Chapter 35

In Gavin Booth’s delightful book By Bus to School, 34 well-known professionals, writers, photographers & enthusiasts recount why the bus on which they travelled to school was so formative in their lives. So it was with me... and, in a rare moment of personal openness, here’s Chapter 35...

I met my future wife in a bus station. And, yes, it was love at first site (sic). This wasn’t awaiting a school bus but it was an education-related journey, as an undergraduate. See how important buses are?

But it was during my primary years that I began wondering about buses. Then, they were only part of my weekend. The two buses each way I later needed for the long journey to Grammar developed that interest. In spite of slowly realising that buses came in various shapes and sizes, it was the routes, destinations and people on them that interested me most. Why were people travelling? Why were only some routes double decked? Some more frequent? Some poorly patronised? Why did some run at what I later realised were the scheduler’s convenience? Why suddenly would a regular fare-paying adult simply disappear? The answer to the last question no doubt was that they had bought a car.

I remember at the age of about eight asking Mother why people ran buses. Her answer: because people needed to travel and were willing to pay. Though I struggled to understand the concept, it was an early lesson in bus economics. Shorty after I began using buses to school at 11, I recognised that it was scholars such as I keeping one of my bus journeys afloat. Thankfully, my commute also entailed healthier trips, full with mixed classes of passenger.

By 16, I had redesigned the area’s schedules according to new patterns of demand—growing suburbs & satellites versus declining villages. There was some satisfaction that much of what I predicted later came true—the good and the bad. This before my own involvement in the industry.

During that time, such was its importance as a social institution that I can still recall the regular faces on the “school” journeys (and some of the adult fare-payers) and can actually name many of the individuals. This was a place where different years mingled closely, with differing backgrounds, including the girls from their grammar. It became the most important part of the day, when we would unwind, tie other people’s coats & satchels to seat frames, write nonsense on condensed windows, help each other with homework. And later, mixing pleasures, came the courting in the now long-gone bus station: watching full buses depart, especially in summer, while holding hands.

People referred to the buses by their colour, not their company. Ours were Green. They surrounded the others, which seemed more regimented and standard, as they travelled shorter distances usually at higher frequencies. I was very young indeed when my father explained how trolleys worked. Used as I was to sluggish Gardner-engined Bristols, I couldn’t understand how a bus could run so swiftly, silently on electricity. Later, I became fond of those Bristols but how on occasion I wished the overhead wires stretched to school.