THIS time last week, I stood freezing at the gate with the little ones, half expecting the school bus not to turn up again.

The main road to their school was gritted, but the side roads probably weren’t and everything was moving slowly, so we gave it an extra 20 minutes.

And then the older boys, who had caught their bus 40 minutes earlier, suddenly appeared: “Mum! Where have you been? We’ve phoned you about six times.” The 16-year-old looked particularly flustered: “Our bus crashed. We’ve run all the way back. You have to get me into school straight away or I’ll miss my exams.”

There are times in my life when I’ve looked back and thought, “I shouldn’t have done that”, “That was too great a risk”, or “What the Hell was I thinking?” Little did I realise this was going to be one of them.

Charlie was due to take two important AS-level exams. He’d been studying for them since the Christmas holidays. “If you don’t get me in quickly, I’ll have to wait until June, when I’m taking all my other exams.

I can’t do that. You’ve got to get me there,” he pleaded.

While we all hacked the one centimetre deep ice off the car windscreen, the 14-year-old showed me a picture of their abandoned bus on his mobile phone. It had skidded and smashed into a wall, before spinning round and ending up on the other side of the road, embedded in a ditch and hedge.

They had run more than a mile back through ice and snow. “Quick Mum, quick,” urged Charlie: “Can everyone just get into the car. The exam has already started and I won’t be allowed to take it if I turn up more than 30 minutes late.”

I didn’t even have time to scrape the side windows. When I opened mine fully, so that I could see out, it was as if there was another window, made of thick, solid ice, in its place, which I had to smash apart.

I didn’t realise quite how bad the roads were until I turned into the village.

I was driving on solid ice. Another car had crashed and there were a number of vehicles abandoned by the roadside.

Luckily, I was in the 4X4 but even then, it was a struggle to keep control.

On any other day, I would have pulled over and walked home, but Charlie was looking at his watch and pleading with me to get him there on time.

The worst bit was the steep hill we had to go down. There were about eight cars abandoned at the top. We had to wait for an articulated lorry to get up the other side, but it kept slipping back and eventually gave up, pulling over to the side. It took me about 20 minutes to get to the bottom, and I almost ended up in the hedge a few times. The younger boys were clearly scared.

“If you don’t get me there in ten minutes, I’ve missed my exam,” said Charlie. We arrived at school with just a few minutes to spare. It was only then I realised how wet Charlie’s school shoes, were. “It’s because I ran through the snow. My feet are like blocks of ice,” he said. “I’m freezing.”

I was still shaking from the stress of our journey. I don’t know how Charlie managed to get through his exams. I explained what had happened to the examinations officer and she said quite a few pupils had turned up late but all had made it by the 30 minutes deadline. He would be given “special consideration”, she said, and I’m sure he won’t be the only one.

I imagine quite a few of his classmates turned up feeling equally anxious and stressed out. And this won’t just have happened in our school, or even our county. Teenagers all over the country, particularly in rural areas, will have endured fraught, often dangerous, journeys in order to be able to take their exams.

While we were officially being told not to get in our cars unless it was absolutely necessary, the underlying message to youngsters was that they must get to school to sit their AS and A-levels at all costs.

Some students had been staying with friends near school overnight, others had even gone to the lengths of booking into hotels nearby on the night before exams, in order to avoid additional stress. But this wasn’t an option for everyone.

When I first got home, I was just thankful we made it safely. But then I started to feel angry – angry with the unnecessarily inflexible exam boards, which have refused to reorganise exam timetables despite these extreme, and quite exceptional, weather conditions affecting the whole country.

Exams watchdog Ofqual’s acting chief executive Isabel Nisbet, speaking from London, said postponing the tests was “not easy”. But I wonder if she – and, for that matter, Schools Secretary Ed Balls – realised just how “not easy” it has been to get around outside our capital city.

And just how difficult can it be to delay the start of the exams by a few weeks?