African Women to the Wine Factory

The Verona-Brescia Bus, June 2009

On the Sunday Verona-Brescia bus, in both directions, there in the morning and back in the evening, many of the passengers were African women. In the morning they got on in a suburb of Verona, and got off at a wine factory, and in the evening the reverse – they were clearly going to and from work.

All shouted, either at each other or down their mobile phones, in a language that was a mixture of English, Italian, and the language of wherever they came from (Nigeria, at a guess). A patois that was almost impossible to understand. How do they come to be there?

We travelled from Verona to Sirmione on the Verona-Brescia bus. More about this trip on Unmuzzled Lapdogs.

Hartlepool to Durham

November 2008

I waited for the bus to Durham, at the bus stop that was outside the Hartlepool Arriva Travel Centre. This meant that I could spend the time waiting for the bus, profitably reading the adverts for holidays that were stuck to the inside of the travel centre windows in great abundance. I learned that I could go on a five-day trip to the German Christmas markets, with afternoons to myself in Freiburg and Strasbourg, and a berth in a cabin on the overnight ferry from Hull to Rotterdam, for £259. That seemed extraordinarily good value. Or if I preferred, Skegness for £129 or Morecambe for a bargain £99. What value! Pregnant with possibilities!

Then it was time for my bus and I saw with some surprise and delight as it arrived that it was a double-decker. It was a rather ancient double-decker that rattled a lot. I rushed upstairs to the front seat, but needn’t have hurried, for of course all the old folks (ie all the other old folks) fill the seats nearest the door, so they have as short a distance as possible to walk. The only other person to come upstairs was a young man who looked like he probably had a mild learning disability, and he sat near the back. The bus was rather decrepit, and the backrest of the seat opposite where I was sitting came away from its housing when the driver braked, and slapped back with a resounding clonk as he accelerated.

The driver batted the bus along at quite a lick. Or maybe he didn’t especially, maybe it just seemed like it because it was an old rattly bus. Winding through depressed-looking towns, though this bus also negotiated some country lanes, past pheasants strutting in the ploughed-up fields. These buses do a number of detours around housing estates and it’s not always clear to a newcomer like me whether you’ve been down a road before, whether the bus is in fact just doing a loop. So I was not quite sure how many direction signs I saw to a SureStart centre, for it’s possible that some of them were seen more than once, but it did appear to me that every small town had at least one. SureStart is the government programme that helps parents with parenting skills, among other things to try and help make the poor less poor.

The other pleasing thing about this double-decker bus was that one of the unappealing towns it went through was Hutton Henry. When you drive north along the dual-carriageway A19 through County Durham, you see the signs to Hutton Henry, but of course never go there. To my delight, the bus did, not that there was much there when it came to it, but no longer will I have to wonder.

As the bus gets within sight of the cathedral at Durham it goes down a steep straight hill, quite fast, which in the front seat upstairs makes you feel like saying, wheee! (to yourself of course, even though there was no one else on board). A windy day too.

Sunderland to Hartlepool

November 2008

The bus from Sunderland to Hartlepool was a smaller one than I travelled on from Durham to Sunderland, and was cream and blue instead of bright purple. The passengers, as with the Durham to Sunderland bus , were almost entirely old folks travelling on their free passes (well, why not? that’s what I was doing). And they looked rather poor.

The bus goes through a string of poor-looking towns: Ryhope, the outskirts of Seaham, Easington, Horden, Peterlee. I have been through most of these places before, and they do look rather depressed. The people look poor, whatever that means (some comments on this on my page about Sunderland). And so do the buildings. Among the old folks joining and leaving the bus was a woman reading a book called Contract Law. Why would someone travel on a bus from Sunderland to Peterlee, reading a book about contract law? She may have been studying law – as a (very) mature student – or maybe she was in dispute over a loan or something. So much that one doesn’t know and is far too shy to ask. There was a story to be told there, there must have been.

The woman with her book was unusual. No one else I saw that day on the buses was reading a book.

The Man in the Luggage Compartment

Calais Port: September 2006

A Man With No Trousers On

Waiting to board our ferry we were watching a Czech tourist coach where the driver opened the first two luggage doors for the passengers to get their pullovers out of their suitcases, then when they’d all got themselves kitted-out for the windy bleak crossing and gone back to their seats, he opened the third luggage door and out popped a man with no trousers or shoes and socks on. He was the second driver and he’d been locked into the luggage compartment to have a snooze, he washed his face from the coach’s bog overflow and put his uniform on and . . . then the port official said hurry up the queue’s moving.

To Mzuzu on the Bus

A Bus Ride to Mzuzu and Our First Meeting with Lead Fart and Lawnmower, Malawi 22 January 1996

Our twelfth day in Malawi. This follows on from Of Dogs and Tears. We go to stay with some of Penny’s relatives in Mzuzu and we travel there by bus, and we get introduced to Lead Fart and Lawnmower, who will be significant periodically in the rest of our stay in Malawi.

Today we are taking the bus to Mzuzu. First we go into town in Lilongwe with Penny and John to change money at the bank, buy postcards, and buy some malachite to take home. We bargain a little and buy bracelets and earrings for 500 kwatcha – eleven bracelets and a pair of earrings for £22, seems OK to us. Then a man tries to sell us a further five bracelets for a price dropping to 80 kwatcha. Should have bought them. ‘Oh, spit!’ cries Penny in her girls’ school English. ‘Oh, spit.’ Penny reckons we could have got the lot for a quarter of the price and that we’ve been done.

Then we pack the bags and drive with Penny and John to the bus station. We watch the combi vans pull up, the sliding door opens and about a hundred and fifty Malawians tumble out. These are the local buses. Most of the minibuses are Toyotas, often the sliding door does not close properly having pressed on too many bodies too often.

The Mzuzu bus arrives and we bundle on, getting ourselves a rather collapsed plastic-covered seat for the four-and-a-half hour journey. Our tickets have seat numbers on them, but we are not too surprised to find no one taking any notice of them.

The bus drives through the embassy district to the Capital Hotel to pick up business-type Africans in suits and deodorant. Then to the airport, then off down the road at full belt: 5mph up hill and 95mph down, hooting cyclist and pedestrians off the road, occasionally being obliged to slow down for an ox cart or turning Carlsberg lorry.

We pass two checkpoints where soldiers get on the bus to check passengers’ credentials, one of these checkpoints is right alongside the Zambian border. At this stop, people get off to buy hard-boiled eggs, barbecued maize and cooked chicken. Drinks and crisps are available in the bus from the smiley steward. Coke for 3.50 kwatcha per bottle (15p).

The road becomes much more deserted of people as we climb through wooded hills – on one of them a paper-making venture.

It starts to rain, giving the African passengers the excuse to close all the windows and so steam up the inside of the bus, making everyone feel sleepy including, we rather worryingly suspect, the driver. Certainly he had not changed the tape lately. Music has been played in the bus the entire journey. It started off all right with blues, then degenerated through smoochy piano to end up on Country and Western. Aargh!

We arrive in Mzuzu in one piece thankfully, to be met by John and Gillian and Lead Fart and Lawmower. Penny and John had warned us about the latter two and they were right.

Lead Fart and Lawnmower were visiting from the UK. They had first stayed with Penny and John in Lilongwe and were now with John and Gillian in Mzuzu. During their time in Lilongwe they had gained the nicknames of Lawnmower and Lead Fart (unknown to them, we hope and assume). Paul, aka Lawnmower, had something wrong with his face, which had caused Rusty at the SOS Village to remark that he looked like he had been run over by a lawnmower. Jane had got her nickname from Penny, whose girls’ school English had remarked that when you talked to Jane everything you said went down like a lead fart. So they were Lead Fart and Lawnmower.

Lead Fart tries to get every conversation round to the mundane, primarily to prevent it from getting out of her not substantial depth. She can be quite rude about it – all done in a supposedly upmarket south-of-England accent.

The first evening we were in Mzuzu they were discussing why a Malawian car mechanic, who had been on a course in Bedford including some work at the Vauxhall plant in Luton, still can’t fix a car with any evidence of commitment to the project. I suggested that perhaps he was there in the 1970s, when there was a fashion for sabotage of anything smacking of official systems. ‘We didn’t sabotage things in the 1970s’, announced Lead Fart indignantly. To which the answer was: ‘I know you didn’t dear, you weren’t a bloody motor car mechanic working for Vauxhall Motors, were you!’ But the damage is done before I get a chance to respond, the thread is broken, others rush to her rescue and change the subject. Any whiff of intelligent conversation killed. On the other hand: ‘Oh, what pretty flowers. Aren’t they pretty flowers!’ keeps her going for hours.

So the evening was made bearable largely on gin and tonics. At least Mr Lawnmower is not too bad, just rather boring, not surprisingly really since he commuted from Dorking to London every day for forty years for the same company.

The story continues with Florence Nightingale Wasn’t a Nun.