Life and the Village Bus.
Page 67
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T USUALLY sleep very well, but there are times when 1 I awake in the early hours of the morning. On these occasions, it being too dark to see the time, I listen for the sounds which tell that the town near by is waking, too. The first sounds are those made by motorcars, or vans, being driven swiftly in the direction of the town. These I take to be newspaper vans from the larger city, well known as a newspaper centre, eight miles away. A little later there is a sound of clogs on the pavement, and a miner of the older type passes by. Soon after that comes the village bus. I hear its restrained throb as it comes along the road from town; it passes, and the noise of its engine fades away even before it turns off a few hundred yards farther along. From there it follows a circular route, rejoins the main road, then goes back to town with its first load of early morning workers. Most of these, I assume, will be mill girls, though my masculine curiosity has .never been strong enough to lure me from my bed. I shall be in the same bus two hours later, yet should I have occasion some morning to catch it on its first journey, these (to me) unfamiliar passengers would make the bus itself seem strange.
Here I ought to correct the impression that the village bus is to be referred to in the singular. Actually, it is a fleet of buses, though it has grown since the service started some 15 months ago. The village was interested in the venture from the first, partly because it linked up outlying places hitherto neglected, but for other reasons also. These other reasons are many, and some of them are as far removed from the subject of buses as they could be. Yorkshire housewives bake their own bread, and I heard one woman remark that she timed her baking by the buses which now passed her house l They may have more uses other than that of transport, and I know of a number of cases where bus services are so punctual that people on the routes correct their clocks by them.
The latest addition to our village fleet provided a subject for conversation for some few days. When it turned out on its first run, for instance, we cracked weak jokes about its upholstery, and asked the conductor if we could travel in this for the same fare as we paid in the others. Youngsters going to school experienced a feeling of superiority if they could say that they had travelled by the new bus, whereas others had travelled by nothing better than one of the older ones. And even those who have left childhood's years far behind are not above a kindred feeling. You find the new bus waiting to take you home after an evening In town, and you feel that life is not too bad after all.
F.W.P.
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