For the last couple of weeks I’ve been meaning to write about another experience I had in London, which I visited earlier this month for gay pride weekend. Upon my arrival on a sunny Friday afternoon at London Luton Airport, I bought a Green Line bus ticket to get into town. The ticket clerk, a fairly young black woman, was the most indifferent employee I have ever encountered. She did not even look up from her magazine as I approached the counter. Not only did she not care whether I bought a ticket from her; she seemed acutely annoyed that I was there, asking her only to run my credit card through the machine so that I could board the bus.
But when I got on the bus, I was taken aback in the opposite direction – the driver could not have been cheerier. Perhaps I’m too cynical, but I generally expect bus drivers, especially on routes such as this, to be less than thrilled with their lot in life. But this man clearly took a lot of pride in his bus and his job. For example, before we left Luton, he stood up halfway, turned around and announced brightly, “Ladies and Gents, seatbelts please!” A few minutes into the ride, an older couple sitting in the front row struck up a conversation with him. I was sitting two rows back, close enough to eavesdrop. The couple were British but lived in Ottawa; he was an engineering professor who had been visiting at a local university. They, like me, had just come in from Berlin, where they had been sightseeing. They asked the driver where he was from. He was Pakistani, but born in Watford, the suburb we would soon be driving through en route to London. In Watford he had met his wife, an elementary school teacher also of Pakistani descent; they had two children.
The conversation turned to the bus service itself. The couple asked how often the buses ran; the driver proudly said there were departures every 20 minutes around the clock, adding, “I find that pretty amazing.” This bus company must treat its drivers really well to get this much gratitude and, even, wonder, I thought. The driver described the kind of buses the company uses, how often they are fueled and serviced, and how long the typical shift runs (three round-trips to the airport and back). The company employs 14 drivers, he explained, and they are overworked; in fact, his wife and kids were leaving the next day to spend six weeks in Pakistan, but he was unable to get vacation time and would be working through the summer. He would be driving his family out to Heathrow the next morning before beginning his shift.
The driver then asked the professor for some advice for his younger brother, who was studying engineering and had to decide which subfield to pursue. In his own case, the driver added with a bit of regret, his grades were not good enough to pursue a field like engineering, and thus he had ended up as a bus driver. It was clear he hoped for better opportunities for his own children; at one point he noted that his kids were the stars of their respective schools. I thought it interesting that such a seemingly intelligent man, so devoted to education, was satisfied with his work as a bus driver.
Shortly before our arrival in London, we made a very sharp turn onto a small street. The woman from Ottawa commented to the driver how well the bus maneuvered. The driver shrugged off the suggestion and said it was because of his many years of experience that he was able to make such a turn. He added, “Your husband will surely know what I mean – when you work at something for many years, you become very good at it.” I found this a strangely old-fashioned comment – as if the woman herself could not have become so good at anything over the years to have had that same experience. Perhaps, I wondered as we pulled into Baker Street, the driver was more traditional and conservative than I had imagined.
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Less than 48 hours after I disembarked, I was waiting on Gloucester Place in London for the trip back to Luton. The bus pulled up as a light rain began to fall; I looked in and saw it was the same driver. I was initially glad, for I expected he would get us to Luton quickly and safely. But I could tell right away the driver was in a different mood this day. I had my laptop out when he pulled up and opened the door, and as he walked by he said to me nastily, “I certainly hope you’re not expecting to show me your ticket on there.”
Once all of us were seated, he shoved off without bothering to ask us to fasten our seatbelts. When we stopped at the next bus stop to pick up more passengers, he opened the front window and announced sternly to the crowd waiting outside, “I have only three seats left on this bus. I will not open this door to let anyone on until I have only the first three people to arrive here. Everyone else will have to wait for the next bus.” There’s a fine line, I thought then, between taking pride in one’s work and brandishing a bit too much power. On Friday the driver’s pride had seemed charming and useful; today it was troublesome. Perhaps, I wondered, had his mood shifted because he had dropped off his wife and kids at Heathrow the day before and now faced months of working and living alone? Or was it simply because it was a stormy Sunday afternoon, with a bus bursting almost full of cranky passengers, while Friday afternoon’s bus had been nearly empty?
The coup de grâce, however, was yet to come. Sitting around me this time were a group of five young French women who seemed to be lesbians. (It can be hard to tell sometimes!) I was sitting in the second row, next to one woman, and in the front row sat two pairs of young women, one on each side of the aisle. A few minutes after our coach finally got on the motorway toward Luton, the two lesbians in front of me started making out and touching each other. I thought it was a little unusual, but not bothersome. Suddenly, however, the driver shot them a glance and reprimanded them sternly: “Ladies, what you do on your own time is fine, but this is a public bus and that behavior is unacceptable.” The women stopped touching, looked at each other and talked quietly to themselves in French. The woman next to me leaned forward and said something to them in French as well. (I wished my French were better, so that I could eavesdrop, and maybe commiserate with them.) It somehow seemed ironic that George Michael’s “Father Figure” was playing on the bus radio at this very moment.
My first thought, of course, was that the driver would never have said the same thing to a man and woman doing what the women were doing. What a shame, especially on gay pride weekend, for these women to have to endure such an upbraiding, especially when no other riders had said a word to complain. I wondered if this could, or would, happen in the U.S. I wondered whether he would next tell me I had to put away the gay pride magazine I was reading, which contained some quite explicit sexual ads.
I also wondered: Did the driver have it backwards, in making this a public-private issue? If this were truly a public bus, would he be entitled to tell the passengers what they could and could not do? As it was, this was a semi-public bus, and perhaps (although the driver didn’t say so) the bus company had rules against such behavior.
True, the women were a bit brazen, sitting in the very front seat in full view of the driver, and doing a bit more than kissing. But even so, the driver’s reprimand was unnecessarily nasty. And with that my opinion of the bus driver from Watford came full circle. A man who first impressed me with his cheery outlook and dedication to his job proved to be something of an intolerant brute drunk on his own power, such as it was. Perhaps indifference has its advantages after all.
One footnote: Interestingly enough, according to Wikipedia, Watford is well-known because of the popular British expression “North of Watford,” which is “a light-hearted, yet derogatory” expression used “typically by those living in the south of England to describe any part of the United Kingdom situated more than a relatively short distance North of London. It is a euphemism for ‘provincial’ and by extension ‘unsophisticated’ … its use has contributed to a mildly negative association with the place name.” Wikipedia adds that Watford “is the first major town encountered when traveling north from London and therefore forms a well-known and obvious landmark to define a provincial town.” Provincial town, provincial people?
