Chapter 11

Exam Week was a bastard.

I had been forced to spend a perfectly lovely late May weekend indoors, cooped up in my stuffy bedroom revising; desperate to fill my brain with any fact that I could possibly later scribble down on paper and earn a mark for.

The problem was, not everything we had been taught would come up in the exam, and I was learning a lot of useless information along with the essential stuff.

I needed to cover the whole syllabus so that I would be able to have a decent stab at the compulsory questions, but also to do enough detailed work to be able to select three other questions to answer well. With 40% of the available marks coming from the compulsory questions, there was a lot more down to luck than I liked!

I had a total of four exams to sit; three written and one practical.

Maths was the first one, on Monday afternoon. Then Physics, then Chemistry, and on the next Monday morning, the Chemistry Practical exam.

The Great Hall in the Students' Union was filled with rows and rows of tiny desks with small rigid uncomfortable orange plastic chairs, itself a really depressing sight.

All the notice boards round the walls had been stripped of their usual comforting riot of colour, and were now covered with uniform rows of candidate lists and exam timetables.

Maths went surprisingly well, as I managed to answer the compulsory question to my satisfaction, and have a good go at four of the others, and I even had some time left at the end to check my answers. I did find one error, and fortunately was able to rework the whole calculation and change my answer.

There is a school of thought that says it is best to leave the original answer, as the instinctive answer is more likely to be correct than one that has been hesitated over for too long; but I was confident that I had replaced an error with the correct answer.

So I was in a fairly happy mood when I nipped round for a cup of tea with the girls; they too were pretty content with their performance in their exams that day.

Sian and I had to step in when Vee and Julie, who of course had done the same exam in English Literature, started to do a post mortem on their answers. As the two of them were perfectionists, who hated to have missed out even the smallest detail, their conversation was getting morose as they tried to work out how many marks they would be docked, rather than how many marks they had earned with what they had written!

I had a quick snog with all three of them, wished them luck and a good night's sleep, and then headed back to my house to crack on with my last-minute physics revision.

There was a heated row going on in the kitchen amongst the lads as to whose turn it was to cook supper; as I had opted out of the food kitty some months before, I kept well clear and stayed in my room all night, having picked up a pie at the chip shop on my way home. It was a little worrying to find that the lads were getting so easily distracted from the vital business of exams, and that none of them were willing to give ground for the sake of peace. I could only shrug my shoulders, and remind myself that I had already told them I would be moving out at the end of the year.

Physics on Wednesday was horrendous. There was some kind of cock-up over the papers for one of the other exams, so we all started late after sitting looking at the blank back page of our own exam papers for about twenty minutes.

No sooner had the reading time finished and the actual answering time started, than someone at the front of the hall had a dramatic nose bleed, resulting in much rushing about, and the incongruous sight and sound of an invigilator with a mop trying to clear the gouts of blood off the floor before someone trod in it. Why did the bloody idiot have to clang the galvanised bucket on the floor with every movement he made?

The compulsory question was about polarised light and Snell's law, but I just couldn't quite get my head around it with the recent distraction, so I left it, and went on to try and work out my likeliest three other questions. There frankly wasn't much to choose, so I knocked out two or three sides of equations and description for each of them, and went back to the compulsory question with only 20 minutes left. I thought I had probably sorted it out, but wasn't sure.

When I nipped round to ask the girls for a cup of tea, the rumour mill had clearly been in full swing. Bryony asked me if it was true that someone had slashed their wrists in the exam hall, and seemed almost disappointed to be told what had actually happened.

Sian was bemoaning her choice of questions; with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight she felt that she could have aced the Holy Roman Empire question, if only she had actually chosen to answer it. Vee and Julie were testing each other for their next exam, so I left them all to it and nipped round to see Malcolm. He offered me a can of beer while we chatted about the Chemistry Practical, which we had to do as a team. We were quietly confident; we knew that we worked well together.

We then got onto the subject of revising for the Chemistry written exam; we agreed that the recent petrol crises would probably lead to a greater emphasis on organic chemistry than inorganic, but also agreed that some of our lecturers might not have noticed the news, so tied up were they in their own extremely specialist, not to say obscure, areas of research.

One of our senior lecturers was said to have asked the building janitor to eject him from his office every night to go home, rather than work through to the morning as he had often been known to do in his single days, before one of the departmental secretaries married him.