No time at all… I was already employed by the company when they put me through my test. Had to wait a week to do the complete waste of time that is the initial cpc test. No wonder so many of the old school drivers like robroy got ■■■■■■ off with the introduction of cpc. It’s bad enough for people who get it from the start of their driving career, let alone some clueless berk telling you how to do something you’ve done just fine for 40 years!
Of course, I lied through my teeth at the interview, saying that I knew my way around London and had plenty of experience driving trucks. They got an old boy out of the little warehouse at the back of the greengrocer’s shop which was their operational base and told him to check out my driving skills. The truck was parked on a one-way street in Islington and we drove about a quarter of a mile before he told me to turn left into a side street and stop outside a cafe. After a cup of tea and a sausage butty, which he generously paid for, we turned left and left again to get back to the shop and he told them I was okay.
I started work the following Monday morning and they gave me a bunch of collection and delivery notes. Other drivers offered to help with directions and they said things like, “you know as you drive down Southwark high Street you see a big old church on your right?” I would nod, not having the faintest clue where Southwark was let alone anything else. I did have an A to Z and I spent a lot of time driving with it on the steering wheel.
Anyone who thinks their employer is stingy today has no idea. The women who ran that company stingy down to a fine art: when we were given our notes we would be given a chit for what they considered to be enough fuel to do the job (maybe 2 gallons?). We had to collect our fuel from a local garage that gave double Green Shield stamps and then hand them into the office at the end of the day. Maintenance was fix-it-when-it-breaks and when I broke down in Watford one day, they sent another driver in a truck with a long chain and towed me down the A1 through Highbury and Archway down the hill to Islington; you simply could not imagine doing that these days.
Years later, I got a class III with grandfather rights and then years after that, I was a TM and put all my drivers through their class I and added my own name to the list.
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
thats the way it was then when it was a normal mans hands on type job.
lie through your teeth to blag the job then find a gear,any gear to shudder the thing out of the gate and wing it as your day progressed.
you could park outside a petrol station and ask someone who was most likely english and pink for directions with the bonus of similar to getting chained home from a breakdown. there was a sense of achievement in doing a tricky job or getting out of a situation without too much grief.
ive been recovered by chain,and straight bar.
not exactly the most pleasant of experiences but the truck got home.
ive managed to come back from france with no clutch,do my deliveries in england then load for scotland before getting home which you couldnt do nowadays even if you were capable.
id much rather be driving todays trucks timewarped back to 50 years ago roads and work practices. that would have been something, ( obviously without mobile phones and trackers. 
Not long!
Started at Hewlett Packard, had an easy trunk run but took the wrong trailer 
There was only one trailer in the yard so didn’t bother checking numbers, it was only when I reached my destination that I was told they had two yards!
So obviously not my fault 