5 of 24 - The Bedford OB coach

 

The council house that we lived in was about half a mile from the main road and to catch the school bus, I had to walk up the hill to the main road. Walking with one built-up shoe was a risky business. I was regularly stumbling, even on level ground. If the ground was uneven or if there was an adverse camber, my progress could be erratic.

Our school bus was a single decker Bedford OB coach that would trundle around the country lanes picking us up one by one and delivering us to our school in town. One afternoon, on the way home from school when I was eight or nine, the bus coasted gently to a stop in the middle of nowhere. We were informed by the kindly driver that several baby rabbits were huddled together in harm’s way in the middle of the road. He suggested that one of us should get off the bus and shepherd the young rabbits onto the verge. I volunteered eagerly and stumped down the steps and onto the tarmac. As I approached the rabbits my fellow travellers crowded into the front window of the bus to watch.

I adopted a shepherding stance, stretching my hands out widely as I stumped towards the bunnies. The rabbits didn’t understand my shepherding technique at all, they simply darted left and right around my feet and fell back into a huddle behind me, still in the middle of the road. I stumped around 180 degrees and again adopted the shepherding stance. They simply ran around me and regrouped in the road as before. I must have repeated this clumsy stomping pantomime several times to the escalating amusement of my fellow travellers, and I guess the growing impatience of the driver, until he eventually said, not unkindly, “Come back in lad”.

The juvenile rabbits were in much the same place as they were when we first encountered them, so the driver simply drove the bus around them and left them to their fate. Following this mortifying event, I refused point blank to cooperate with the hospital. I vowed that I would not wear that clumpy great national health surgical built-up boot ever again.

The Bedford OB coach is of course an old-fashioned vehicle. Its designers, I imagine, felt entitled to expect a significant degree of common sense from its passengers. Therefore, the sliding door at the bottom of the three metal steps had no form of interlock to prevent the door being opened unless the vehicle was fully stationary. Why waste effort on preventative safety measures when no reasonable person would attempt to dismount from a moving machine. Only Buster Keaton and his ilk would ever attempt this. In law this reasonable person was once the fictional arbiter of right and wrong and was referred to as ‘the man on the Clapham Omnibus’.

The question is how reasonable is an 11-year-old schoolboy, unsteady on his pins at the best of times, and nearing his stop on the fringes of Bodmin moor? I think that I was replaying in my head movie scenes of clever omnibus dismounts, a quick trot beside the still moving bus, a cheery wave to the passengers, then hands in pockets and a nonchalant whistle on my lips.

What actually happened was I opened the sliding door, stepped from the moving coach onto a wet grass verge, and slid smoothly feet first beneath the nearside rear wheels of the Bedford coach.

An empty Bedford OB coach weighs 3.5 Tons, more of course with the weight of the driver and a dozen school kids. The nearside rear wheels went over my thighs and the whole coach bumped down on its fully floating rear axle suspension when it passed over me. This unexpected bump alerted the driver and the passengers that something was amiss. The bus stopped and they all ran back to gawp at me lying in the gravel.

I think that the driver must have served as a medic in the war because he obviously triaged me as I lay whimpering in the road and decided that being run over by a 3.5 ton bus wasn’t so bad and the best course of action would be to lift me into the bus, lay me on one of the bench seats, and continue his lumbering route around the Cornish lanes to deliver the remaining children to their homes. Only then, after another hour or so did he turn the bus towards the hospital in town.

At the hospital I was examined. I had gravel embedded under the skin of my legs, and livid tread mark bruises forming, but miraculously no broken bones. Nonetheless I was in hospital for a few nights, long enough to need the services of a bedpan.

Nobody explained that the toilet paper was placed in the bottom of the bedpan, the result being that I did my business all over the supplied sheets. What to do? I remembered that Mum had brought me a small box of chocolates and there were corrugated separation sheets in the box, one of which I used to wipe my bum. But then I realised that I couldn’t simply put that in the bedpan, what would the nurses think of me? So, I hid it in the bedside drawer, which is where my mum inevitably found it the next day.

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