this will be fun
There’s a certain unapologetic attitude to the women of Cornwall.
Of all the travel experiences, surely public transport with the local people must be one of the richest. When I returned from Cornwall a friend told me ‘there’s a place I spent six days and saw very little’. She and her travel companion had hired a car and spent most of the time lost down lanes or being hurried along by double decker buses as their windows fogged and their tempers frayed.
At the recommendation of my host I purchased a bus pass and didn’t regret it. I caught those little pink and green Mousehole buses at all times of the day, getting nods and an ‘alright?’ from the drivers who came to recognise me.
I began to understand the flow of the passengers — workers, school kids, shoppers and the knitters returning from their Wednesday get together.
The little pink and green buses run regularly between Mousehole and Penzance.
Catching the 8am from Newlyn to Penzance is a different prospect to the later services. It’s friendly and fun. When an elderly man lifts himself and a small suitcase up the stairs a woman he knows says ‘off on a visit?’. He gives her a cheeky grin and says ‘’eerm runnin’ away’.
One thing I found out is that Cornish women are not to be messed with. Like the unapologetic mother who scatters the front seat into standing when she boards with a long pram swinging with shopping and nappy bags.
I wonder what’s coming when the jolly man sitting behind me says, ‘this will be fun’. He’s already saved me from boarding a school bus ‘full of savages’ so I trust his judgement.
I’m ready to help at any moment but the mother deftly wheels and parks the oversized rig and engages the footbrake like an English Channel lorry driver. Her preschooler, a confident young man, not needing her permission heads for the back of the bus and she leans against the driver’s cordon and rolls a cigarette. At the next stop a white-haired woman with a duck-decorated shopper on wheels takes the only possible priority seat she can.
It’s several stops before I realise the mother not only has a newborn but there are a pair of dangling legs at the back of the pram, presumably the middle child. Somewhere toward the prom she calls for her son to press the button but he’s preoccupied and the rules of ‘you snooze, you lose’ apply as she presses it hastily and calls out: ‘too slow!’
She tries to reverse the pram to alight but the wheel sticks against the wheel of the elderly lady’s shopper. The woman looks down at her and says, ‘they’re stuck’ as though it’s the responsibility of the old woman to fix the problem. Which she promptly does by sliding her shopper forward, releasing the gridlock but then she’s in the path of the pram and there’s nowhere to go but out of the bus, so she steps down, away from her shopper, onto the footpath.
I hear the man behind me chuckling and I can’t help but giggle to myself. The pram driver has her vehicle out of the bus in a flash but the bus driver is keen to move on and I’m fearful the old lady will be left as the doors slide shut. My fears are unfounded, though, these Cornish bus drivers are gems and between the narrow streets and lanes and the cat and mouse accelerate and reverse game each time they encounter a tractor or a sizeable SUV, their jobs are stressful.
The old woman successfully retrieves her shopper and safely takes her seat as the doors close. But there’s a shout from the mother on the footpath — her son is still on the back seat, unfazed. The bus finally erupts in laughter as the baffled young man steps off and the family circus is on its way.