On the buses
Jeremy Clarke There was a bus shelter, but it had no sides and the icy wind was blowing the rain horizontally at us. We huddled together, all eyes on the bus-driver. A bus-driver with an ounce of compassion would have opened the doors and let us on to get warm. This one sat and insolently contemplated us from the warm, dry fastness of his driver's seat. Yes, it was another general-publicloathing bus-driver, for whom keeping his contempt within certain well-defined bounds was probably the hardest part of his job. Company rules prohibited his telling us exactly what he thought of us. Accelerating past bus stops giving waiting passengers the raised finger was also out of the question, unfortunately. But opportunities for small, ambiguous humiliations of the travelling public do arise from time to time, and he'd grasped this one with both hands by keeping the doors firmly closed until 30 seconds before we were due to depart.
We crept obediently aboard. Most of us were not as nimble as we had once been. As we climbed aboard there were hold-ups. A turnip dropped out of a shopping bag and had to be retrieved. A walking-stick was dropped. A bus pass wasn't easy to find. I didn't have the right money. The driver raised his eyes to heaven. Under his impatient gaze, our halting and creeping became a means of defiance. 'We will creep,' we said to ourselves.
Naturally, he didn't wait until we were all seated and settled before slamming the engine into gear and lurching away. 'Ooh!' exclaimed an elderly woman, who had to sit down suddenly and not where she wanted.
There was nobody else on the top deck. I sat at the back, opened the Daily Telegraph and tried to read the obituaries while being flung about as if on a white-knuckle fairground ride. But a few minutes into our journey, outside a school, we were becalmed for a long while.
A crowd of excited school kids was besieging the doors, but the driver was refusing them entry until they formed a more orderly queue. When he finally let them on, there was a riotous cheer and an advance-guard of 14-year-old schoolgirls came shrieking up the stairs and sprinted for the back seats, hemming me in on all sides. Before I had the upper deck to myself. Now I had about a third of a seat.
One or two school kids were wearing Santa hats. Crisps and sweets and fizzy drinks were being tipped between green and ruby lips. Great sullen and dishevelled youths followed. The din was tremendous.
'I 'aven't seen a paper as big as that before,' said the girl behind me directly into my ear. 'You must have!' I said, genuinely surprised. 'Her Dad gets the Sport,' explained her worldly friend.
Somewhere next to my ear, a radio was switched on and turned up so loud that the sound was distorted by the vibrations. Singing broke out. A hat was snatched from a head in front and skimmed like a Frisbee towards the front. Up at the front there was an ungainly scuffle. It was no longer possible to absorb the obituaries, so I closed the paper and watched the mayhem.
The school kids had filled the bus as quickly and completely as air fills a vacuum. The pavement below was now empty. But the bus remained stationary. Footsteps sounded heavily on the stair and the head and shoulders of the driver appeared above the guardrail. There was a notebook and retractable ballpoint pen in the breast pocket of his open-necked white shirt and a faded tattoo on his forearm. The din lessened slightly.
'This bus is going nowhere,' he yelled, 'until you people find some manners.' Then the head and shoulders retreated and the din became louder than ever. 'What did he say?' said the Sport reader's daughter leaning against me as a great lummox of a schoolboy went hurtling past in search of retribution for some unseen slight. None of her friends had been paying attention. I repeated his warning. What an effing twat, they said, rolling their eyes in sheer fatigue at the ineffable boringness of the adults they had to put up with day by day.
Again the driver's head and shoulders appeared above the rail and his threat was reiterated. This time he wasn't ignored. This time his head and shoulders were the target for a well-directed hail of waxed drink cartons, empty plastic bottles, sweet wrappers, crisp packets and a woolly hat. I joined in with the 'Business' section of the Daily Telegraph and an apple core — much to the delight then hilarity of my companions at the back of the bus.
Previous page
