One mother’s solution to driving test failures

SIR – I failed my driving test (Letters, January 14) a number of times in the late 1960s. My mother thought that sympathy might work. She found a nurse’s uniform, complete with frilly sleeves and cap, from the bottom of a wardrobe and, minus the cap, I set off.

I passed. Marguerite Beard-gould Walmer, Kent

SIR – During my driving test as a trooper in a three-ton Bedford RL, the fearsome and charmless examiner, a staff sergeant in the Queen’s Own Hussars, admired my watch and told me to pull over going up the Snake in Catterick so that he could look at it.

On taking it, he left the cab for a couple of minutes and on returning told me to carry out a hill start. As an aside, he said he had placed my watch behind the nearside rear wheel.

I reached the top of the hill, whereupon he took the watch out of his pocket – without so much as a smile. I passed his test.

Lt Col Simon Stewart (retd) Hexham, Northumberland

SIR – I took my test in 1963 in my father’s small truck, which had been converted to transport boars before the days of artificial insemination.

The examiner climbed into the truck and asked me to start the vehicle. This I did, at which the truck started to shake. The examiner said: “What’s that?” I replied: “There’s a pig in the back.” The examiner said: “You cannot take your test with a pig in the back!”

I called to my father, who was in the waiting room, and explained the situation. “No problem,” he said, and dropped the tailboard and drove the pig, a fully-grown boar, on to the parking area, where he kept it while I took my test. I failed.

Derek Godfrey Holt, Norfolk