Driving Lesson Disasters with Sophie Sayers and Friends

In the run-up to next week’s launch of my ninth Sophie Sayers Cozy Mystery, Driven to Murder, in which Sophie learns to drive, I asked author friends at my publisher Boldwood Books whether they had any funny stories or cautionary tales about their own driving lessons and tests.

Their flood of answers made me wonder whether anyone ever learns to drive without mishap! Huge thanks to Team Boldwood for allowing me share their entertaining anecdotes on my blog today, interspersed with some exclusive excerpts from Driven to Murder.

As Sophie discovers, beginner’s nerves can be a challenge. Says Donovan Cook , “I did my driving test in the winter and had to do a reverse around the corner, which I hated and was terrible at. Naturally, I messed it up and because I knew I messed it up, I became that nervous that I fogged the car up and we had to wait a while for the car to de-fog before we could carry on with the test, which I failed .”

When Friends Can be Foes

One might feel less nervous if taught by a friend, but Sophie fears damaging her relationship if she lets Hector teach her. Here she’s trying to break to him gently that he’s not her first choice of instructor.

‘Before I can go any further, I need to find a decent driving instructor. I’d thought about giving the local guy a ring. I’ve seen his red hatchback about the village, with the sign on top – “Succeed with Saxon”. I expect he’s booked up ages in advance though, so no rush.’

Hector turned his doleful lost puppy look on me, green eyes wide beneath his dark curls. ‘Why pay good money to a driving instructor when I can teach you? I thought it might be fun to give you your first lesson after work tonight. Look, I’ve just made you a present.’

From beneath the trade counter, he produced a pair of white cardboard squares, each bearing a large red letter ‘L’ for ‘Learner’. He must have printed them on the shop’s laser printer.

‘You’ve laminated them,’ I faltered. ‘Are you sure home-made L-plates are legal?’

Any excuse would do to postpone the ordeal. Still at the honeymoon stage of our relationship, Hector and I hardly ever argued. I didn’t want driving lessons to upset our comfortable status quo.

Sophie’s first driving lesson is in Hector’s beloved Land Rover – pictured here outside his Hector’s House bookshop in T E Shepherd’s lovely illustration (Copyright Thomas Shepherd http://www.teshepherd.art.com)

M J Porter learned the hard way to avoid lessons with her father: “I had the slowest crash while under my Dad’s driving instruction. It was the first time driving the family car, and he told me to brake, which I did, but the brake pedal wasn’t as responsive as the one in the instructor’s car, and I slowly, slowly, slowly, crashed into one of the signs on a roundabout which tell you which way to go. Nightmare. I never went out with him again.”

The Perils of Professional Driving Instructors

But as Sophie discovers, hiring a professional instructor can bring its own problems. Here she is on her first lesson with local teacher Saxon Arch:

His right hand bypassed the gear stick and landed on my left thigh. ‘There are other ways of paying, if you get my drift.’

Instinctively, I let go of the steering wheel to slap his straying hand. ‘How dare you!’

He recoiled as if at an explosion.

‘You bring me out here and insult my boyfriend, besmirch the memory of my lovely great aunt, and then lay your grubby hands on me! That’s nothing short of assault.’

I steered the car towards the car park’s exit sign.

‘I’ve had enough of this. I’m driving us straight home now.’ I swung the car onto the lane, taking only a small piece of hedgerow with us. As we headed through the winding lanes in second gear, I ignored Saxon’s sharp intakes of breath. I wasn’t entirely confident about changing gears yet and thought it better to stick with the gear I knew best.

‘If you think you’re getting any more business from me, you’ve got another think coming,’ I stormed, steering abruptly into a layby to let a tractor pass. ‘And I’m not paying for this lesson either, as I’ll have had barely twenty minutes behind the wheel by the time I get home.’

Saxon, wide-eyed, was gripping the dashboard with both hands now. At least that meant he was keeping them away from me.

Fortunately the lanes are around Sophie’s village of Wendlebury Barrow are usually quiet. Unfortunately they’re mostly single-track – not easy for novices to navigate. (Image © T E Shepherd http://www.teshepherdart.com)

Like Sophie, Jessica Redland picked the wrong instructor. “For my very first driving lesson on my 17th birthday, the instructor drove me to a remote, empty car park 15 minutes from home below a hill. He spent ages drawing a picture of a gear box and explaining how it works (yawn!) We had enough time for me to attempt to drive up and down the car park twice, using first, second and reverse gears before having to drive home, an hour’s lesson gone. What a swizz! Looking back later, it struck me how wrong it was for him to take me somewhere so remote. I lasted my six booked lessons with him and ditched him. I found him very creepy!”

Fenella Miller had problems with her first instructor too. “On my first lesson, the instructor made me hold a washing up bowl and pretend I was driving. He ended up sectioned a week later.” Not the obvious way to get to grips with the technology of cars – another problem that Sophie encounters. Here she is trying to master which pedal does what on Hector’s Land Rover in the middle of a disused airfield. Hector is trying to keep it simple:

‘Just remember, the pedals are in alphabetical order by function. A,B,C: accelerator, brake, clutch.’

‘Copy that!’ I replied brightly, the airfield setting going to my head. Now I imagined taking flight, like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Once I’d mastered driving, perhaps I could learn to fly a plane.

I tapped each pedal, from left to right, with the tip of my right shoe. ‘Accelerator, brake, clutch.’

Hector facepalmed. ‘No, no, Sophie, other way round. Like I said, A, B, C.’

When he pointed at the pedals again, I realised he was going from right to left. I thumped the steering wheel.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, make your mind up! That’s reverse alphabetical order. In this country, we read from left to right. It’s C, B, A.’

‘That’s why I pointed, so you could see which pedal was which.’ He wagged his finger in the air. ‘You know what I mean. Same difference.’

I scowled. ‘It’s not the same thing at all. You’d soon complain if I sorted our fiction section in reverse alphabetical order.’

Although often tricky to navigate, the winding, narrow Cotswold rural lanes are very scenicTesting Times with Tricky Examiners

Of course, we can pick our driving instructors, but not our examiners. Leonie Mack had an unfortunate experience on her driving test: “The guy who invigilated my driving test was a real weirdo. I was studying journalism at uni and when he found that out he started ranting about how awful and immoral journalists are and how they invade privacy and I think he told me a personal story about how a journalist hounded him for something and I was a clueless first-year just trying to pass my test!”

Fortunately, Sophie is luckier with her examiner, although not everything goes smoothly. But at least she is luckier than Maddie Please, who told me, “I failed my first driving test when I pulled out of the test centre and stalled in the middle of the road. The examiner rolled his eyes at me and said, ‘Well let’s just have a nice drive shall we?'” I suppose it could have been a lot worse – at least he was kind about it!

Feel the Fear and Fail Anyway…

Plenty more of my author friends failed their driving tests at least once. When I passed second time, my instructor told me I’d be a better driver for my earlier failure, because it would make me a more careful driver. It irked me at the time, as I’d never failed any other kind of exam before, but – eventually – I was thankful for the experience.

Rachel Burton and her family also had the “benefit” of failing first time. “I failed one test for speeding and one for driving out of the “entry only” gate at the driving centre,” she confesses. “My husband failed for driving on the wrong side of the road. My mum had the best one though. She drove out of the driving centre on her first test and straight into the back of a bus.”

Edie Baylis has a string of driving test horror stories to share. “On my test I slightly scuffed the kerb on the reverse round the corner manoeuvre and in classic 17-year-old fashion, I yanked on the handbrake, yelled “I’ve screwed that up now!” and proceeded to get out of the car and walk off having a meltdown, leaving the examiner sitting there. Afterwards, I discovered that he hadn’t noticed the scuff (it was barely a touch but I’m a perfectionist) and was about to pass me…. But I walked off… Doh! Needless to say in my retest I didn’t have a meltdown, but it was close when on the same manoeuvre, I’d just got round the corner perfectly and almost finished when a car indicated to turn into the road, and I had stop and go back out the road and wait to do it again once the usurping car had gone. I was even more furious when I realised the driver of that other car was only my bloody mother! My ex passed his test by writing the test car off four minutes into the test. He passed because he’d dealt with the accident/exchanging details correctly!”

Jo Lovett has another set of disaster stories. “My daughter failed her third driving test for speeding. A couple of weeks before that she was having a lesson and accidentally doing 50 in a 30 zone, and her instructor lost it and yelled, “Jesus Christ, woman, you’re going to kill us.” A friend taught me before my second test and he wouldn’t let me drive under 35mph for petrol consumption reasons. I drove too fast right at the beginning of my test and was only saved from running a woman with a buggy over on a zebra crossing by the examiner slamming his brakes on. Then we had to carry on and do the whole thing. In those days they ticked boxes of things you’d failed on and he ticked every single box except two. I’m an ok driver now!”

In contrast, Sarah Bennett taught her examiner a new trick. “I lived in Swindon when I learnt to drive and everyone who lived there had to make it across the Magic Roundabout unscathed (if you haven’t ever seen it there is one central roundabout in the middle surrounded by five other mini roundabouts). When I was taking my test, we approached it from direction I had never come from before and when I set off, the invigilator said “oh, we’ll go this way”. I had a proper panic and started asking if I’d done it wrong, had I failed etc and he said “just keep going”. Thankfully we were almost finished but I was convinced that I must have failed. When we stopped at the centre he apologised immediately for being unprofessional and that he should not have said anything but I had taken him by surprise. He told me that he used that route every day and it had never occurred to him to follow the route I had chosen and that it was actually more efficient than his usual route and he would be using it from then on! I passed but I’m not sure if that’s because I was good enough or if he was embarrassed or delighted I’d made his daily commute easier.”

Ruby Speechley also struck lucky. “I stalled on a hill during my driving test. I thought oh well, I’ve failed so relaxed and carried on. I was amazed when he said I’d passed and asked him if he felt sorry for me because I was pregnant. He said no, he didn’t even know I was pregnant! (I was so skinny and 6 months pregnant with my first child and had the tiniest bump).”

Sarah Hope also found hills a hazard. “My childhood home was on a hill, and almost every time I pulled up outside the front of it, my instructor’s car would start rolling down the hill despite the handbrake being pulled up. Of course, this was always my fault – I should have pulled the handbrake up more – rather than his dodgy car!”

When Sophie takes her test, she doesn’t let the unreasonable demands of the driving examiner get her down:

My confidence faded once I was sitting beside the examiner, a stern, elderly chap with the severe hairline of a monk’s tonsure. I tried not to think about my recent discovery that monks wore their hair in that style not for religious reasons, but to reduce nit infestation. Whatever happened, I shouldn’t take my hands off the wheel to scratch my head.

‘Get a move on!’ he cried, at one point, as I took my time pulling out to overtake a milk float. That seemed needlessly cruel. I wasn’t going to let this guy push me around, just because he had a licence, and I didn’t.

‘I’m sorry, but I’m not going to overtake unless I can see the amount of road clear that I need to complete the manoeuvre,’ I said. ‘And I can see the road ahead better than you can from the passenger seat.’

‘When I hit the dashboard with my pen, you’re to do an emergency stop,’ he announced a few minutes later as we reached a clear, straight stretch of road.

I glanced in my rear-view mirror. ‘Well, don’t do it just yet, or that idiot who is far too close to my back bumper will go piling straight into me.’

His pen was already in mid-air when he glanced at the wing mirror on his side of the car.

‘Next left,’ he barked.

Our follower carried on down the main road. In the side street we’d turned into, there were no moving vehicles in front or behind us, only parked cars on either side.

‘Okay,’ he murmured, and tapped the dashboard.

I slammed my feet so hard on the clutch and brake that he lurched forward and fell back hard against his seat.

‘Full marks for reaction time,’ he conceded, rubbing the back of his head where it had collided with the head restraint. Just as well the head restraint was there, or his head might have ricocheted off the parcel shelf.

Finally, he commanded me to pull into the test centre car park and pointed to an empty space. Although I could more easily have driven straight into it, I showed off by reversing neatly in. I wanted to make him feel bad for having failed me.

Not all driving lesson disasters are the fault of the learner.

J A Baker recalls: “My instructor got into a road rage argument with another driver while I was heading down a busy road in rush hour traffic. It was so bad that he undid his seatbelt and clambered into the backseat to give the other driver behind us the finger.”

Poor Jennifer Bohnet could hardly have been expected to anticipate the obstruction she describes here. “When I took my test many years ago in Bristol, the large zoo there was still operational, and about halfway through the test the examiner told me to take the next right, followed by a left. The right turn was quickly followed by an unscheduled emergency stop – two elephants out for their daily constitutional were coming towards us.”

You wouldn’t find elephants on the highway these days – nor would you be allowed to drive unaccompanied on a provisional licence, as Valerie Keogh did back in the day in her native Ireland: “When I got my first car, a mini, I decided to drive to show it off to my sister – it was okay going, but on the return journey I needed to turn left off the dual-carriage way – I was so worried about getting into the correct lane that I drove about 5 miles in the right-hand lane at about 20 mph. On a Sunday afternoon.”

Last Word from a Former Driving Instructor

To be fair, let’s finish with some funny stories from the driving professional’s perspective. Former driving instructor Phoebe MacLeod shares just a few favourite anecdotes. “I have an arsenal of stories, from the “mature” lady I taught who farted every time something surprised her (I knew she’d failed her second test the moment I opened the car door), to the clueless 17-year-old posh boy with no road sense who used (literally) to stab at every pedal with any foot until he found the one he wanted. His mother was equally scary, reprimanding me because he wasn’t stopping at every roundabout. After careful explanation that he’d likely end up with another car in his boot if he did that, and some tactful but honest appraisal of his driving skills, he was packed off to somewhere remote for his test. There’s plenty more where that came from… ”

Launching 26th January 2024

To read more about Sophie Sayers’ adventures on the road – including her quest to solve a bus passenger’s murder and to save the local bus service – pre-order Driven to Murder from your favourite bookstore now! It’ll be launched by Boldwood Books on Friday 26th January in ebook, paperback and audio, and hardback will follow soon. 

Click here to order your copy now – or ask for it by name at your local bookstore.