When I interviewed the memoirist and journalist Dolly Alderton for the podcast, she had a similar experience when she failed to get into Bristol University. Like me, she had been lucky enough to be sent to a private school, something that struck her as ‘the most wildly unfair thing in the world’.
‘I’m not an academic person,’ she said. ‘I was pretty lazy, and I came out with tremendous results that 100 per cent I wouldn’t have got had I not been at a private school. I truly believe and know that in my heart, because it’s actually really hard to be a failure at private school because you’re paying this extraordinary amount of money to be in these tiny classes, normally, to have a huge amount of time and focus and resources spent on you.
‘I think it’s so unfair that a girl like me, who would have just completely fallen through the cracks, I think, in any other schooling environment, manages to have these great opportunities and excel in a way that isn’t artificial, but was very much supported at every baby step of the way.’
Alderton passed her GCSEs, managing to get a C in Maths ‘even though it seemed like that was the most impossible thing’ and sailed through her schooling so that by the time it came to applying to universities, she was blessed with ‘this rock solid assurance that everything is going to be really easy in life, which I suppose is entitlement’.
When Bristol rejected her, ‘I just didn’t believe it. That’s the extent of how little I had faced failure in my life. Everything that I tried, my parents ploughed money in and time in to make sure that I just dragged my feet through it. Whether it was a ballet exam or getting into this boarding school for sixth form. Or my Maths GCSE. I just hadn’t experienced failure.
‘But yeah, it was a good lesson to me because it made me acknowledge the extent of my privilege and the curious and unfair and unusual education that I had. And to acknowledge that and realise that that’s not what the real world was going to be like.
‘And maybe it’s not just exclusive to people who were privately schooled, maybe it’s a sort of adolescent arrogance as well. But what a good lesson to learn!’
It is. Alderton ended up going to Exeter, so it’s not exactly an unremitting tale of woe. Nor was my driving-test failure. A few weeks went past, and I sat my test again. I had been randomly allotted the same examiner. The absurdity seemed to me so great that my nerves actually dissipated.
Interestingly, because I’d already failed and faced the entirely self-imposed indignity of that failure, I was liberated from my own expectations. My family now knew I was a rubbish driver, I thought, so there was no need to worry about letting anyone down. Besides, maybe continuing to fail my driving test over the coming years would become a loveable character quirk and I’d develop a hitherto untapped ditziness that people would find funny and charming.
So I embarked on my second driving test in a pleasant fog of couldn’t-give-a-shit-ness. I made legions of minor errors. I could see the instructor jotting them down on her clipboard and I still didn’t care. This time, when it came to the hill start, I glided smoothly away without any rollback but the minor errors kept piling up until her sheet of paper became blackened with tiny vertical hyphens.
I returned to the test centre and waited for the examiner to deliver the bad news.
‘I’m pleased to say …’ she started and I knew I’d passed.
The biggest lesson I took from it all was that the secret to succeeding at tests is not, actually, to get a fantastic mark. Succeeding at a test means not defining yourself according to the outcome. It means reminding yourself that you exist separately from those ticks in the margin and that most of life is an arbitrary collision of serendipitous or random events and no one is awarding you percentage points for how you live it.
Since then, I have tried to adopt this mindset, of someone who has made the effort to understand who they really are, what they care about and what their values are rather than what grades they think they deserve. After all, the person awarding those grades might simply be having a bad day or might not agree with what you believe about Prospero’s role in The Tempest or whether you think Richard III really did kill the Princes in the Tower (it was definitely Henry Tudor). But that doesn’t mean you’re a failure as a person.
Of course, that is not to say exams are unimportant. They are. They give you discipline and focus. Good results can be a conduit to a more expansive life with greater opportunities. They can get you into universities and fulfilling careers and they can give you confidence in your own abilities. I’m not one of those people who, every year when A-level results come out, takes to social media to pontificate pompously about how none of it really counts and, hey kids, I left school with an E in Snail Breeding and Advanced Crochet Work, but look at me now – I’m a C-list reality TV star with 120,000 followers on Twitter and a boohoo.com clothing line. No, I think exams are important. But I also think we need to keep them in perspective. No one deserves to pass a test simply because they believe they’re entitled to a positive result. Nor are we wholly defined by exams; it’s just that working hard and doing well at them can occasionally help us get to where we want to be.
And sometimes, if we don’t end up where we’d planned or we’re forced to confront the humiliation of a failed science exam or an undead bat flying around a classroom, it can make us understand all of the above.
That is its own kind of success.
I got into Cambridge University. I did well at my exams there too, having fallen into the habit of doing everything I could to achieve the best grades. I enjoyed my time at Cambridge because, true nerd that I am, I loved my subject and geeked out reading Plato and studying war memorials and writing essays with linking words such as ‘nevertheless’ which I thought made me sound intelligent (I was wrong).
I also met my best friend, Emma. She was standing in the corner of the college bar one evening in freshers’ week. A half-Swedish blonde-haired sexpot, she wore a slogan T-shirt with ‘One for the rogue’ emblazoned across the front and was holding a pint in one hand. Inevitably, she was surrounded by a gaggle of slavering men who could barely keep their tongues from flopping out of their teenage mouths.
Whoever that is, I thought as I walked in and ordered my old lady gin and tonic, we are so not going to get on. At first glance, Emma looked like one of the popular girls I had lived in fear of since the days of Siobhan. But then one of the men I knew vaguely from halls beckoned me over and introduced us, and Emma looked straight at me, ignored all the guys trying desperately to get her attention, and started quoting dialogue from the Austin Powers film. She turned out to be so incredibly funny and so disarmingly unaware of her own gorgeousness that, right then and there, I fell in platonic love.
Emma has the most darkly hilarious sense of humour I’ve ever encountered, and it’s so unexpected because she looks so sweet and pretty when you first meet her, and also because later in life, she became a psychotherapist and a very seriously successful person. The contradiction is part of her considerable charm. In our final year at university, we lived together in student rooms. We used to have friends over for ad-hoc dinners, although because we had no kitchen, we were severely limited in what we could offer in terms of food (most of the time it was guacamole, I seem to remember). Emma and I washed the dishes in the bathroom basin, and left them to dry on the window-sill, which meant that occasionally we’d be awoken by a dramatic crashing sound as soap-sudded plates slipped off the ledge and ricocheted into the alley below. I truly hope no passerby was ever injured, but I cannot guarantee it.
After graduating, I upgraded to a place with a kitchen and lived in a house-share