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It is GCSE results day on Thursday. One way or another, my younger daughter will be having a morning to remember; we all will.
We are just back from Croatia, which has brought back strong memories, because that’s where I was, more than two-thirds of my life ago, on O-level results day in 1983. I was with two schoolfriends in my aunt’s tiny flat in Zagreb. Before reaching the capital, we had been on the coast for three weeks. Joyously unencumbered by laws on underage drinking, we’d drunk like idiots every night without ever summoning the courage to talk to any girls at all.
The only means of receiving my results was my auntie’s phone. My dad was jubilant with my seven passes; I was less so. The grades weren’t brilliant and I’d failed German and music. I retook the German that November, having been tutored by an elderly ethnic German woman from Russia who, for reasons unclear, lived in our village. Frau Wolfsdorf got me up from an E to a B, God love her. She lent me a book by Solzhenitsyn and made me swear I’d return it. I never did. I glance at its spine every day, berating myself. Shame on me.
I told my mates, Jamie and Rich, what I’d got and we went out in Zagreb for one last night of legal drinking before flying home the next day. The two of them had chosen to get their results when they got back.
Rich’s dad, Ken, picked us up at Heathrow. When we got in the car, he told Rich how he’d done. For one reason or other, Rich had struggled in school, but his results were kind of OK. Sitting in the back with me, Jamie opened a letter from his dad breaking the news that he’d done rather badly. Big tears rolled down his cheeks. It was awful. Ken passed us a pork pie each for the journey home. Jamie shook his head and left it on the seat between us. Rich and I demolished ours; Jamie just stared out of the window. I was gutted for him, but after a while I started to wonder about his pork pie, which I didn’t want to see go to waste. Soon I picked it up and said: “Do you, erm …?”
He snatched it out my hand and silently ate it, still looking out the window into the murk of a rainy August evening.
I only mention all this because Rich, Jamie and I happen to be meeting up tonight. Rich, after no kind of academic start in life, eventually went on to get an MBA and now has a brilliant job working in Malaysia. Jamie, now known as Jim, has done really well for himself too and now lives in Brighton; both married brilliant women and begat wonderful children.
My point is that for those who have done well today, great. Congratulations. But for those who haven’t, I implore you: do not despair. However you’ve done, you’re just at the start of something, not at the end. It’s all to play for. Live long and prosper.
• Adrian Chiles is a writer, broadcaster and Guardian columnist
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