Tag Archives: bus

A short bus journey in Chennai

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IT WAS VERY HOT when we decided to travel from Chennai Central Railway Station to the city’s Indo-Saracenic style High Court, which is about a mile away. A policewoman told us that it was too far to walk, so we must take a bus. Following her sensible advice, we boarded a local city bus.

As with all buses in India, there was a conductor on boarf who sold tickets. On enquiring the cost, we were told that the price was 5 rupees. We asked if that was per ticket or for the two of us. The conductor replied that my ticket was 5 rupees and that on his bus women travel free of charge. Then, he gave us two fragile paper tickets. One was marked with a large ‘5’ and the other was covered with Tamil script, but no ‘5’ (except a small one in the ticket’s six digit serial number). A friend, who reads Tamil, explained that the brown ticket without the large 5 reads ‘lady’s ticket’.

After travelling one stop, we disembarked in a busy street market, and walked about a quarter of a mile to the impressive, oriental-looking Court building’s, which were constructed between 1888 and 1892, to the designs of architects JW Brassington, Henry Irwin, and JH Stephens. As we had committed no misdemeanors and had no legal work to do, we could not enter the complex of buildings.

The saying goes ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’, but during our visit to central Chennai, we discovered that there is such a thing as a free bus ride!

A chance meeting in north London

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During the late 1990s, our then young daughter had a baby-sitter called Bridie. Although Bridie was already well into her eighties when we first met her, she was a remarkably sprightly lady. Born in a rural part of the west of Ireland, she came to England in her late teens. On arrival in England, she and her husband were cared for by the Salvation Army in exchange for taking a pledge never to drink alcohol again. Bridie never reneged on this promise.  To earn a living in London, where she settled, she became a domestic servant. Hearing that I had been brought up in northwest London’s Golders Green, she told me the following story.

War memorial clocktower in Golders Green

Sometime before WW2, Bridie was employed as a maid in a Jewish household in Golders Green. She looked after the family’s children and carried out many household duties. Even though it was not a particularly wealthy family, Bridie recalled that she wore uniforms when on duty. There was one outfit that she wore in daytime and in the evening, she changed into another. As she did with our daughter, Bridie became fond of the family’s two young sons.

Many years later, when Bridie had become a grandmother and our daughter’s baby-sitter, she used to spend her spare time travelling around London by bus (making use of her old age free bus pass).  One day, she was waiting for a bus at the stop closest to Golders Green’s Sainsbury’s (on the site of the Ionic cinema), when a well-dressed late middle-aged man in the queue said to her:

“Goodness! Is it you, Bridie? We have not seen each other for so many years.”

After a moment, Bridie realised that she was being addressed by one of the two boys, whom she had looked after in the house in Golders Green before the War. Just then, a bus arrived, and as her former charge was about to embark, he shouted:

“This is my bus. Are you taking it, Bridie?”

Bridie misheard what he had said, and by the time she realised, the bus had pulled away, leaving her at the bus stop. She told me that if she had known he was taking that bus, she would have joined him. As far as I know, she has never seen him again.

A lady from Lichtenstein

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FUNCHAL IN MADEIRA is famed for its glorious gardens, which can be visited by members of the public. Actually, the whole city is filled with so many flowering plants and trees that it is almost like a huge garden. Nevertheless, we decided to see one of the gardens  for which the city is known. We chose the Palheiro Gardens, which are located about 500 metres above sea level.

To reach the gardens, we took local bus number 37 from the Pingo, a square near the  Mercatos Lavradores. While waiting for the bus to depart, we began chatting with another passenger, a lady who spoke English with a Germanic accent, who last visited the Palheiro 18 years ago. It turned out that she is from Lichtenstein. As far as I can recall, she is the first person from that tiny country next to Switzerland with whom I have ever spoken.

The bus trip up to the Palheiro is spectacular. The road winds ever upwards along the edges of deep ravines. As the road ascends, there are many dramatic views of Funchal and its bay.

The gardens are well-tended and are laid out in a seemingly informal way, in the English garden style. The gardens flourish on slopes overlooking the city far below and a golf course nearby. I do not know enough about trees and flowers, but suffice it to say that the place provides a colourful feast for the eyes.

The Palheiro gardens are laid out in the former estate of the wealthy Count of Carvalhal. The place was purchased in 1885 by the Blandys, a family of British entrepreneurs, bankers, makers of Madeira wine, and merchants who have been important in the development of Madeira’s economy. Part of the gardens retain features laid out by the Count in the 18th century, but much of the rest of the grounds have been developed since then.

Being at about 500 metres,  the garden is noticeably cooler than in the centre of Funchal.  In fact, during our visit, we were close to the clouds and occasionally felt the moisture contained within them. I am pleased that we visited the Palheiro, but feel that given the profusion of lovely plants all around Funchal, I wonder whether visiting gardens like this one is a ‘must do’ activity unless you have a special interest in gardens and gardening.

The journey between Funchal and Palheiro and my first meeting with a person from Lichtenstein enhanced my trip to the gardens.

An old bus evokes memories

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SEEING A VINTAGE London bus today (20th of March 2022) brought back some memories from the early 1960s.  In those days, my best friend was the son of a medical doctor who worked for London Transport. Nick and I were about 10 years old when we became keen bus spotters. This involved loitering in the open-air bus station at Golders Green station with pencils and notebooks at the ready. As buses arrived in the forecourt, we noted down their serial numbers, which are visible on the sides of the bus or, in some older models, on their engine covers. These differed from the vehicles’ registration numbers. The serial numbers of different models of bus consisted of 1 to 3 letters and up to four numerals, e.g., RF 645 or RLH 24. Routemaster buses, which were replacing older models in the 1960s had serial numbers that began with ‘RM’ or in the case of the extended versions ‘RML’. The double-decker RMs were gradually replacing their predecessors, the RT models (which were in use in London from 1939 to 1979). Although we recorded every bus that passed us, certain examples, e.g., RT5 and RM1, were rare and exciting observations. The two of us and my friend’s younger brother formed the short-lived ‘OBC’, the Omnibus Club, of which we were the only members.

Now in 2022, long after the OBC disbanded, the Routemasters have largely disappeared from London, having been replaced by newer models. So, it was with some surprise that I spotted a RT bus in pristine condition parked in Notting Hill Gate today. For those bus spotters reading this, the vehicle bore the serial number RT1705. It was carrying the route number 28, with its destination board showing “Golders Green”. Today, route 28 still exists, but no longer runs from Chelsea to Golders Green (via Notting Hill Gate and West Hampstead) as it did in the ‘60s. In those days I had a friend who lived in Notting Hill Gate and used to visit him from Golders Green, using that bus route. Today, the same journey can be made using a bus on route 328.

The RT, which I saw today, was being used for private hire. As we were about to travel to West Hampstead, my wife asked the driver if he was going there later. He said he was, but he was not insured to take passengers who were not members of the party which had hired the bus. That was a pity, but as a former bus spotter, who gave up the hobby many decades ago, I was excited to see an RT still working on a London street,

Once it was owned by Rothschild

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ACCIDENTALLY, WE BOARDED a bus, which we believed would take us to Gunnersbury station in west London, but instead it took us to the edge of Chiswick Business Park furthest away from the station. This meant that we had to walk through the business park, and this was no bad thing.

The business park has been built on land that used to be owned by the Rothschild family, who owned nearby Gunnersbury Park for much of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th. In 1921, a bus company built a 33-acre bus maintenance establishment on the site where the Rothschild’s used to have orchards and where today the business park stands. This was closed in 1990, and various architects, including Norman Foster, drew up plans to develop the site with buildings around a central ‘piazza’.

Eventually, after gaining planning permission, the first building was completed at the end of 2000. Gradually, the rest of the buildings were constructed. The site was completed in 2015. The result is spectacular. The buildings are uncompromisingly modern, almost sculptural, and, most importantly, pleasing to the eye. They are arranged around an attractive lake or pond, complete with waterfalls, a bridge, and some metal sculptures. A number of small spherical glass and metal ‘meeting pods’ have been placed close to the water feature and there are several refreshment kiosks dotted around the place.

In 2019, a long footbridge, suspended from a series of giant oxidised steel hoops was constructed between the place where our bus (route 70) terminated within the business park and Chiswick Park Underground station. It is an elegant piece of engineering.

We have often passed the Chiswick Business Park whilst travelling by car or bus along Chiswick High Road that forms its southern border, but never bothered to walk in it. Today, we did, and it was a pleasant new experience.  

Red rover

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MY GRANDMOTHER LIVED a serene life in Port Elizabeth in South Africa. Born in the 1890s, she came with her parents from what is now Lithuania to what was then the Cape Colony. She married my father’s father in Cape Town. She raised four children and also helped her husband run a general store in Tulbagh, a small town, almost a village, near Cape Town. When her husband died young in 1931, she continued running the shop for a few years before marrying a widower who lived Port Elizabeth (‘PE’). Through this  second marriage, she acquired three stepsons and her fifth son. Hers was a tough life to begin with. By the 1960s, when the children had grown up and dispersed, she began living a quieter life in PE.

GRANNY red-rover-ticket john harper

Once every couple of years Granny used to visit her son, my father, and his half-brother in the UK. Although I met her when I was three years old, I only remember her from the time I was about nine. She used to sit in our ‘lounge’ (colonial term for ‘sitting room’) and did little except meet people. Every day in the late afternoon, she enjoyed a glass of whisky before the evening meal. It was in our home that she first ate bacon. My mother, although Jewish, was far from observant and was almost unaware of dietary rules. We ate ham and bacon regularly. She served bacon quite innocently to Granny, who had not encountered it before, enjoyed it, and appeared unperturbed to discover that this delicious food item was derived from pigs.

I was about ten when I suggested to Granny that we went on an outing together. It was an outing quite unlike any granny had ever done before or was ever likely to do again. I suggested that we should buy Red Rover tickets and then set off into the unknown. Few readers will be familiar with Red Rovers. So, I will explain. A Red Rover ticket allowed the holder unlimited travel on London Transport’s red buses for a whole day. In the early 1960s, an adult Red Rover ticket cost six shillings (30 pence) and children paid half of that. To my surprise and joy, my not too sprightly seventy-year-old grandmother agreed to the plan.

We set off from the bus station at Golders Green one morning and travelled to Chingford, which at that time was the terminus of the long 102 bus route. Then, another long bus journey through dreary parts of north-east London ended at Ponders End. By this stage, both Granny and I had enough of being jerked around on double-decker buses, but we had to face a couple more tedious bus journeys in order to get us back to Golders Green. For the rest of her life, Granny would recall this trip and the name ‘Ponders End’. When my father’s half-brother moved to a new house to north-east London, we were both amused because it was not far from Ponders End.

Many decades later, about two years ago, I decided walk south along the River Lee Navigation canal, starting near Waltham Abbey. After walking slowly for almost a couple of hours along the canal, which is flanked by large reservoirs, many electric pylons, and occasional industrial buildings, I reached the lock system at … Ponders End. Although I could not remember what Ponders End was like back in the early 1960s except that it was dismal, I found that although there had been much new construction, it had remained dismal.

I am glad that I got the idea of using a Red Rover out of my system. Until the arrival of the Coronavirus pandemic in London, my wife and I loved using London’s superb bus system. Since mid-March, we have not boarded a bus. Now, it is mandatory to wear a face covering on public transport. We see people waiting at bus stops, their noses and mouths covered by everything from a fairly useless single-use paper mask, such as I used when treating dental patients, to colourful home-made fabric coverings. However, things go wrong once these masked passengers enter the bus. We have noticed that many people travelling on buses that pass us have removed their face coverings once they are on board. Also, many bus drivers do not wear them.  So, if you were to gift me a Red Rover, you can be sure that I will not be using it in the foreseeable future.

 

Photo from john-harper.com

A chance meeting

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BRIDIE WAS OUR DAUGHTER’S babysitter for several years. She also collected her from school and looked after her until one of us returned from work. Although she was well over 80 when we first employed her, Bridie was a very sprightly, energetic woman.

LondonUnderground_GoldersGreenStation

 

She had been brought up in the wilds of western Ireland. Every day, she used to walk several miles over the hills to go to school. She moved to England as a very young lady. On arrival in Britain, she was at first given shelter by the Salvation Army. She had to promise them she would become teetotal. She kept this promise.

One day, Bridie told us an interesting story. When she was young before WW2, she worked as a maid for a Jewish family in north London’s Golders Green.  She wore uniform. There was one uniform for daytime and a different one for the evenings.

When Bridie was not working for us or ironing for our friends, the Wilsons who had introduced her to us, she used to roam around London taking advantage of her free bus pass (given to Londoners over 60 years old).

One day, Bridie visited Golders Green. When she was waiting for a bus to take her home, an elderly gentleman in the queue said to her:

“Excuse me, but are you Bridie?”

“I am,” she replied.

“Well, you looked after me when I was a child sixty years ago”

Bridie realised that the man was from the family, for whom she had worked in Golders Green before WW2.

A bus approached. The man asked her:

“Are you getting on?”

Bridie nodded, thinking he had asked a different question. The man jumped on the bus, leaving Bridie standing by the bus stop. Had she heard his question correctly,  he would have waited behind to reminisce with her: an opportunity lost for ever.

Ever since hearing about Bridie’s chance encounter, I have always considered her story as being rather sad.

 

Picture of Golders Green bus staion (Wikipedia)

A road through my childhood

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IT IS BECOMING AN ADDICTION: I must write something every day. It is probably a harmless compulsion, but it gives me great pleasure. Today, I will write about a road that did not exist until 1835. It runs northwards from the centre of London. It was built to bypass the hills on which Hampstead perches. The old route to Finchley and Hendon from central London passed across these hills before Finchley Road, originally a toll road, was constructed. Part of Finchley Road connects the suburb of Golders Green with Swiss Cottage. For five long years I travelled along this stretch.

HALL BLOG

Swiss Cottage is named after a pub, Ye Olde Swiss Cottage, which still resembles many people’s idea of what a Swiss chalet should look like. The pub is a descendant of the Swiss Tavern, built like a Swiss chalet. Opened in 1804, it stood on the same spot as its most recent avatar. It stood on the site near one of the toll booths built for collecting money from people using Finchley Road in earlier times.

There was another toll collecting place at Childs Hill, between Golders Green and Swiss Cottage. This toll gate was next to the now demolished Castle pub. For five years, I passed through Childs Hill on my way to the Hall School near Swiss Cottage.

I attended The Hall between 1960 and 1965. The Hall, founded in 1889 (the year the Eiffel Tower was built) was a private school for boys preparing boys for entry into private secondary schools, misleadingly called ‘public schools’.

During my time at the Hall, several bus routes plied between Golders Green and Swiss Cottage: 2, 2a, 2b, and 13. The fare was five pence (less than 2.5p) for children. I used to say to the conductor: “five-penny half, please”.

The bus journey to and from The Hall was tedious and slow. This was because Finchley Road was being widened. The roadworks began before I entered The Hall and continued after I left it five years later. To widen the road, which was lined by houses and shops all the way between Childs Hill and Swiss Cottage, every garden by the roadside had to be cut short. There was a garden centre in a long greenhouse near Finchley Road Underground station opposite the present O2 Centre.  More than three quarters of its length was demolished to permit road widening. All in all, the long section of road being ‘improved’ caused the rush hour traffic to move sluggishly. After 5 years of enduring this, I used to be able to recite from memory and in the correct geographical order the names of all the shops along Finchley Road. Today, hardly any of them exist. Even the large, still extant department store John Barnes has changed its name to John Lewis. Gone is the remains of the garden centre and the Edwardian Swiss Cottage public swimming pool. During my time at The Hall, this place closed when the then new Swiss Cottage Library and swimming pools opened close to the swiss style pub. Another of many disappearances is that of Cosmo, a restaurant that used to be popular with refugees from Central Europe and later with my wife, who loved the Hungarian cherry soup served there.

The Camden Arts Centre stands at the corner of Arkwright Road and Finchley Road.  The arts centre faces across the main road the start of Lymington Road, which soon runs along the side of a large grassy open space. This is where Hall School boys played football and cricket. We used to walk two by two with one of our teachers from the school to and from the field, a distance of at least a mile.

The Hall School was an ‘elite’ establishment. Almost all the pupils had parents who were listed in “Who’s Who”, or royalty, or were extremely wealthy. Several of my fellow pupils were sons of Greek shipping magnates. One of these used to be driven from the school to Lymington Road in his chauffeur driven Bentley, which he pronounced ‘bantly’. Occasionally, he used to offer teachers a lift in his luxurious vehicle.

The sports field in Lymington Road was opposite a small newsagent-cum-sweetshop. We were not supposed to enter this during school hours, which included time at the sports field. And, because we walked back to school after a sporting session, there was little chance to explore it, but somehow, we managed. The shop was amazingly well-stocked with cheap sweets. I discovered that if I walked from Swiss Cottage to Lymington Road, the fare from there to Golders Green was two pennies (there were 240 old pennies in one Pound) cheaper than from Swiss Cottage. This gave me two pennies on top of what I was given daily to buy snacks (in my case, read ‘sweets’) on the way home.

At Swiss Cottage, there was one sweet shop near my bus stop. It was a branch of Maynard’s inside the subterranean foyer of the Underground station. The sweets it sold were poor value: there was nothing for under three (old) pennies. In contrast, the shop on Lymington Road was full of sweets costing less than one (old) penny. For example, one penny bought four ‘blackjacks’ or a large chewy item called a ‘refresher’. And, for three pence, a ‘Sherbet Fountain’ (still available on the internet for 132 [old] pence or 55p). This used to consist of a paper cylinder containing a fizzy lemon flavoured white powder into which there was a black cylindrical straw made of liquorice (used to suck up the powder). The thing looked just like an unexploded firework. In short, It was worth walking about a mile to save on the bus fare and then to spend it in a place where my money had much better buying power.

At the end of the day, I disembarked at Golders Green near the Underground Station. There used to be many children from other schools mingling there on their journeys home. One incident at this place remains in my mind, but before relating it, you need to know what we wore at The Hall. The colour that predominated in the school uniform was pink, which was considered rather strange for a boys’ school. Blazers and peaked school caps also contained black trimmings. One of these, which was prominently sewn on to our caps and the outer breast pocket of our pink blazers trimmed with black, was a black Maltese cross. The way that the school’s emblem was drawn was closer to the shape of the German Iron Cross than to the real Maltese cross. By the time I was attending The Hall, I had already become interested in the Holocaust (the Shoah). Golders Green had many Jewish people living there and several shelves of its public library were filled with books about the deeds of Hitler and his followers. I borrowed and read many of them. Therefore, I was horrified when I stepped off the bus at Golders Green one afternoon, and then some schoolboys from another school shouted at my friend and me:

“Look, the Nazis have arrived.”

Is it not strange what one cannot forget?

 

Picture from https://www.uniform4kids.com/ 

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Lost property

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When we visited the museum at the Harrapan archeological site at Dholavira in Kutch (part of Gujarat, India), we found that there was a sale of guides to various historical sited in India, all published by the Archaeological Survey of India. With the exception of a couple of volumes that were printed in Hindi, we bought one of each, about 18 in all and at radically reduced prices.

After a couple of days in Dholavira, staying at the very overpriced Rann Resort, we travelled to Bhuj, where we stayed before taking a bus to Ahmedabad.

The air conditioned bus, which was not particularly comfortable, took eight hours. It was a part of the fleet of Gujarat State Road Transport (GSRTC). I was very tired when we pulled into the central bus station at Geetamandir in Ahmedabad, and disembarked with our several pieces of luggage.

Several hours later when we were comfortably settled into our hotel, I realised that I had left my cloth bag, containing my collection of books acquired in Dholavira, on the bus. My wife, who is fluent in the Gujarati language, suggested that we return to the bus station to try to recover the bag of books. I agreed, but felt that there was little chance of success.

We were directed to a booth where GSRTC officials in charge of controlling the bus service to and from Bhuj sat. My wife explained the problem and immediately the official began tapping on his keyboard. A screen marked “journey report” appeared. From this, the official was able to get the telephone number of the conductor who had been on our bus. He was off duty and our bus was on its way back to Bhuj. However, he provided the phone number of his colleague, ‘X’, who was now the conductor on ‘our’ bus that was returning to Bhuj.

We rang X, who soon found the book bag on the luggage rack close to where we had been sitting. He told my wife, in Gujarati, that he would be retutning on a bus that would arrive at Ahmedabad central bus station at about 5 pm the next day, and would bring us the bag of books. This sounded promising, but you never can tell what might or might not happen.

As we were setting off for the bus station the next afternoon, X rang us to tell us when he expected to reach it and where we should wait for him. At a few minutes before 5 pm, the bus on which we had travelled the day before pulled into the Geetamandir bus station. Soon X was walking towards us, holding our cloth bag filled with books. My admiration of GSRTC increased immensely.

We offered X some confectionery as a small token of our gratitude. He refused it twice, saying that recovering lost property is part of his duty. When we said that he should give the gift to his family, he accepted it.

Often Asian folk traditionally refuse an offer two or three times out of politeness before accepting. In the case of conductor X, I do not believe it was politeness that he did not accept our small gift immediately. Instead, he was behaving professionally and correctly.

A few hours earlier, we had been shown various interesting features by a guardian in the Jumma Masjid in Ahmedabad. When he had finished, we handed him some Rupees, expecting that he was probably poorly paid, if at all. We were most impressed when he refused the money, which would have been useful for him, and, instead, showed us which charity collection box in which to put it. Like X, the bus conductor, this fellow in the Masjid was too dignified to accept a tip for what he felt it was his duty to do.

Postscript.
The Asian habit of refusing three times can backfire when practised in Europe. A friend of ours of Middle Eastern upbringing became a junior doctor in an English hospital. After a few weeks, he asked an Egyptian colleague how to obtain a cup of tea.
“Simple,” the Egyptian said, “just get it from the lady who pushes the tea trolley around.”
Our friend replied: “Yes, she brings her trolley to me and she offers me a cup and I refuse. And then without even asking me a second or third time, she pushes the trolley away. So, I don’t get a cup of tea.”