Ah, August, the month where you have to hear again what Jeremy Clarkson got in his A-levels, to be juxtaposed delightfully (he thinks) against his later success, and parents parading how traumatic their kids’ results are for them. You’ll be hearing a lot about plucky individuals who smashed their GCSEs, come Thursday, and not so much about the ones who failed maths; their parents will instead be wondering on X how anyone is supposed to concentrate when TikTok exists.
It is not classy to boast about your exam triumphs, especially when it was 35 years ago, so a lot of parents will be claiming not to be able to remember what they got in their own GCSEs, even though that is plainly a lie – come at me, faux-amnesiacs. Can you remember your landline number from when you were a kid? Your postcode? Then you can remember your exam results. These were the only letters and numbers of any use or meaning from the first two decades of your life. They’ll be the last sequences standing, long after you’ve forgotten what number the damn machine wants to know before it will give you any cash.
Parking the results themselves, which I can remember but decline to share, the main thing I remember about getting my GCSE envelope is that I smoked 20 cigarettes straight before I opened it. From which I extrapolate that my mum must have been at work, because even though she also smoked, she was pretending not to know that I did, and even if she’d let that mask slip for the day, she wouldn’t have been on board with that kind of waste of Silk Cut.
It’s all coming back to me. I must have called her at some point to tell her my results, but it definitely wasn’t a priority. My dad, meanwhile, was also at work, and didn’t live with us anyway, and didn’t mind that I smoked (though he once said, mildly, “You smoke like I used to; as if air itself is toxic, and only a cigarette can ward it off,” and I said, “And that’s … bad?”, and he said, “Well, I gave up,” and I said, “You’re smoking right now!”, and he said, “That’s because you’re making it look delicious”).
The point is, they weren’t up in my grill the whole time. They hadn’t booked time off, they weren’t on hand, they hadn’t planned an array of facial expressions to cover every eventuality. I have a lot of memories of the exams themselves, and neither parent features in any one of them. By the time the Reading festival arrived, either that Friday or the one after, they weren’t lecturing me on drugs or checking whether my tent was watertight. They would not have had one clue about site rules, and whether I should take my own sausage rolls for an emergency.
The whole conception of a 16-year-old was different – it was someone who was old enough to make their own mistakes. But the idea of a parent (which, in the 80s, had yet to be turned into a verb) was more distinctive in its maturity. They knew the extent of their own influence, which was “almost none”. They knew that they could commiserate with me over a disaster but they couldn’t head it off or make it vanish once it had happened, and as a result, they were not, of themselves, a cause of exam stress.
This is by far the biggest change, across the generations; we parents talk about social media as though we didn’t know how to waste time or negatively compare ourselves with others, back in the day (but we did). We talk about kids vaping as though we didn’t smoke, and screen time as though we had vivid outdoor lives, and we never talk about this seismic social reorientation: that your parents used to leave you alone to get on with things, and now they (we) don’t.
Incidentally, my tent was not watertight, and I could have used a sausage roll. Some parental intervention might have helped. Just not this whole nine yards.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
