The Written Test

It’s 8.30am on a Saturday morning and I’m sitting in the plaza ballroom of the Brisbane Exhibition Centre. And I’m bored. They took our mobile phones and IPods from us at reception and the test I’m here for doesn’t start until 9am. So I’m alone with my thoughts and about 300 Chinese and Indian people. Like me, they are here to sit a written English exam for residency purposes and to judge by their expressions they are equally at a loss to know what to do without electronic gadgets.

It wasn’t like that when I last sat an exam, which was back in the long hot summer of 1987. That was held in the Industrial Hall of the Royal Dublin Society which was like an oven on the day I sat my Financial Accounting test. At 1pm that day, I finished eighteen years of education and did what any Irishman would do in that situation. I went to the pub. This wasn’t necessarily a good idea. The exams came at the end of six weeks study leave during which time, I had hardly eaten, slept or washed. So after two pints in the Horseshoe Inn in Ballsbridge, I was floating on air. Ten hours and many pints later, I stumbled into Wanderers Rugby Club which held a disco on Friday nights, for the purposes of introducing nurses to young trainee accountants like me.

Unfortunately, on that Friday night, I was in more need of medical care from those nurses than loving. Somewhere around midnight, I stumbled into the toilets for a quick evacuation of my stomach and somehow managed to lose my glasses. Luckily, through the benefit of alcohol, I didn’t notice I was blind until the middle of the following day. I have only one other memory of that weekend. On the Saturday night, I went to see Elton John in an outdoor concert and couldn’t see a thing. Which was quite an achievement considering the clothes he was wearing.

I’m all grown up now of course and as I sat waiting for the exam to start in Brisbane, all I was dreaming of was a nice latte at the end of the test. I glanced around the hall and marvelled at the geographic spread of the students. For some reason it brought me back to a geography exam I sat in school. I sat beside a particular idiot who stared mournfully at his paper for an hour before nudging me.

“Why did Copenhagen become the biggest City in Denmark?” he asked. I was deep in contemplation at the time on the weightier matter of South American weather systems but I felt sorry for the poor guy as he looked like he lacked the geographical knowledge to find the toilet during the break.

“Because it’s a Port” I said, feeling that this was a suitable titbit to offer and would shut him up.

He gave me a conspirator’s wink and wrote in barely legible type, “Because it’s imported”.
I felt a mixture of annoyance and guilt, so I leant across and repeated my instruction. He nodded and put a line through his first attempt before writing “Because it’s exported”.

I sighed and decided to leave him to his ignorance. He’s probably an economic advisor to one of the Irish Banks now.

Finally the Brisbane test was about to start. The question and answer booklets were handed out but a rather angry English woman stood at the top of the hall and warned us under pain of death that we weren’t allowed to turn the papers over until she said so. She was paranoid about cheating and seemed to be under the impression that students had hidden answers in the toilet cisterns because she issued a severe warning that after the exam started anyone feeling a call of nature would have to cross their legs for three hours.

She spent the next ten minutes explaining how to complete the personal information section at the front of the answer sheet. One of the questions was “Male or female” which left her slightly flummoxed. Her headmistress persona was temporarily dented as she searched for the correct instruction. In the end she said “You can choose either one”. Everyone in the room laughed which was enough proof for me that they understood English and we should have just packed up and gone for a coffee. But it just made her angrier. She slammed her hand on the lectern and stared menacingly. I don’t know about the Chinese and Indians, but I was reminded of a particularly nasty Mother Superior and had the good sense to shut up and get back to my paper.

The exam itself was tougher than I expected. Having to write with a pen was a challenge. We have become so used to typing and texting that very few of us use pens any more apart from completing Sudoku puzzles. Spell check has also made me lazy and I found myself not using particular words because I lacked the confidence to spell them.

The first part of the test was about listening, a subject that all my ex girlfriends would grade me as an F. You had to interpret what was being said and answer questions on the hoof. This meant doing two things at once, which being a man, presented problems. After that, we had an hour of comprehension, which is harder to spell than it is to sit. We finished by having to write an essay on the subject of “Success in later life is determined by your parents. Discuss”.

I could see the finishing post and let fly with gusto. Nature versus nurture got a mention before I felt the need to lighten things up a little. So I mentioned my mother and how she bought me my first pair of glasses. That allowed me to study and to land the big jobs that have taken me all over the world. Those glasses not sit somewhere within the sewage system of Wanderers Rugby Club in Dublin. But they did their job Mam. Thanks for that and for teaching me how to speak English in the first place.