Why Sue Gaisford is less than thrilled with her daughter's driving-test result...
Sue Gaisford
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She’s done it. Our youngest daughter has just passed her driving test at the third go, I think (or maybe the fourth). She is absolutely thrilled and I suppose we should be too. Success is always better than failure, isn’t it?
Somehow, the broaching of this particular barrier doesn’t produce feelings of unbridled joy. Maybe it’s because we’ve become conditioned to L plates flapping relentlessly down the years. They represented the certain knowledge that the child was not going to leap into the driving seat and roar away alone. She still needed me or her father there beside her, offering quiet, practical advice about how she might bring the car (safely and immediately) to a halt.
When the oldest was learning, full of haughty scorn for her ignorant
parents who clearly knew nothing, I confided my anxieties to our local
pharmacist. She was profoundly sympathetic. She told me that she and her
husband would often compare notes after taking their own daughters out to practise driving. "Sometimes" she recalled "we’d agree that it was a one-Valium experience. More often, we felt that it really called for two."
But you have to give them lots of time to practise between lessons and before you’ve thought about it there you are again. Sitting in the passenger seat, bumping along in the gutter, assailed by overhanging branches and impotent terror, while the engine roars and innocent primary school children dive for cover. You realise with startling clarity that all you want in the world is to be safely home again and nobody hurt. Very quietly, you reassure yourself, surely no examiner will give this one a licence? Then you pray, disloyally, Oh, please God, surely not?
But they just have, and now she wants the car. She’s going to pick up
her friends. She’s taking them to the pub (Well what else is there to
do round here?) And, yes, she’s only going to drink diet coke and she’ll
probably be late and will we please stop worrying. After all, she can
drive now. Can’t she?
