First published in The Times on 6 January 2020
CHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMES; HAIR/MAKE UP: FIONA MOORE/TERRI MANDUCA
When you commit the fatal error that means you’ve failed your driving test, they don’t tell you straight away. I knew it wasn’t a good sign, though, when, as I was attempting to change lane on a busy street, my examiner whipped his head round, shrieked “Shit!” and yanked the wheel back.
“That’s that then,” I said grimly, once the honking had died down. He was wide-eyed. “We’ll talk about it at the end,” he said.
Welcome to the world of the learner driver. It’s a world that will be a distant memory for most of you, who did the sensible thing and learnt before you hit 20. I, however, started lessons in February last year, aged 35 and three quarters.
Why did I do it? Several thousand pounds and many humiliations down the road, I almost struggle to remember. I have lived in London for 13 years and managed very well by using public transport. The problem, though, was that several loved ones had moved to suburbs and distant villages and inconveniently had children there. I was routinely spending 90 minutes hopping from one train to another, when with a car I could have been there in half an hour.
If I’m honest, there was something else. I had a feeling I might be a really good driver; I thought I might have a natural aptitude and quickly take to doing long, carefree road trips, the wind in my hair, Roachford’s Cuddly Toy on the stereo.
It turns out that I don’t have any aptitude at all. The lane-changing disaster was what caused me to fail the first time, but it’s a toss-up as to whether it was the worst moment of the test. Twenty minutes later, despondently seeing the thing through to its bitter end, I was sitting in slow-moving traffic behind a van that was towing a trailer down a residential street. The van stopped; I stopped a foot or two behind it. Then it started to reverse. I realised with an outbreak of cold sweat that the driver was trying to pull into a parking space and hadn’t checked his mirror. The trailer was inching determinedly towards my instructor’s Micra.
“Reverse, reverse!” said the examiner urgently, leaning across me to honk the horn. I started fumbling desperately with the gear stick. “I CAN’T GET IT INTO REVERSE,” I cried, just as the trailer hit our bumper with a crunch.
The biggest shock of the year, really, has been how terrifying it is to be at the wheel of a car. I’m impressed by all of you who have been nonchalantly popping on and off motorways for decades, wisely never letting on to your passengers that it’s a constant test of nerves and reflexes. Of course I had heard the stats about crashes, seen the gruesome ads about wearing seatbelts and looking out for motorbikes, but it wasn’t until I started driving that I became bone-janglingly aware that cars are death machines. Visions of bloodshed flashed in front of my eyes when I tipped over 25mph; I found the car unwieldy and couldn’t tell how close I was to other vehicles, kerbs, walls and cats.
I had taken my theory test in March, which was fine, embarrassing as it was to queue up alongside teenagers and their mums. As for the practical stuff, I stopped counting the number of lessons I’d paid for when I passed the apparently average 40-hour mark. That was in . . . early June.
At least I liked my instructor, a middle-aged Pakistani-born father of two. We’ll call him Imran because, as I now know, he has great respect for Imran Khan. You cover a lot of conversational ground when you’re sitting in a car with someone for the best part of a year, although occasionally I’ve had to say: “CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT YOUR CRICKET LEAGUE IN A MINUTE? I’M CONCENTRATING ON THIS ROUNDABOUT.”
Despite not having a huge amount in common, we have bonded. We have talked religion, family and work. He has asked me with gentle bafflement why British people go to McDonald’s, and I have taught him not to use the unconvincing phrase “You’re doing reasonably well” when you’re trying to boost someone’s confidence. We have practised parallel parking outside his house, with his toddler waving vigorously from the window. We once watched gleefully together, for a good five minutes, as an argument between two drivers about who had right of way descended into some clumsy shoving.
After my first test he politely dismissed the dent in his bumper (not my fault, technically) and did the drive home so that I could weep in the passenger seat. Sometimes, being Muslim, he would need to do the sunset prayer during a lesson; we would go to the big Tesco and I would quietly practise my bay parking while he sat next to me with his eyes closed. I don’t know whether the praying was connected to the driving.
It took me three months to get a second test slot. By then it was mid-September. “If I’m not in a crash, then it’s an improvement on last time!” I repeated manically to anyone who would listen. My hands were trembling. As we drove to the test centre, I told Imran I needed him to say positive things. “I’m going to be GREAT,” I said firmly, leading by example. “Yes, probably you will be OK — much of it is luck on the day,” he said with a shrug.
We parked and went into the waiting room. I nipped off for an anxious wee. When I came back, Imran said: “Can you give me the key? I need to do something in the car.” Fine, I thought, he’s probably retrieving his jacket.
Driving tests start with an eyesight check; my examiner — a new bloke, sterner than the first — had me read a distant number plate aloud. “Thank you, Harriet; and now you can show me to the car,” he said with a flourish of his clipboard, and cheerfully I replied: “Of course!”
We turned to face the car park. The car was gone. “Oh,” I said. “It’s not here.”
He looked at me with a patient smile, like someone humouring a moron, and asked: “What colour is it?”
“It’s red, but it’s not here,” I repeated. His smile disappeared. I called Imran, adopting the tone of someone who doesn’t want to have a fight with their spouse in front of a stranger. “I’m nearly back!” he said brightly. “He’s nearly back,” I said to the examiner, who had begun to huff and roll his eyes. “I’ll have to cancel the test if the car’s not here by five past — if there IS a car,” he said darkly.
Two minutes and a lot of theatrical watch-checking later, Imran returned. He told me later that he had had an issue with the car that he thought he could fix before I noticed he had gone. By the time my test started my examiner was thunderous and my feet were trembling too. Technically I failed that one because I hesitated too long at a junction, but it was doomed all along. I didn’t speak to Imran much on the drive home.
Once there, I took to Twitter in self-pity. “I failed my driving test for the second time today. Send sympathy to this incompetent old person,” I tweeted mournfully. “The best drivers pass sixth time (or I did at any rate),” a highly competent journalist I know replied. “My instructor said in his whole career he had never met anyone with less natural aptitude for driving than me,” said another, who has been driving for 20 years.
This immediately lifted my spirits. “I got a D for dangerous driving on one attempt for hitting a pedestrian, though I still maintain he hit me,” brought a smile to my face too, although that probably makes me a psychopath. I also found this response very heartening: “I passed first time and I wrote my car off 11 days later. When you pass you will actually be able to drive!” Another kind soul got in touch to tell me that her third test had gone so badly that she had had to park the car and do a walk of shame back to the test centre, the examiner walking silently by her side.
It was a deep comfort to find that, although pathetic, I’m not the only person who finds the whole thing terrifying. I’m also not statistically unusual in having failed. I was 36 by the time I took that first test; in 2018/9 only 34 per cent of women my age passed first time, and 35 per cent second time. That’s compared with 53 per cent and 56 per cent of girls aged 17 and under (17 is the legal driving age for most, but some with mobility issues are allowed to take their tests at 16). Whether it’s overconfidence or a brain that’s tuned to school, we’re much better at this stuff when we’re young.
Reluctantly, but in the interests of good journalism, I’ll tell you that the statistics are startlingly different for men. Boys of 17 and under had a 56.3 per cent pass rate, while men my age still had a very respectable 48 per cent pass rate. This is annoying. Do women get worse at driving as they age, or worse at learning, or worse at handling their nerves? Do women have a crushing, debilitating awareness of mortality that men don’t suffer from? Then again, the statistics look rather different when you learn that men account for 74 per cent of all UK road deaths; the pass rate doesn’t seem to reflect a greater competence.
At my next lesson after the second fail, my frosty mood towards Imran beginning to thaw, I asked him what he was having for dinner. Fish and chips, he said; his wife cooks it with spicy batter. I said how delicious it sounded. At the lesson after that, he casually presented me with a foil parcel for my tea.
By this point I had re-evaluated my expectations of my driving — from “Susan Sarandon in Thelma & Louise (without the suicide)” to “the woman who is pictured in the local paper after passing on her 27th attempt”. Then suddenly, at the end of September — I did it. The stars were aligned: it was sunny and the roads were quiet; my examiner was a jolly type who made lots of jokes. I passed, and I couldn’t believe I had done it. I still can’t.
My new car arrived just in time for Christmas. Part of the reason I learnt to drive was so that I could more easily visit my sister, who lives a couple of hours away by public transport; on reflection, though, I have decided to cut contact with her and find a new family who I can visit without taking any A or M roads.
I don’t know yet whether all this has been worth it. I have faced the unnecessary humiliation of proving myself crap at something that idiots can master. I have spent an enormous amount of money and the best part of a year on a journey that never involved getting out of the car. I have picked up a skill that will make me poorer and inflict damage on the environment, and that in London I could have lived without. There are rarely available parking spaces anywhere near my flat. And worst of all, now I have to say goodbye to Imran, my safety blanket and dear friend who isn’t really a friend — in that it would be socially awkward for us to spend time together in any other context than sitting side by side, staring at a road.
When I got out of his car for the last time, he called: “Perhaps I’ll deliver some fish and chips sometime.” I wonder if he would also give me a lift to my sister’s.