Jim Perks – Being told by accident that I’d passed Perisher

I knew the Flag Lieutenant to the Admiral at the time and finished that run and you are allowed to smoke onboard at the time, and I was a smoker.

You go up to the bulkhead and have a cigarette, calm down, relax, feeling pretty good about myself, thinking ‘yep, that was alright,’ Teacher seemed happy.

At this stage Teacher is saying nothing, other than, “Why?” I mean really nothing, he’s standing back now and again as I realised there’s a bit of Teacher wanting to show the VIPs, his students.

There is pride there, definitely, they’re your people, but I knew the Flag Lieutenant. He said, “Oh, well done mate.” I said, “What are you talking about? He said, “I’ve just come out of the Captain’s cabin, you’ve passed.”

I said, “What?” He said, “Yeah, well done” and shook my hand. “You’re not supposed to tell me that. We get told on Sunday.” “Oh sh*t, keep it quiet.” How, whether he went back and told Teacher because anyway we’ll come to the final day, but it was bloody funny.

I don’t think he did but anyway, I can’t remember. I think I told the rest of my guys on the Course it had happened.

You still don’t know and every single Perisher student gets asked the same question, at what stage did you know you passed? Well, there’s only one stage when you know you have passed is when Teacher hands you a glass of champagne, says, “Congratulations Captain.”

You can be as open about it as you like. You can be as optimistic as you like, but if you’re honest, you don’t know, so I didn’t know. I took that with a pinch of salt and there’s still a lot of work to do and we went through and we were really supporting each other in getting through it. It’s tiring, ‘cos it 24 / 7.

Again I didn’t realise how tired Teacher would get ‘cos he’s up for all of them, he’d doing every run obviously.