11:58

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Hungerford Common is where our eldest, Jack, shed his bicycle stabilisers, aged somewhere between three and four, I’d guess.

There’s a reasonably long, hard, compacted gravel and smooth dirt track just off the winding road that passes over the common, with bollards just after a parking area, to prevent cars from driving too far along it, so it’s safe for cycling practice.

The only real obstacle, not that there were any this day, would be free grazing cattle that wander the common leaving ‘natural cones’ to weave around. There wouldn’t be a lot of weaving though on this mission. It’d be stabilisers off, pedal pedal pedal, let the wind flow through your locks and fly Jack fly.

And so it came to pass that day, he’d effectively seen off his balance learner plates and no longer needed two extra wheels to keep him steady, well, most of the time anyway.

The common was to become my playground for family portraiture during the first ten years of my photographic business. It has plenty of room for kids to run and run, a nearby railway to make the session a half-decent adventure for the youngens, and a pub within walking range for parents to celebrate the successful navigation of an hour spent making family memories.

I’m not a frequent visitor to the cattle-gridded common these days, but without fail, every time I do drive over it to hug the route of the Kennet and Avon canal from the south side, that stretch of path I see from the road is front and foremost in my mind, for its recollected family history that was a small but significant step in the history of someone marking freedoms.

Fourteen years later, and along somewhat more asphalt-covered roads, Jack is now, hopefully, about to remove the stabilisers from his next vehicle. This time, that safety net is not an additional set of wheels but his passenger-seated travelling chaperones, i.e., Sam, me, and the driving instructor. He’ll hopefully be able to cast aside the red L stickers on the bonnet and boot of his dark blue mini and become the family’s youngest driver to gain his licence, freedom to roam, and drive over the same common where he first cast off that set of bicycle stabilisers well over a decade ago.

I’ll level with ya, it’s 7-ish in the morning as I write these words, and you are, thank you in advance, the best catharsis a man could need. I’m nervous. I just want him to pass, and once I drop him at the test centre later on this morning, there’s nothing I can do to affect the outcome. I can only wait, hope and drink tea in the adjacent café to the test centre.

I can’t reach across and grab his saddle at the first sign of a wobble, I can’t shout “Go on Jack, you’ve got this,” at appropriate moments, though he’d probably swat me away for being an overenthusiastic dad if I did. All I can do is wait, hope and drink that tea.

I did muse that it might be funny to position myself along the route, if I knew which one they’d be taking, and hold up a placard with a message from his mum, who is equally as nervous as I am this morning. Can you imagine the trouble we’d be in?

‘Tea Neale, tea, best just drink tea.’

Freedom is such precious gift, and we take that, I suspect very much for granted, until the day someone takes your licence away for whatever reason.

When I first took my test &GF% years ago, it was in my instructor’s red Nissan Cherry, and I can’t say it went well. I’m stretching to remember his name. Colin, Terry, Trevor, it was one of those kinds of names, not a Dave or Mark, more the sort of name that comes with a clipboard. A name like Colin is a signed-up clipboard name.

Talk about nerves, though. That day as, let’s call him Colin, wished me luck and walked off to the 1984 equivalent of the café adjacent to the test centre I attended hoping his Nissan would return in one piece, I met with my examiner, let’s call him Mr. Burgess, a nod to the examining officer in a film called The Knowledge, for those who recall a movie about becoming a cabbie in London.

Mr Burgess wasn’t a character to be messed with in the film, which pretty much described his namesake’s demeanour at the driving test centre I attended.

Mr Burgess made it pretty obvious that his job was to keep the roads clear of young drivers who just weren’t up to the job. It was a personal policy that came with a look that said, “It’s unlikely you are walking out of this place with a pass today.”

I may not remember his name, but I do remember clearly what I felt like that day.

The test centre was positioned next and to the left of a large parking area, which was mainly taken up by heavy goods vehicles, and the reason I remember that detail clearly was because Mr. Burgess shouted ‘Stop’ loudly as I pulled out in front of an approaching articulated lorry, which I thought was turning left before it got to the test centre’s car park.

We’d only just begun, as the Carpenters once sang.

I swear blind he had his left indicator on, but in the ensuing years and a bottle or three of Château Neuf de Fallover 1976 vintage, I’d be making it up if I were to say he definitely did.

I stopped briskly.

Mr Burgess tested the seat belt nicely, and there followed the first dressing down, which no end of 76 vintage will have me forget.

“What do we never do when pulling out onto a main road?” he said in raised tones.

I’m not sure if ‘what do we never do,’ is entirely grammatically correct, is it?

I suspected I’d probably failed straight away, though I hoped Mr Burgess would forgive me, my first moment of nerves during the driving test.

“Sorry, sir,” was all I could really muster, thinking that sir might buy me some generous respect points. It worked at school, why not here?

And so we continued.

Mr Burgess had a habit of tutting. He’d tut, and then he’d write something down. You’d drive another street or two, and he’d tut again, possibly twice, and scurrilously write notes in an angry-sounding way.

He also sucked air in, every now and then, in that ‘Ooooh, you don’t want to do that’ kind of way.

When he wasn’t tutting or sucking air, he was practising the art of menacing silence. He made silence feel like a formal warning. He certainly didn’t do small talk.

I know that, because thinking I could talk my way down from the lorry mishap, he shushed me immediately.

“I think I would prefer you just drive and only talk if I ask you a question.”

And so followed 45 minutes or so of tutting, air sucking and angry scribbles.

Toward the end of the test and on the way back to the centre, we arrived at a roundabout, where Mr Burgess asked me to complete a 360-degree manoeuvre around it. Now, at this point, you’re going to look at me and say ‘You made that up, Neale,’ and I wouldn’t blame you in the least, but this is 1984, a time when we shared our provincial roads with those wonderful kitsch electric milk floats.

On the outside of the roundabout, a blue and white Express Dairies milk float was trundling around the road feature, hugging the curb stones for some reason. I waited for it to pass, then entered from the junction and positioned myself in the centre of the space, which allowed for two vehicles, he says, sounding like a copper’s report of a traffic accident.

The float was, as floats are, slow.

I passed it on my left.

Mr. Burgess tutted, then sucked more air in than a mechanic about to tell you, you have a family of gnomes living in your catalytic converter and it’s going to cost you your house to repair it.

“What do we never do on a roundabout?” asked Mr Burgess.

These days, many years older, and armed with the knowledge that when you’ve messed something up to a level you’re clearly not going to recover from, the only recourse is humour, I might have said something like, “Have a picnic?”

I’d overtaken a moving vehicle on a roundabout, and milk floats counted apparently. This did not look good.

We returned to the test centre.

I parked up, and Mr Burgess put crosses in boxes. I know that because of the double strokes he was making in his unnecessarily angry fashion.

“Well, that is the end of the test,” he remarked, “and I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that you haven’t passed.”

He seemed delighted. I was gutted.

My plans for the evening had been foiled, and Mr Burgess was, of course, with my seventeen-year-old’s rationale fully employed, completely at fault for placing a lorry in an awkward place at the start of the test, and a milk float challenge at the end, with a hundred tuts in between.

So, licence still imaginary, plans cancelled, pride bruised, that was that.

The way these things are written, we’ve shifted by a few hours, and I’m now sat in the café next to the test centre having just dropped Jack in for his test.

I didn’t see him leave the car park. I didn’t see his version of Mr Burgess. I have no idea what is currently happening as I sit nursing a pot of tea and a Bakewell slice.

The test started at 11.58, which seems rather a strange exact time to begin a test.

Surely noon would have been fine, wouldn’t it? Or do they say 11.58 so as to prevent someone getting 1200 hours confused and showing up to take a test at midnight?

I hope ‘Son of Burgess’ hasn’t taken up a role in this test centre, eighty or so miles from where I took my examination.

I’ve given Jack two bits of advice.

Don’t pull out in front of lorries, and avoid roundabout manoeuvres involving milk floats. A bit niche that one, seeing that I haven’t seen one on a road for three decades or so.

Freedom is a particular prize in our life isn’t it? And whilst you can clearly have that without needing to drive a car, there’s a definite privilege to starting your day in one place, and ending it several hundred miles north, east, south or west.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a pot of tea to finish, and another twenty minutes to endure before our Jack calls me with the news.

I’ll get back to you tomorrow.