One of the odder reasons love Agatha Christie films and other 1950’s costume dramas is because there’s always a chance that they will feature my old bus, and after a bit of a hunt on the internet I found it restored, repainted and looking very fine indeed. I have a very strong connection with this exact bus (the little one in the picture), although when I drove it for three years it was hand painted in cream and brown and beginning to look a bit scruffy as it had already seen 25 years of service at Clifton College, transporting mud-caked boys from Clifton to Beggars Bush where the sports field was. After art school there was no prospect of any paid work and so I went to Clifton College and Madame went to Wills tobacco factory – which she hated – and then got herself the perfect job at Long Ashton Research Station; the horticultural department of the university in which she thrived. There’s a link here that gives a much fuller account with pictures of the original wooden slatted seats and the unbelievably rudimentary dashboard. Just click above and you’ll find it.
I went for the job and was interviewed by the Bursar to whom I lied about my qualifications, or at least told a half truth in that I did have some O Levels but failed to mention the honours degree bit. He asked me if I’d ever driven any larger vehicles and I said I’d driven a transit van and that was it. He shook my hand and said I’d be fine and off I went. On my first day I noticed an empty greenhouse and asked about it. Trev, the boss, said that my predecessor had filled the greenhouse with plants but just as they were coming into flower he’d come in one night and cut them all down and taken them away. Well well, I thought, this is going to be fun. I was to be a half time groundsperson in the mornings, tending the playing fields, marking out the pitches and helping out with the workshop where the brilliant but irascible mechanic, Geoff, would curse, hammer and repair our collection of old and worn out machinery. We once completely dismantled and rebuilt a Massey Ferguson 35 tractor; repaired a damaged Barford roller by replacing its piston rings with some taken from a Vespa motor scooter. The other half of my job was driving the school buses. They were beasts with crash gearboxes and frankly underpowered for dragging 25 schoolboys up from Avonbank on the river where they rowed, back to Clifton. I had never seen a crash gearbox before and so my first trip up Park Street from the river was conducted very slowly in second gear generating a huge traffic jam. The trick was to match the speed of the gearbox with the speed of the engine. If you failed to get it right the gearbox emitted fierce grinding noises and refused to engage – so when changing down from second to first there was a danger of rolling back and crushing the car behind. Changing up a gear was a bit easier because you declutched once, paused for a moment for the engine to slow down, declutched again and with a brief prayer the gear would engage like (as we used to say) greased weasel shit. This was the famous but these days unknown skill of double declutching which has gone the way of quill pens and longbows. There was a small team of retired Bristol Omnibus Company drivers who joined us in the afternoon because they knew how to change gear. I remember one, called George, with great affection.
My other workmates were the boss, Trev, who rum tum tummed and pom-pommed under his breath constantly; smoked his pipe and taught me the weeds which plagued us on the fields because he would never mix sprays to the recommended strength since he maintained that the manufacturers exaggerated the dose to make more money. Consequently we made our contribution to the development of weedkiller resistance among Speedwells and the infestation got worse and worse. In the summer I would mow the fields, pulling a gang mower behind the little Fergie and pausing frequently to acquire the beginnings of my field botany skills. In the winter we’d maintain the equipment and (favourite job) lay the boundary hedges and warm our hands on bonfires of prunings on frosty days.
Chubby was my other work friend. Indeterminately old and wily with withered skin over a foxy face, he would carry a brown paper bag in his pocket with as much as a couple of thousand pounds in it. He was notorious as a wheeler dealer and was reputed once to have bought a small herd of cattle off the field and resold them the same day without even moving them. Stories about Chubby included the time he sold his shoes at a dance, and I almost killed him once when we we felled a large tree. I was wielding the chainsaw and he was driving the tractor with a tensioning rope which I was convinced was too short. It was too short and when the tree came down Chubby was enveloped by the branches. Miraculously when I rushed across he was still sitting on the Fergie, laughing and completely unscathed. Chubby had a bit of a secret life, we all thought, but since the name of a well known Bristol criminal was attached we just included it in life’s rich tapestry.
Over the years I’ve worked with some proper characters and kept it all close but learned so much of great value. One of the best lessons I learned over the years is that real people stab you in the front when you get out of line. It’s the polite middle classes who stab you in the back!
Anyway, back on the allotment I’ve forsworn heavy exercise in theory at least, and today I cleared a bed of potatoes, with a few rests, panting and leaning over the refilled pond. It was a delight to discover that all our efforts at feeding the soil with compost has rewarded us with a smaller than usual but still useful crop of potatoes, and it’s true what they say; compost really does hold the moisture and after a three month drought there was still a perceptible trace of moisture in the earth. This season has focused all of our minds on water and as this is also the time for planning next year’s projects I’ve been wondering about taking out two of the compost bins which we don’t use properly and substituting one of those 1000 litre polythene water tanks to increase our stores to 2,250 litres – because it looks very much as if droughts are going to feature large in future.
And just to finish, we installed the trailcam again this week and captured a lovely image of a badger hunting sweetcorn in the night. He’s also done us the favour of digging over our wood chip paths in search of roots and grubs. Good luck to him, I say!