As I sat in my plastic chair in the sports hall, gripping my copy of ‘Blood Brothers’ and lining up my black biros in front of me, quotations and page references swirled around my head. I was looking anxiously at the clock, anticipating for the second hand to reach twenty-five past three and my one-hour drama exam to begin.
It was not quite my final exam- although almost. My hands were already blistered from the previous week’s battle against the raging mock GCSE exams. My mind appeared to be plagued with the equation to find the area of a sphere and the function of a nerve cell.
Just two exams out of sixteen left. A total of two hours and thirty minutes left sitting in this freezing cold hall, writing until my hands are smudged black with ink. All I had to do was focus.
But, suddenly, as I sat in my seat with my hands shaking with adrenaline, an unmistakable sound escaped from the ceiling above us.
The fire alarm.
Immediately our eyes darted around the room. Surely this had to be some type of joke. A cruel, miscalculated joke that ruined everyone sitting in that sports hall’s day. You had never heard such a collective sound of pens dropping onto desks and paper slipping onto the floor. The look of disbelief that echoed from teacher to teacher gave evidence for what we were all thinking.
This was not a drill.
As we filed outside into the drizzling rain, with mud seeping up our shoes, we watched as fire engines piled into our school. Although no smoke could be seen, rumours spread like a flame from one end of the match to the other. There were stories of someone burning their scones in food tech; someone forgetting to turn off the kiln in the art block; someone desperate to escape the prospect of a drama exam.
Pretty quickly it became apparent that there was no fire- and the cause of it remains a mystery. Whether it was a result of an accidental nudge of a shoulder against the big red button or a mischievous student wanting to get out of class, there’s one thing for certain. No one in my drama of class of twenty-three enjoyed standing outside in the rain, knowing that our exam would have to be rescheduled to the following week. To say the least, we were less than impressed.
