44

Friday Fragment #44

The terminus for the 44 bus was stationed outside the outdoor on Clay Lane at the top of Bosworth Road, just a two-minute walk from our first childhood home. In this current age of electric buses that stop and restart every couple of minutes, it’s hard to imagine the thrill for a child of a throbbing diesel engine on an old double-decker bus coming to the sudden noiseless end of its hour-long journey. The outdoor¹ is also now an anachronism. Back then, it was the solitary shop from which to purchase alcohol, prior to licensing laws changing and the commonplace of buying beer, wine and spirits in all manner of new outlets, from the supermarket to the corner shop. From the age of seven or eight, Mum and Dad would occasionally despatch us there on a Sunday evening with a carrier bag full of clanking empty Corona pop bottles. We redeemed each empty for 10p, and used the change to purchase slabs of Hella’s cream-filled chocolate, pink metallic packets of Turkish Delight, glorious pickled-onion or roast-beef Monster Munch, and Fab and Big Feast ice lollies. And there would usually be a bag of pork scratchings too – that salty snack roulette which, one to the next, could melt on your tongue or risk the displacement of all remotely fickle front teeth. Along the street from the outdoor was the newsagent’s where we would browse that week’s Shoot! or Eagle comic whilst sending occasional arching glances skywards to the forbidden top shelf. Next to the magazines stood a rickety display stand, with a hundred metal spokes loaded with the cheap and the tacky, the discounted and the discontinued: from twenty-pence water pistols to ping-pong-ball blow pipes, from the unwanted Datsuns and Toyotas of the Matchbox range, to the bin-end yet hugely price-inflated Star Wars figures of Bib Fortuna and Ree Yees. To the end of the road and the corner shop, for emergency food items, for half-penny chews and everlasting gobstoppers, for cans of Tango pop and packets of bourbon cream biscuits: fuel for a day out and about playing with friends. The bus would draw its last breath in front of these shops that sold wine and chocolates and comic books and sweets: the real estate bastions of my childhood. After ten or fifteen minutes of sitting idle, the 44 would re-boot that roaring loud engine, turn at the island a few yards further down, come back along the lane, park at the bus shelter just in front of the post office, and switch the destination on the bus blind from ‘Lincoln Road North’ to ‘City Centre’ before opening its concertina doors to paying customers. From there we would journey into Acocks Green village for shopping with Mum, a visit to the library and, on rare occasions, a film at the Warwick Bowl. When older, we travelled beyond the village and into Tyseley and secondary school. At weekends, we would go further still, along the entirety of the route, via the seemingly kamikaze flyover and into the city centre, where the iconic Rotunda building loomed large over everything; through the bustle and noise of the markets, and to the gloss and glare of Tesco superstore, where the shelves and displays of Star Wars figures stretched as far as the eye could see. It was on the 44 that one of the school bullies once marched to where I was seated at the back of the top deck and violently swung his arm to deliver the loudest of smacks to my forehead, shouting SLAPHEAD as he made contact – it was only the sheer shock and force that stunned and prevented me from crying. In that same first year of secondary school, Pete and I waited for more than an hour after the home-time bell for the bus that would return us home; roadside on the cruelest of winter’s days, in the snow, with worn-through shoes filled with cardboard insoles we had cut from cereal packets, but which were no match for the wet snow and ice-cold pavements. When that weather-delayed 44 finally arrived, we limped upstairs to the front seat of the top deck and removed that wretched and sodden footwear and changed into the green-and-orange hooped rugby socks from our backpacks and sat with burning feet, crippled and crying all the way home. Once back, Dad poured kettles of heated water into a bowl for us: we’d never known such pain and self-pity. For the first eleven years of our life, the 44 was the single constant vessel we travelled via, one which took us away from what we knew and lived each day, from the humdrum of home, to something that was different and sometimes magical. The number is the first that ever held any significance and mystique: beautifully symmetrical, printed in large capitalised sans-serif type onto the blinds above the windows of that noisy Leyland bus. Each time I see it today, I’m never not seeing and reliving those fragmented moments of sadness and bliss, of nostalgia and cold, of wet socks, forehead slaps, Star Wars figures and pork scratchings.

‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.

1. ‘The outdoor’ was so-called because it was a shop situated next door to a public house which was licensed to sell alcohol that did not need to be consumed on the premises. Such shops began to appear separate from pubs and so the term ‘off-license’ became far more common, to describe a place where alcohol could be purchased to be consumed ‘off’ or away from the site which held the license.