On the buses

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-public-loathing 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.