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I remember having plenty to worry about as a pimply sixteen-year-old attending high school in America. There were the pimples, for a start. The first flush of youth morphed into the first rash of young adulthood almost overnight. Some of the less generous boys at school started calling me Pizza Face. That was distressing. Then there was the eternal struggle for scraps of coolness among the society jackals of my sophomore class. I'd always been on the periphery, and like so many teens, attaining higher status among the hip set was never far from my thoughts. And of course there were always half-a-dozen girls that had taken my fancy and were therefore trying to avoid me. That hurt, too. Even my studies - shock to my parents if they ever read this - actually troubled me slightly.
But I never once worried about not getting my driving licence. It simply wasn't one of those things American school-goers stressed about. You took a handful of lessons; the instructor drove you up to a test centre; you lapped a few cones in the car park; you came home with your lovely shining photocard. This you'd later find to be useless when trying to buy alcohol when under the age of 21, and so was almost always immediately butchered into a fake ID. This was cause for more consternation, as getting caught with a badly botched fake ID was much worse than not passing your driving test.
I think I got out on the roads about a dozen times before my actual 'test'. Lessons were four-up in a beige Nissan Sentra (Sunny), and - showing the slightest amount of proficiency - I was almost always left to go last, when there were only about ten minutes remaining in the 'session'. I spent most of the time urging the other learners to go faster from the back seat. I remember my driving instructor being fairly lenient about just how much gas we could administer on the winding country lanes banked on each side by towering rows of maize. And in backwater Middletown, Delaware, you were more likely to encounter a tractor or a buzzard gnawing on some roadkill than you were another car. Hazard awareness was being able to detect a bend in the road. Nothing short of relaxing Yank motoring, even as a novice.
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| Honda Civic - Pizza Face's little friend |
I passed the test first time. I think I was in and out in twenty-five minutes. I'd saved up a little cash from summer jobs and my parents chipped in (well, you know) a little for my first motor: a 1989 Honda Civic four-door with an engine so gasping my father was sure I could do no harm to anyone in it. I loved it to pieces for its simplicity and just for the fact that it started up every time and I could thrash the Bejesus out of it without a murmur of complaint. Four months later I wasn't watching what I was doing and ploughed into the back of a friend's 4x4 in traffic. There was hardly a snick of paint off her big Toyota, but my little friend was no more. Thankfully, I emerged unscathed from the wreckage bar my dented dignity.
Fast forward twelve years. My Yank licence has expired (yes, they do) and I'm in the awkward position of working for a motoring website but lacking a driving qualification in the UK. Not that it would have done any good - I'd only learned on a slush 'box in America.
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