Because the sun is butter yellow and the butter melting, because the weeds are sprouting lanky and threatening to lock us in like the sleeping beauties we are, and because our blackbird has come over all Bruce Springsteen in our backyard, then it has to be exam weather.
Warm plus balmy days plus birdsong equal exams. It has ever been so.
You never lose the butterflies in the stomach or the dread of the rows and rows of digits in the old logarithmic book.
My heart still skips a beat at certain words: armageddon and arithmetic are yoked tightly together in my being.
Always at this time of year, memory trips down the avenue of 50 years ago back to the exam hall: the straight rows of desks; the clip of the invigilator’s shoes as she walked up and down aisles; the pink papers waiting to be flipped open at those words. “Begin!”
All down the years, May and June were a curse. I’d sit at the desk in our bedroom, trying to make sense of the reproductive system of a butterbean, rhyming off Latin declensions or considering getting to the end of Huckleberry Finn. I never did make it.
But it was a shared purgatory. We were all friends, all in it together, and we’d sigh in our shackles and dream of summer days.
There were many awful moments – as students of English we once had to sit an exam that was a series of essays on your reading outside the course. None of the set books was allowed. I’m not over that yet… waffle is my middle name.
On the final English A-Level exam, I greeted a friend in the cloakroom and she had a saintly smile on her face. I usually avoided the cloakroom – it was a seething cauldron of nerves.
“Are you not nervous?” I asked. But not her. Someone’s half a valium had helped a little, she said.
My aunt used to pop one when she put in her curlers at night. Those were different days.
My go-to remedy was deep breathing, no chat before the exam and never, ever do a post mortem. That way madness lies.
The exam torture proved inversely proportional to the euphoria of the final day – it felt so much sweeter. The final instruction in the dusty exam hall: “You have five minutes left”, then “Pens down” … and the whole crazy summer lay ahead.
We swore we would so enjoy every May and June to come without exams, then time took on its own momentum and we forgot.
The truth is that “swot” was my middle name – I liked exams. But when it came to the school of life, there were not so many A-star grades there
Resilience is the buzz word these days. I wear my failure in my first driving test as a badge of honour. Who gets their driving test first time… only our boy, but never me!
What it took a long time to learn is that nothing is the end of the world – that we can move on from failure and learn from it. Take a path less travelled through the woods of life.
Writer Samuel Beckett said: “Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
You never lose the butterflies in the stomach or the dread of the rows and rows of digits in the old logarithmic book
But didn’t Beckett not also say that his students were the cream of Ireland, rich and thick?
So now when our children are shackled to their desks, as the sun shines and the birds warble, there is nothing for it but to serve comfort with cream buns and hugs and sympathy. There is nothing for it but to say that even if it all goes madly wrong, still the world does not stop turning.
All will be well, all manner of things will be well. Some how things will work out all right in the end.
