Chapter 4

Blood on the buses

I had not yet got to within spitting distance of the main crowd – which proved fortunate given the sport of some of their number – when I was approached by two little girls. The one at the rear was visibly distraught and was led hand-in-hand by her pig-tailed friend. Both girls wore glossy black patent leather shoes with shiny gold buckles – almost certainly not the footwear that their mothers would have sanctioned for wearing to school.

‘That boy’s nicked Ruby’s bus pass,’ said the friend. ‘She won’t be able to get home without it.’

‘Which boy’s that?’ I asked.

‘That one over there,’ the girl said as she pointed. ‘The one with the dirty trousers and the squiffy eye’.

I was too far from the boys she’d indicated to make out which of them had a squiffy eye and which ones didn’t, so she’d not really narrowed the field. ‘You’d best come and point him out,’ I suggested.

Both girls turned and walked quickly back up the street with me following on behind. As we got closer to the boy that I assumed to be the bus pass thief, he turned to face away and lobbed what was obviously the girl’s bus pass into the garden ahead of him. His gaggle of friends giggled and cheered but scattered to either side when I got there.

‘Now go and fetch that back,’ I said as I stood staring down into the boy’s squiffy eye.

‘Fetch what back?’’ he protested.

‘This girl’s bus pass,’ I said, nodding my head to the left to indicate Ruby who was standing close-in beside me. ‘I just watched you throw it into that garden. Now go and fetch it back.’

‘How am I gonna do that?’ he said. ‘It went in the pond’.

‘Find a twig or something to fish it out with!’ I instructed. ‘It’s not rocket science, for God’s sake’.

The boy continued to stare at me as defiantly as he could manage with his one good eye and slouched against the gate post.

‘Fetch it,’ I said firmly, moving a step closer. ‘And be quick about it or I’ll keep you in detention to five o’clock’.

‘You ain’t allowed to do that,’ said a voice over my right shoulder. ‘You ’ave to give twenty-four hours’ notice for after-school detentions.’

I half turned, narrowed my eyes, and smiled in a manner that I hoped would convey menace. ‘I suggest you keep quiet young man or else you’ll be joining him,’ I said.

The squiffy-eyed boy pushed away from the gate post and swaggered slowly into the garden, exchanging sniggers with his little gang as he went. He walked across to the privet hedge that separated the garden from the neighbouring one, and he snapped off one of the lower branches.

He walked back to the edge of the pond and poked around in the murky water with the twig. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts, he managed to scoop the bus pass onto the grass. He moved it back and forth with his foot to remove the pondweed and then gingerly picked it up and brought it over to me.

As I passed it on to little Ruby, someone up the street bellowed ‘The buses are coming!’ and within seconds the crowd around about me thronged to the kerbside. Ruby delivered a parting ‘Thank you, sir,’ and she and her pig-tailed friend were swept along with them.

The bus duty rota, as I was later amazed to discover, was arranged so that there would be six members of staff on duty on any given day. And with such numbers, it might just have been feasible to manage the near-death and certain destruction that came as a consequence of fifty or more bodies all trying simultaneously to board each of the four double-deckers and lay claim to seats on their top decks. As I also later discovered, however, one very rarely had five of one’s colleagues attending to lend assistance. Some staff simply refused even to venture into the street until the buses had departed, while others paid lip-service to their allotted role but stayed well out of harm’s way when the buses arrived at the kerbside.

On this, my very first tour of duty, I found myself accompanied only by a frail and rather skeletal-looking woman who seemed unlikely to survive a stiff breeze let alone a surge of anarchic adolescents. The woman was clearly cognisant of her own limitations and maintained several feet of open space twixt herself and the nearest homebound child.

‘There’s absolutely no need to push and shove like that,’ I heard her say, ‘There’s enough seats on the bus for all of you.’ And that proved to be the sum total of her efforts to control the crowd. They paid no heed whatsoever to what she said and continued to push and shove regardless.

The bus that pulled up nearest to me was the No. 42. This was the bus that was destined to carry home those who lived on the Naseby and Edgehill council estates; it was commonly referred to by the St. Wilfrid’s staff as the battle bus – and in part, this was a nod to the housing developments’ rather strange celebration of the Royalists’ failures to quell Cromwell’s lot in the English Civil War but mainly it was because its juvenile passengers had a longstanding reputation for buggering about and belligerence.

When the driver of the bus opened the doors, the nearest six or seven were pushed forward by those immediately behind and became wedged like sardines in the entrance. The boy toward the front gave a backward head butt to the girl behind him and he elbowed the lad to his left in the face. By this means, he successfully then broke free of the ruck but was rudely detained by someone to his rear who refused to let go of his backpack. The boy turned, dug in his heels, and yanked hard on the bag’s shoulder straps. Whoever was holding on to his backpack then released their grip so that the bag shot forward, struck the boy in the chest, and caused him to fall over backward.

Those following close behind endeavoured to step over their fallen comrade but were singularly unsuccessful and ended up sprawled in a heap at the foot of the stairs to the upper deck. One of the fallen was female and fell to the floor with her navy-blue knickers on show. This revelation did serve to ease the mounting tension a little but also brought on problems of a different hue.

Despite her wildly flailing arms and her friend’s tirade of obscene instruction delivered against her assailant, the girl was poked repeatedly between her legs and up the bum by a boy brandishing a 12-inch plastic ruler. The onlookers at the kerbside gave wolf whistles and cheered.

And it was at this point that I reluctantly entered the fray, spurred to action by the driver who – from the comfort and safety afforded by his glass-shielded cockpit – shouted ‘Well, don’t just stand there mate, sort the buggers out!’

He bashed the steering wheel with the ball of his right thumb to emphasize his discontent. I gave him a strong look of disapproval and forced my way onto the bus with head down and shoulder first.

The boy with the ruler, without really knowing, I think, that he was being tackled by a member of staff, completely ignored my instruction to stand down, and fought off my attempts to pull him away from the fallen girl. He kicked back with his heels against my shins and jabbed back at my face with his flexed elbow.

I eventually managed to pull him away by grabbing a handful of his hair and yanking hard but even as I then opened my mouth to berate him for his bad behaviour, he shrugged free of my grasp, vaulted the girl on the floor, and, with the speed of an amphetamine-fuelled whippet, shot up the stairs to the top deck.

As the girl with the exposed knickers then stood, re-arranged her skirt, and darted down the aisle to the back seats, the whole world and his mother flooded to either side of me and piled onto the bus. I fought against the tide of bodies, edged back to the door, and squeezed sideways out onto the pavement.

‘Fat lot of bloody use you were,’ the driver said, and I pretended not to have heard him. It did register though that this had not been a great first day. I felt a complete and utter failure and began seriously to worry over the miserable times that likely lay ahead of me. But then I caught sight of the two girls who were sat in the left-hand front downstairs seats on the bus; one was Carol Farr – the girl who’d chatted with me in the morning about bed bugs and cat fleas, and the other was the proud owner of Fidget, Moira Middleton. Both girls saw me looking and gave a little wave and a smile.

I smiled back.

And as I then turned to go back into the school, Sharon Mackenzie came across from the corner shop. She was in company with Tracey Watkins and my lunchtime antagonist, Madelaine. As they brushed past me, Sharon winked and offered me an Opal fruit. ‘This is Maddie – my kid sister,’ she said as she looked back, and as the three of them boarded the bus and bade me farewell, my mood improved a little.

I unwrapped my Opal Fruit and walked back through the car park, little suspecting what lay in store at the close of play on the following Monday.