Fear of failing

Text 1: Grade Five, by Philip Dunmore

An original short story extract.

The waiting room at the music centre had a radiator that ticked and a poster about dental hygiene, left over from whatever the building had been before. Josh sat on a plastic chair with his trumpet case across his knees and listened, through the wall, to a girl playing the oboe. She was very good. Every note came out round and whole, like an egg.

His mouth was dry. He had read that this would happen and had brought a bottle of water, and he had drunk all of it, and now his mouth was dry and he also needed the toilet. He went over the scales in his head: D major, two octaves, tongued. The chromatic scale from G. He had played them a thousand times in the garage, with the door shut so that his dad could not hear the wrong notes. He had not played a wrong note in that garage for a month.

But the garage was not this. In the garage nobody wrote anything down.

The door opened. The oboe girl came out, pink and smiling. The examiner, a small grey woman with reading glasses on a chain, said, “Joshua?” and he followed her in.

He lifted the trumpet. His lips felt as if they belonged to someone else. He breathed in, and blew, and the first note of the D major scale came out as a sort of strangled honk, like a goose being sat on.

There was a silence. Josh waited for the world to end.

It did not end. The examiner looked at him over her glasses, not unkindly, and said, “Take a breath, Joshua. And again.”

So he took a breath. And the second time the D came out clear and bright and ordinary, and the next one after it, and he was halfway up the second octave before he realised that the worst thing had already happened, and that he was still here.

Text 2: Castle Hill, by Rhiannon Daly

An original contemporary memoir.

By my fourth driving test I had stopped telling people when it was. After the first one, which I failed for mounting a kerb outside the cemetery, I had told everyone, and spent a week answering the question. After the second and third, I had learned to keep quiet, so that the failure stayed inside the car and did not follow me round the staffroom.

The night before the fourth, I did not sleep. I lay and drove the route in my head, every junction, every mini-roundabout, the steep bit of Castle Hill where you had to do a hill start with a bus breathing up your exhaust. I imagined stalling there. I imagined it so many times, and in such detail, the jerk, the silence, the examiner’s pen, that by morning it felt less like a fear than a memory.

The examiner was called Brian. He had a moustache and a clipboard and he said “Lovely” after everything, even things that clearly were not.

I stalled on Castle Hill.

I want to report that it was terrible, but it was not. It was exactly as I had imagined it, the jerk and the silence and the pen, and then it was over. I restarted the engine. The bus went round us. Brian said, “Lovely,” and wrote something down, and we drove back to the test centre in a calm I had not felt for weeks, as if a stone I had been carrying in my chest had finally been put down on the passenger seat.

I failed, of course. Brian told me kindly, in the car park. I thanked him, and meant it, and walked home the long way, and booked my fifth test that evening, and for the first time I was not afraid of it at all.

‘Both texts present the fear of failure as worse than failure itself.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what the characters are afraid of
• explain how far failure is as bad as the characters feared
• compare how the writers present the fear of failure

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.