Writer’s Workshop | Take It Easy

It feels like time for another dip into John Holton’s Writer’s Workshop. His #1 prompt this week is

Write a post inspired by the word test

so that’s what I’m doing. There are many possible interpretations for this but I’m going with the kind you need to pass before you are allowed full access to the road network, as distinct from the restricted rights you have as a learner on a provisional licence. A few months back I shared The Week I Grew Up, an edited and updated version of a piece I first wrote in 2016, about a week in the summer of 1969 in which life changed beyond all recognition for me. Part of that experience was my first holiday job, from which I saved enough to buy a secondhand motor scooter – a Lambretta, just like this one, and in this colour:

I spent many happy hours riding that around town and countryside: trips into town for shopping, occasionally to school as it was more fun than the bus, and for football matches in which I was playing in the not-so-local Sunday League. After a while friends encouraged me to take the driving test for it, as a full licence would allow me to carry a passenger – essential to the image in attracting a girlfriend. I didn’t have one at the time, but I lived in hope. To be fair, though, as a learner I was allowed to carry a passenger if they had a full licence, and on the couple of occasions I did that it felt very strange: leaning around bends in the road took on a whole new dimension!

But I persevered, and around nine months after I had bought the scooter I felt sufficiently brave to apply for the test. We lived in a village outside Dover, and the nearest test centre was in Folkestone, around eight miles away. I read and re-read the book I had bought about riding a scooter several times, and studied the Highway Code diligently. I was ready, wasn’t I? Not living in Folkestone meant that I would be taking the test on unfamiliar roads, but what could possibly go wrong? As it turned out, just about everything.

For a car test the examiner gets in the vehicle with you, but for a scooter and motorbike that obviously isn’t possible, so they give you directions of where to ride and then cut through the route on foot to join up with you, from a circuit that gives them plenty of opportunity for observation. And instead of thumping the car dashboard for the emergency stop, they leap out at you from behind a tree. Well, this one did, anyway! I pootled around quite happily, making sure that I looked around and gave signals, and after about twenty minutes I was given the final verdict: I had failed!

He actually said that he almost stopped the test as soon as it started, as I pulled into the wrong lane for the first turn and then had to cut across in a way which would have been dangerous with more traffic around, but let me carry on to see if I got better. Apparently, I didn’t. He told me that I hadn’t looked as much as I should at junctions, that my emergency stop was too slow (I thought it best not to mention that the scooter’s brakes weren’t all that good) and the final coup de grâce: he told me I had been speeding!. I knew that the speedo wasn’t accurate, as it never registered more than 47mph even when I knew from others that I was riding with that we were doing 60mph, but didn’t think that would matter in a 30mph limit in a residential area. It seems that it did!

So I had to ride home after that crushing disappointment with his parting words echoing in my ears: “be careful…please.” I had a thoroughly miserable trip, which at some point got even worse than I could have imagined: this was in summer 1970, and I was assailed by a hailstorm which was pretty painful to ride through until it softened into flakes rather than stones. Snow in summer? Not possible, but it sure felt like it!

The postscript to this story is that around six months later we moved to Folkestone: my Mum sold the family home after she and Dad divorced, and moved us to the town in which she had grown up. We lived in a second storey flat in a converted late Victorian house, and the surrounding roads had a familiar feel to them. Mum had only gone and bought a flat in a road on the scooter test circuit, and the very tree from behind which my examiner had leapt out at me was right across the road! I saw him several times putting other victims through the same torture, and wondered if he recognised my scooter, which was parked on the wide pavement outside our building. Probably not, but that was one of the factors in my decision to sell the bike to a schoolmate the following year. Well, that and being stopped by Mr Plod for riding without a headlight. I told him that it could only have happened just up the road, as I was in an area well lit by streetlights and I would have noticed its absence sooner. I had, actually, and was taking a bit of a chance, but he didn’t need to know that, did he?

I usually like to end my posts with a tune, but there aren’t many for motor scooters. I could think of songs for other types of two wheeled transport, such as The Pushbike Song by The Mixtures (utter crap), or Jasper Carrott’s Funky Moped (vaguely funny, but also crap). But there is one that stands out for me, and if you watch this lyric video you’ll see the phrases “once upon a pair of wheels” and “scoot down the road,” so it works for me:

Simon and Garfunkel, of course, with Baby Driver from their Bridge Over Troubled Water album. That sums up how I used to feel, even if I was never officially approved and didn’t get to test anyone’s ‘engines.’ I can’t have been that bad a rider, though, as I’ve lived to tell the tale, and only came off it once 🤣🛵