Come to think of it, with your evident attitude that 'what was good enough for Queen Victoria should be good enough for us', perhaps you'd like us to go back to this sort of public transport provision:-CHAPTER 1 OF ‘THE CLIFF END’ BY EDWARD C BOOTHFirst published 1908, last republished 1956Tankard's bus is the most beautiful bus in the world - the biggest, blandest, broadest, noblest, longest, good-naturedest, most magnanimous. Only to see it emerge in yards of profile from Tankard's side-gate, till its box is butting into Gasserford's blind window, its two horses slewed up at right angles along the wall, and still not room enough to fetch its stern clear of the gate-posts without no end of shouting, is to crown it unhesitatingly monarch of its kind. No fewer than five steps swing at its tail-end to two yards out, with balustrades of real brass. Five steps form the complement of a full-grown flight of stairs in Ullbrig - as many, indeed, as take most of us up to bed - and to watch them all wag together at a cobble or a corner is something worth sitting on a gate for. As for windows, the bus is one continuous transparency with them from end to end. Tankard's responsibility in glass alone must be awful. There is no bus like Tankard's; no, not one. All the virtue of Ullbrig, of Whivvle, of Wetherington, of Shippus - of this corner of Yorkshire even - Iies contained in its giant profounds, translated into the sacred symbols of sound, sight, and smell. Only to take one sacramental sniff of its cushions is to be filled as a perfumed vase with the breath and spirit and sympathy of the district; is to divine the soul of the soil, the heart of the heavy-headed corn, aflush to the cliff-edge; the sensuous sway of barley in ceaseless stir of mystic communion; the stillness of turnips; the rustle of oats; the grateful green of pasture, traversed slowly here and there with streaks of dun and white-and-tan, and the fleecy grey blots of nibbling sheep; the murmur of many waves; the rippling cadence of the reaper; the busy hum of the threshing-machine, in indefatigable ascent and descent of its three semitones…... Yes, yes; all that in Tankard’s Bus.All that and more. Tankard's Bus rolls out of Hunmouth every Saturday afternoon, having rolled in from Ullbrig in the dim hours of dawn, wet or fine, brimming over with butter-baskets and early scrubbed faces. It is timed to leave the Market Arms at three o'clock. To make quite sure of a corner seat, you would do well to be sitting in it by four o'clock at the latest. After this the butter-baskets begin to re-assemble one by one upon the cushions - some empty, with their white cover-cloths folded into neat squares, or falling in outline over the unfinished piece of pork pie that had to be set aside for the sale of the last pat; others bulky with the next week's groceries. Fare for the single journey, one shilling; double journey, one-and-six; children, half-price - that is because they give so much less trouble than grown-up people, and never stand on the cushions; small parcels, a penny. The getting away of Tankard's Bus from Hunmouth on Saturday afternoons is a stupendous undertaking - only comparable, indeed, to the moving of mountains. Without faith it could not be done. What gives the impetus to that mighty chain of events whose final link is the bus's departure, or by what mysterious combination of agencies it is quickened into movement, no man mortal may decide. Slowly, silently, secretly, during unseen moments of the afternoon, the baskets multiply upon the dingy cushions, and in divers distant quarters of Hunmouth Tankard is heard to say with genuine conviction: “ Weeal, wussl' et-ti-be yawkin'! " (Well, we shall have to be yoking.) But it is not till an hour later; when the butter-baskets line the seats in magnificent perspective from the door to the box-end in order of precedence, and Tankard's two horses stand yoked to the shafts by wizard hands, that the great drama of the departure is enacted. It is more difficult to lure Tankard's passengers into their places than to accomplish Pigs-in-Clover on ship-board. They will come of their own accord so far as the bus end - will even go the length of sitting down upon its steps for facilities of conversation - but further than this the devil himself would be hard set to drive them. They are as shy of Tankard's voice as any unbroken colt of a halter. The appearance of his penetrative eye round the bus corner has the immediate effect of disintegrating a group into its constituent elements and dispelling it altogether like mist to the sun. Not the receding waters were more elusive to the lips of Tantalus than are Tankard's passengers to his persuasions at this moment. Faces appear incidentally at the bus door, scanning the long column of baskets for intelligence of friends. "Ye've gotten Missis Wetherby wi' ye, then? That'll be 'er basket wi' band lapped (wrapped) round t'andle, ah reckon." Or, "What's gotten owd (hold) o' Jan Yenery ? 'E's not i' market, an' ah can mek nowt of 'is basket onniweers." Or, "Ah s'll 'a time ti get ti Stringer's an' back, ah see. Ye weean't be ready yet a bit." And disappear again forthwith, like the illusive figments of a dream. "Coom, coom!" says Tankard, with fretful appeal, upraising himself in monumental rebuke to. the roadway over the bus top. " Let's 'a ye inside - some on ye, at onny rate - and let's be gettin' started. Ah nivver seed nowt like it…..ye're wuss nor a lot o' sheep sketterin' about bus yend. Whativver sort of a time div ye think it'll be by we get ti Oolbrig? " "Why! what's use o' stewin' us up i' bus yet awhile, mun?" says a rebellious voice out of the radius of Tankard's eye - on the steps by the sound of it. " We s’ll 'a plenty o't bus an' all when she get's o't road, ah reckon, an' ah'm none so fond of 'er at onny time. ...What div ye say? " "Ah say an' all," says Tankard, subsiding in muffled exasperation from his sculptured eminence, " ...ah say it's eneugh to sicken a pig, what wi' waitin' an' waitin' an' better waitin', an' both 'osses i' shafts ready to mek a start, an' me callin' of ye till ah'm fair black i' face. That’s what ah say. Ah mud as lief (soon) be talkin' to stones. It's not a bit o' use sayin' nowt to onny on ye." "Nay, it's na use sayin' nowt," says Dixon's genial voice from behind, with maddening agreement, and all is silent but the eye of Tankard upon the box.So the getting away goes on, the big bus simmering slowly in sunshine up to the moving point like an engine under steam. Every now and then somebody comes to look inside for somebody else, and departs (regardless of Tankard's protests), not finding him; and somebody else returns in somebody's absence, and leaves in turn likewise, clearing somebody's re-arrival by a swear's width. In such fashion the bus's departure is put off till the moment that Tankard, frothing at the mouth, remembers which of his commissions has been forgotten, and goes off gibbering to execute it. His departure is the signal for a general paroxysm in the bowels of the bus. There begins a frenzied transfer of the reins, from the last man to whose fingers Tankard bequeathed them to the last who will undertake their custody, after which they are looped over the brake and abandoned to their own devices. Halfway on his breathless return Tankard stops to expostulate with the foremost member of the exodus contingent, and arrives to find the bus deserted once more, its occupants scattered hopelessly over the roadway like a fall of coster's apples, and requiring as much picking up. Anyone with less nerve than Tankard, or less mastery over all the intricacies of his business, would surely bury his head between both arms on the roof of the bus from the box seat and weep like a child. But Tankard does not weep - he has too much to do with his eye for that. "Theer's no sense in it! " he exclaims, getting down from his perch and coming round to the door for the fiftieth time, to .see who has slipped out of his hands since the last stock-taking. "Ah'm sure ah'm fair sickened o't job. It's nowt bud clammerin' up an' down bus side. Noo then. Are we right this go off an' all?"By false starts alone the bus consumes some fifty yards of its homeward journey, and what with much declamatory pulling up and the doing of desperate marionette work with his eye on both sides of him - till at times it gives the appearance of two to the pavement - Tankard looks like a great boiled beetle-browed prawn, sweat pouring in runnels from under his hat-brim, and being shaken off his nose-end on to his neighbours of the box seat. But not even errand boys, running for their lives to stop him with fish basses that ought to have been delivered an hour ago to some other bus, can delay the departure for ever, and there comes that inevitable moment when the old vehicle heaves up its end for the last time and pitches out into mid-road, all its five steps wagging to alternate kerbs like the tail of a Christmas goose; a-swing with brooms and besoms, and wash-tubs and peggy-legs and protruding clothes-props, and pig-troughs and gates, and cakes of cow-feed and bags of meal and cans of lamp-oil, and empty baskets of every sort and size, one within another, all secured with the complacent insecurity of loose hemp-rope, threatening the safety of passing traffic, and beating the bus's ribs laboriously at every lunge. A great broad sigh of assurance goes up within to the unmistakable import of that last upheaval. "We're off an' all this go, onny'ow," says Jan Yenery, when the heads of either side have done bobbing at each other like corks in a pail of water, and the seats are rocking level again. " What time will it be, Mester Barclay?" "When?" asks Barclay, with that facetiousness for which he is so widely famed. "It'll be twelve o'clock by midneet, ah's think." "Ay, bud noo?" says Jan Yenery, and he and Barclay wink meaningly all round the bus from their respective stand-points in the humour. A Yorkshireman is fond of his joke - and he makes it as well as any man I know, barring a heavy hand for the crust at times - but he doesn't like to see it go untasted. Cumbrously Tankard's Bus noses clear of the great seaport city, threading its way undismayed through the dizzy network of masts and rigging and multi-coloured sloping funnels that complicate every corner; rumbling tranquilly down broad thoroughfares where huge ships, many times the bus's own size, lie sleeping across the roadway like obstinate big dogs, on shop doors and in the shadow of churches. The bus mounts on to frail little movable bridges that span thin widths of winking water, crawling carefully across them like a great garden slug over a blade of grass, and shaking its tail free of their restraint on the home side with a momentary trot. Then, unshackling its wheels of the tram-lines, it turns into the long last road, where the houses dwindle and draw back behind wooden palisades, with three odd yards of hard earth, dandelion roots, asphalt, oyster-shells, and all the other attributes of a suburban garden, in between; then houses set four yards back following on these, marking the progress; and houses five yards back with shrubs and box-borders, and semi-detached gardens with side-walls and trees looking over, holding the golden sunlight cradled in their leaves, that make welcome black shadows on the pavement below; and great wide gate- ways giving access to the pleasure-park of the great city, with its conflux of holiday-makers beyond, abloom with bright blouses and ribbons and the noiseless commingling of bicycles; and after this, dejected-looking building sites, with the scurvy of bricks and mortar already upon them, eating into their green; and after these, hedges and fields and trees and the parting of roads, with Hunmouth a dust-cloud in the distance - a mere smoked edge of the blue dome. The sun pours his melon-ripe rays into the bus as it journeys, gilding the legs of the two end sitters, a-swing behind out of the open door, and from time to time illuminating the golden double column of faces that meet in the middle to gaze backwards or to chorus greeting to the swifter vehicles that overtake them unceasingly for the first part of the journey.Once well in the country, the bus begins to strew a trail of passengers and baskets behind it along the road-side. At every garden-gate there is somebody waiting with a far-beaming starlike smile and a ready word. There is no lane end so lonely but that a voice will hail Tankard from it, brimful of the commission poured into his distressed ear on the outward journey in the early dawn. "Did ye get them seeds, mester? 'Ow are ye, Jan? Ye're out again, it seems. Nay, ye've nivver gone an' forgotten 'em, ah sewd think! " Every chimney is a bar to the bus's progress; at each distant red tile rising over the hedge-tops there is a sudden stir of feet in the straw, and somebody gets up, saying: "Well, ah s'll 'a to be leavin' ye. Way, mester, ye mun't tek me off ti Oolbrig." Whereupon the " Way! " is passed generously from mouth to mouth down the bus to the door, growing as it goes with every variety of inflection and dramatic emphasis: "Waay!" "Woooh!""Weeeah!" "Waaaaugh!” "Weeaaoouugh!" Till it buzzes at last about Tankard's ears on the box like a gigantic bumble bee, making his elbows kick like mad, with no fewer than half-a-dozen helping hands upon the reins. With each departure there is an unmistakable tightening of the bonds of friendship belting the survivors in closer and more visible embrace, and the winks which pass round in pure snuff-box confraternity after an exit are more generously tendered and taken. And so on, and so on, and so on, along the dusty hedge-lined road, homeward in the slanting beams of gold, with the sun spinning dizzily behind and the great elongated shadow of Tankard and his colleagues thrown far away out before, till that last moment when the mill spreads its mighty arms to the left-hand window in welcome of home-coming, and the squat, square-towered church stares stolidly through the other with its unwinking blue-diamond clock eye, and the little red roofs gathered round its midway give warm greeting over the latticed hedges in the mellowed evening light. Ullbrig! Ullbrig! Ullbrig! With the voice of Barclay as I remember it when but a little boy with a big collar:" Nay, nay, mun. Sit ye still and don't shek bus ower. She's come safe eneugh so far, an' she mud as well finish tiv yend (to the end). Ah'm not keen o' walkin' last aif mile."
Chris Veasey ● 6206d