The campaign to save our village bus service has set me reminiscing about Bus Services I Have Known.
When I was growing up in suburban London, my home turf of Sidcup was served by the iconic red Routemaster – the old-fashioned double-decker as featured in the Cliff Richard film Summer Holiday.
In those halcyon days before invention of Health and Safety, passengers boarded via an open platform at the rear. The metal pole that ran from floor to ceiling of the platform must been there to strengthen the back of the vehicle, but it was also useful if you were running for a bus that was already leaving the stop. You just grabbed the pole and jumped, in hope of landing on the platform. It was something of a sporting feat.
Our route was the 51, a number that still means “bus” to me.
In the days before we had a car, the 51 was the starting point to every outing. The elephantine silhouette lumbering towards the bus stop was a welcome sight, whether we were heading for the high street, the railway station, or to see my grandparents. The fare for a family trip was “two fours and three twos” – fourpence per adult and tuppence per child, i.e. one shilling and tuppence (6p).
The bus conductor printed the flimsy white paper tickets in a continuous strip from a metal box strapped to his chest, concealing a narrow roll of paper. He dialled up each fare with little metal cogs, then turned a handle on the side to print each ticket. When replacing the roll, the conductor often gave me the old one to play with, complete with a strip of blank paper for drawing on.
It was a good incentive to be polite to the bus conductor, just in case his roll ran out during my journey.
When I reached secondary school, the 51 was the starting-point for my two-bus journey to Chislehurst, changing onto the 228 at Sidcup Station. Depending on the school term, I might need to juggle my brown leather satchel plus any of the following on my journey: cookery tin, guitar, and weaving loom. This made it tricky to negotiate the spiral stairs to the top deck, but that didn’t stop me.
Chatting with my friends up there was an important part of every school day and formative social time.
When I was 14, my family moved to Germany, and I took a single-decker school bus, American-style, to Frankfurt International School. During the next four years, I gradually worked my way towards the back of the bus. In my final year I travelled on the rear bench seat to which all ages aspired, while also keeping a watchful eye on the little kids further down to root out bullying and other misdemeanours.
It was an object lesson in earning social status.
At university in York, long-distance buses were the most affordable way to visit my grandparents in London or my sister in Bristol. (My parents were still living abroad.)
Negotiating London’s Victoria Coach Station opened up new horizons for bus travel. It seemed you could get a bus to almost anywhere from Victoria.
Travelling abroad, my most memorable bus journeys were in Greece, touring islands and crossing the width of the country. Greek bus drivers seemed to think using their mobile phones was compulsory while the vehicle was in motion, even when careering around hairpin bends on mountain roads with no cliffside barrier – a test of any passenger’s nerve.
On a solo trip from Lefkas, when the driver asked whether we were going all the way to Athens, I got my foreign languages mixed up and replied “Ja” instead of “Ne” – the German instead of the Greek for “yes”. For the rest of the trip, passengers old enough to remember the War subjected me to hostile glares, while I tried to find new and different ways of looking overtly British. It was an informal lesson in international diplomacy.
As the Save the Wotton-under-Edge to Yate Bus Service Campaign rightly points out, there are numerous socio-economic reasons to keep the 84/85 route serving our rural community: it provides access to education, apprenticeship, work, healthcare and leisure activities.
But I’d like to add my twopennorth to that list, as befits someone used to travelling by bus for tuppence:
I’ve learned many life skills on bus rides. Long may we all be able to do so.
PS My latest novel, Driven to Murder, revolves around a campaign to save a village bus service. It is of course entirely fictitious!
This post was originally written for the March 2024 edition of Hawkesbury Parish News.
IN OTHER NEWS
My good friend Michael Macmahon shares my passion for public transport and kindly invited me onto his lively podcast, entitled Don’t Get Me Started!, for an enjoyable conversation about rural buses in particular, in support of the campaign to save our local bus service. Click the image below to tune in.
I didn’t think “What I’ve learnt from public buses” would be all that interesting – but it was! I also went to school by routemaster bus, hopping on an off the platform, often not at an actual bus stop. And, like you, the boys at my school all ended up on the back seat when we were old enough. It was an inviolate hierarchy, never abused, never challenged. As a small boy, I remember asking for a “tuppeny-half”, the fare for a child. We didn’t realise how carefree we were back then, and not only on the buses. Thanks, Debbie, it was great to reminisce along with you!
Thank you, Rory, I’m glad it rang a bell with you – and can’t you still hear that bell we used to use on the old Routemasters to signal when we wanted to get off? One pull to stop and two to go – and of course only the conductors were allowed to give the double-pull! I miss bus conductors!
Yes of course! It was a kind of rope along the roof of the bus… I also miss bus conductors and the way they used to make you shuffle along when the bus was full up. It was always fun to get off at the traffic lights, or to run and jump on after the bus had pulled away from the kerb. Those were the days.