fast at the time of the incident, I had failed to control the vehicle, and I had endangered other road users. He got three failure reasons from that one incident.

I was not devastated, but I was upset and felt cheated. I knew I was a good driver, but I had failed.

That meant more driving lessons to my annoyance because I didn't think I had anything more to learn. The reality is, you only start to learn when you have passed your test and you start going out on your own, and you realise you cannot assume that other drivers are fit to be on the road.

I spoke with people and they told me that they only passed so many test entries and the main thing to remember was to be confident in yourself, whatever happens.

Then came the second test.

Within two minutes, the instructor told me to turn sharp left, and I stalled the car, and a car behind me blasted its horn. From that point on, I knew I had failed, so I went through the motions, completely not bothered, and I was sure of the outcome.

The three-point turn was a mess running over the footpaths, but I got the car turned round, then at the end the instructor as me why a car stalls and I made up something that was wrong.

Then, nine questions from the highway code, none of which I could answer correctly. I had failed: there was no doubt in my mind.

Then the guy filled in his form, turns to me and said, "Congratulations, Mr Singleton, you have passed"

That really was a show, but after what I thought was a total disaster, I was now a driver.

That was my sunshine after the rain.