For Whom the Bell Doesn't Tol
Page 26
Page 27
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
IF I wait here at the traffic lights, I thought, sooner or later the red will stop a bus for me, which will save me the exertion of humping this heavy suitcase a couple of hundred yards on a muggy autumn morning and standing in a queue among a lot of distasteful fellow-bipeds with Olds in their heads. ("I do not love the human race, I cannot bear its silly. face." —Old song.)
Nothing, of course, is more surely rewarded in this world than animal cunning, indolence and misanthropy, and within two minutes a bus obligingly came up all standing, right spot-on where it could be boarded in a couple of languid strides. It didn't strike me at the time but, looking back on it, I believe the only reason it did stop was that a 22-ft. oiler had started to cross its path, which, with the green in its favour, it was quite entitled to do. Certainly the bus was on its way again, pounc lug off the mark like a cricket with hiccoughs before the lights had changed back.
In Darkest Motorbus' or
Alone in the P.S.V. Alone in the P.S.V.
The only thing I had noticed about the bus before mounting, was that its itinerary, according to the route board, included Kew Bridge, where I had a date to see a man about a malfeasance. But now, on looking around and taking stock of the interior, two points distinguished this bus from the general run: (a) I was the only customer, and (b) there wasn't a conductor At least, not on the ground floor. Nor was the usual nasal salvo of " 'ank kew's " and ting-tQng Of ticket punches to be heard from aloft. Of course—who could tell?—the public and the conductor might be huddled together upstairs in some silent, unholy con
clave. . .
I get as far as the fourth stair, intending to check On this sinister possibility, when the bus makes a swerve so violent that my grip is wrenched loose from the hand-holds and 1-execute a pants-first power dive to the platform again So, with typical British doggedness I decide to abandon the attempt forthwith.
Strangely enough, the impact of my 12 stone hitting the deck doesn't attract the attention of young Loch invar at the wheel. In fact, come to look at him, his attention, seems to be very seriously atrophied . . heedless of umbrellas and "Chronic News's" brandished by angry burgesses at successive stage points, he goes whamming past at great speed.
Perhaps he's blind, or perhaps he bears some strange affinity to the • horse in the Shaggy Dog story, whose owner, on complaining to the vendor that the animal canters head-on into a brick wall and must, therefore, be blind, is assured, _" No, that horse isn't blind—it's just that he don't give a darn."
The Light's Fantastic Way
Where the traffic thins out a bit he gets her up to 55 or so. At three intersections in a row the green is with us, and we gambouncel across without a care in the world. At the fourth the amber goes to red when we are 20 yds. short, so Lochinvar prangs his footwear down the real oldfashioned Barratt way and scrimps through before the cross-stream can get into action -with an outflanking .movement
The skid, when it comes—we have only one—is the genu-ine authentic McCoy, a skid to end an skids, a sudden and brutal sabotage of traction It happens at that big roundabout where the big pub stands on the south-west corner and a block of bank buildings on the north-cast
Loehinvar, to my surprise, lifts his foot on the left-hand run-in to the ring2o-roses—drops his speed to not much over thirty-five, at a guess. Then, simultaneously with bending on some starboard lock, down comes his hoof, wham. Both pairs of driving wheels start to spin—you can hear the 'tread patterns etching away at the road surface like a carborun dum wheel—and the tail end sets off to port in a great stewing arc.
When Is a Slide Like a Glacier ? Lochinvar Despairs Once the slide has its full momentum it seems that nothing will strangle it. It has the awesome inexorability of a glacier, withal a rather nasty one. With a leisurely, nonchalant heave or two on the steering wheel, Lochinvar warps over on to full correcting lock, and when that proves insufficient to kill the skid, he gives a little shrug, as though to say, "OK. then, pile your fool self up —you can't say I didn't try." Eventually the correcting lock has its way . . . too much of its way. The stern yaws back to, then far beyond, the centre-line of the imaginary pendulum—over-correction.the old fami• liar story.
While I sit in a clammy bath of sweat and see the best years of my life go by in a matter of seconds, the bus pulls out of the roundabout, still sliding,. on the wrong side of the road; an oncoming Pool tanker mounts the kerb to give us air; and seventy yards farther west Lochinvar is at last getting back on to speaking terms with traction. Moreover, he is using only the near-side half of the road. Makes a change.
Here and There a Corner ; Disbelief in Johnny Horner There are not many bends along this route (not counting the roundabout), but what there are he treats with the disdainful élan of one who once reads something about centrifugal force in a nursery story and rejects the whole thing as superstitious phooey. My mind, as minds will in moments of peril, begins to attain a curiously objective detachment. If I close one eye and stare hard at the route chart on the bulkhead at Lochinvar's back, its crisscross design reorientates itself into a series of diagrams of L.P.T.B. buses going around corners on two wheels, all neatly captioned Fig. I, Fig. 2, and so on, the centres of gravity indicated by an X.
From the chart my idle gaze wanders up and back, dwells fleetingly on an advertisement that inquires whether I am troubled with loose dentures (no, but any moment now), hesitates and finally comes to rest on a little red button marked "Push Once to Stop Bus." The idea, once implanted, grows rapidly to an obsession. "Push Once to Stop Bus." I rise, teeter tipsily towards that magnetic vermilion blob; my index finger stiffens for the decisive prang. .
Yet something about Lochinvar's stiff, still attitude bids me stop and think again. His face is steadfastly to the front—he looks neither to right nor left—but the way he sits, the set of his shoulders, the slight upward tilt of his head, reminds me of—yes, of course, that's it, a sleepwalker.
"May," says a quaking inward voice, "you're in the presence of a somnautomobilst. One of those for whom the bell doesn't toll. Hands off that button, dumbheadl You know what happens when sleepwalkers are wakened by panicky kith and kin—they walk into blazing hearths and catch their nightshirts afire, they throw themselves over ban
nisters and break every bone in their bodies." "May," continues the voice with quavering insistence, " it's all very well up to a point, this stowaway business, but the time has come to sit this one out. Come on, let's go."
I work my way stealthily back to the platform, clinging on like a crustacean to seat-backs, roof pillars, anything that offers a transitory purchase. Glancing over my shoulder, past and beyond the Peak-capped automaton at the wheel, I see, framed in the bulkhead window, the prelude to This Week's Deliberate Mistake. Between an island and the kerb, seventy • yards ahead, a coster's barrow laden with grapes-they'selovely, eightpence-a-pahnd-pears-is laboriously overhauling a station ary Tank transporter. The slit of lebensraum left to Lochinvar amounts to perhaps forty inches. Making a good fifty-five and still accelerating, he is about to insert a quart into a pint pot.
A Leap for Life . .
And a Soothing Voice
I huddle down on my haunches on the outer edge of the platform; cudgel my brain for a half-forgotten recipe for falling off a motorcycle without sustaining rigor mortis (it was told me by an old Indian squaw whom I
had befriended, as she lay dying . . . or was that something else?); let go the hand-hold and leap forwards and outwards with every ounce of strength remaining in these fearsapped leg muscles.
A voice, a female voice of markedly not-amused timbre, is saying: "Now look, this sleepwalking of yours is getting beyond a joke. At eight in the morning, too. Haven't you got a date to see a man about a what-d'you-call-it at nine? Hurry now, do. . . ."