He would not take a booking he could not personally honour, which is why this school has never had more than four cars on the road at once. He wrote down what he had covered at the end of every lesson and made the learner sign it, so nobody could be sold the same hour twice. And he refused to put anybody in for a test he did not think they would pass, on the grounds that a fail costs the learner sixty-two pounds and costs the school its reputation. All three are still house rules, and the third one still loses us bookings to schools that will say yes to anything.

Forty-two pounds an hour sounds a lot until you take out the car, the dual controls, the fuel, the insurance that costs four times a normal policy, the ADI registration, the continuing professional development the DVSA requires, and the fact that an instructor cannot teach eight hours a day for long without becoming worse at it. There are schools locally charging thirty-four. They are running eleven-hour days in older cars with instructors on franchise agreements that take a third off the top, and it shows in the hours it takes their learners to get through. We would rather charge what the work costs and do it properly.

The loop of the river, the medieval street pattern and eleven roundabouts inside two miles make this a genuinely hard place to learn — and a very good one. Learners taught here pass at Shrewsbury and then find everywhere else easier, which is not something you can say about every town. The two test centres we use are Shrewsbury on Battlefield Road and Telford when Battlefield is booked solid, and we teach the routes for both because knowing the road is not cheating, it is preparation.

Two Corsas and an automatic Yaris, all under three years old, all with dual controls fitted by a specialist rather than the cheapest quote, and all replaced on a rolling three-year cycle so nobody ever learns in something tired. Three cars is a deliberate ceiling rather than a stage we have not grown out of: it is the number Enid, Callum and Yusuf can teach in without the school taking on an instructor nobody here has trained. Every school that has grown past its own supervision in this town has got worse, and we have watched two of them do it.