Success, Failure and Trying Again

Story · all 20 words

Five Attempts

I passed my driving test at the fifth attempt, at the age of twenty-six, in a town I did not live in, on a Wednesday afternoon in February.

The first failure was fair. I was nineteen and I had had eight lessons because that was what I could afford, and I underestimated the whole thing so completely that I remember being surprised there was a written element.

The second was also fair. Roundabout, wrong lane, an actual horn from an actual lorry.

The third is the one I still think about. I drove, by any reasonable measure, perfectly well for thirty-eight minutes, and then reversed into a bay at a slight angle and touched a kerb with one rear wheel, and that was a serious fault, and that was that.

I sat in the car park afterwards and blamed the examiner out loud to my instructor, at some length, and he let me finish and then said the single most useful thing anybody said to me in that entire period, which was: “You did touch the kerb, though.”

There was nothing to learn from the third test except that. I had been driving well and I made one mistake and the mistake counted. That is not an injustice. That is a driving test.

The fourth was a genuine setback, because by then I needed the licence for a job that had already been offered on the assumption I would have one. The disappointment that afternoon was not about driving at all. It was about ringing somebody and explaining, and I have rarely felt worse about anything.

I did let that employer down. They were decent about it and held the post for six weeks, which I have never forgotten. Nobody had turned me down; I had simply failed to turn up with the one thing the job required, and that is a good deal worse than rejection.

And then there is the thing nobody admits about this sort of story. I am not somebody who can bounce back from things quickly and I never have been. Between the fourth test and the fifth I did not become more resilient, or braver, or better. I simply booked another test.

That is what persevere actually looks like most of the time. It is not a montage. It is filling in a form again while feeling exactly as bad as you did last time.

What changed was mechanical. My instructor made me do nothing but reversing manoeuvres for four consecutive lessons, which cost me a hundred and forty pounds I did not have and which I resented deeply, and by the end I could have done it asleep. That was the only effort in five years that made any measurable difference. The obstacle was one specific skill, not my character, and it turned out to be a solvable problem that I had spent three years treating as a personality defect.

I do not think anybody overcomes a bad reverse park, and I do not think I did either. I practised the bit I was bad at, which anybody could have told me at nineteen, and somebody probably did.

There was also luck in it. The fifth test had no rain, no lorries, a quiet route, and an examiner who said good afternoon in a way that made me feel like a person rather than a candidate. I have never pretended otherwise.

I have no talent for driving whatsoever. I am, twenty years later, an adequate and cautious driver who still does not enjoy motorways.

What I did get was the second chance, four times over, which is the actual point. Very few things in an adult life let you simply book another one for sixty-two pounds.

I did not get that job. Somebody else had it by then and quite right too. I got a different one eight months later which was better, and I have never worked out whether that makes up for it or whether it just happened afterwards, which is not the same thing.

I still regret telling everybody at work before the third test. I have not told a single person about any exam I have taken since.