The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society

Finally, in first place, we have Jonathan Edward’s winning poem: My Father Sits His Driving Test.

Congratulations on this stunning poem!

My Father Sits His Driving Test

It’s 1962, and the only vehicle he can get his hands on
is his uncle’s mobile shop. There’s no
passenger seat, so the chap with the clipboard
and the pen shining in his top pocket
has to sit on an upturned orange crate and hope
for the best. ‘When I tap the dashboard,’
he tells my father, ‘I’d like you to do
an emergency stop.’ Behind my father’s head, boxes
of washing powder, eggs, hooks that legs of pork
hang from all week. ‘Are you sure?’ my father says.

My seventeen-year-old father has successfully negotiated
the hill start, the three-point turn, occasionally
standing up at a sharp right-hander
to get better purchase on the steering wheel,
or give the full force of his weight to the brake,
when they reach a bridge with an advised weight limit.
‘I can’t go this way,’ he says. ‘We’re overweight.’
The instructor clicks his pen and makes a note.
‘You clearly don’t know the capabilities of the vehicle,’
he says. ‘We’ll have to cancel the test.’
He gets out, starts strolling back to the test centre,
and my father waits for a bus to his uncle’s butchers,
where his cousin stops laughing for long enough
to dock the cost of the petrol from his wages.

Two weeks later, my father gives 17 and 6
to a school of motoring, for the use of their car
to sit the test in. Within an hour, he’s passed,
legal, official, going solo, and every inch the man
who a girl, waiting at the bus stop on the village corner,
for the X16 or else to become my mother,
will see coming, one Friday, sitting behind the wheel
of a mobile shop. Now there goes
the Colonel Bogey March as he beeps the horn,
and the sun catches the windscreen as he passes
and my mother smiles, and somewhere,
behind my father’s head,
all the meathooks rattle their applause.

Jonathan Edwards lives in Crosskeys, South Wales. His award-winning collections, My Family and Other Superheroes and Gen, are published by Seren. His poems have recently won prizes in the Ledbury, Troubadour, Frogmore and Guernsey competitions. He is an Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund.