There are, of course, expectations and established conventions. Perhaps it is easier to conform to these if you have children and grandchildren to mark the route. I don’t and, even so, must all grandparents behave in such and such preset ways? Surely not.

I think too much. This has often been said, even back when thinking was what I was paid to do for a living. Sometimes, this is a comfort. Sometimes, it is a straitjacket with a chain wrapped around and a cast iron ball attached. Those days, I try to rise from my oh-so-comfortable chair and heave myself out into the world.

The other day was one such. I felt both weighted down and unanchored: a disconcerting combination. But the autumn sun was shining, so I ventured out for a bus ride.

The bus I caught was unusually full for the time of day. There was one vacant seat, yet several people had chosen to stand. Perhaps that should have been a clue.

The elderly gentleman I settled next to was muttering and chuntering. The tension in his body suggested he expected to receive (or maybe dish out) blows, at any moment.

He wore a woolly hat over white hair and a mid-length white beard (no ageing hipster, or Santa-in-waiting). Neither dirty nor unkempt, he was… untidy. As a book, he would have been dog-eared: not quite cast aside, but well-used by life.

He seemed mid-conversation; earnest, intense, agitated. I wondered if he might be on the phone, with one earphone plugged into his left ear (the one nearest the window, away from my sight). He wasn’t. Most of what he was saying was utterly unintelligible, apart from the occasional emphatic repeated utterance of the word, “stupid!”

I decided to breathe deeply, relax, and stare forward.

After a few minutes, the bus pulled in at a timing point. It waited and so did we. Out of the corner of my eye, I became aware that I was being stared at, or might that be a glare? Reluctantly, I turned to confront it.

“Are you all right, pal?” asked my chuntering neighbour. It was more a challenge than a friendly inquiry. I wasn’t at first sure how to respond to this, and then it occurred to me that he might be wishing to disembark (one of those who think body language speaks louder and clearer than actual words).

“Is this your stop?” I asked him, in a friendly, helpful, slightly apologetic voice (at least, I hoped it was all those things).

With those few words (and perhaps the way they were spoken), I became something more human for him.

His face softened, as did his whole posture. He told me he was going all the way to Preston station. And then, he started to talk to me. This was more unsettling than it might have been, because he talked as though I were already right up to speed with whatever he’d been fretting and muttering about.

“Stupid! How can he do that?”

I hadn’t the slightest idea.

“Try not to worry too much about it,” I counselled.

“I’m not worried!” He was very insistent on this. He went on.

“He can’t drive. He hasn’t got a licence. Stupid. Why is he doing it? A car’s a deadly weapon!”

Here, I’m piecing together several snippets, spread over a few minutes.

“Stupid! Stupid.”

He looked at me and I felt it was time for another interjection.

“You can only offer them advice,” I said. “In the end, they have to make their own choices.”

“I’m not offering advice!” Again, the insistence. “And why is he making that choice? Stupid!”

I nodded, and pressed the bell.

“This is my stop.” I didn’t want him feeling abandoned without warning.

He thanked me, and said it had been ‘nice’ talking to me. As I got up, he reached out, shook my hand, and told me his name was Phil.

“Not many people listen,” he said, before releasing my hand.

Looking back as the bus pulled away, I could see Phil waving and smiling sweetly, almost happily.

For the rest of that day, I felt more right in myself.

Read Martin’s story A Bedroom with a View

The post I don’t really know how old I am appeared first on Quays Life.

When my Auntie Madge (my great aunt Madeleine) died, I was very sad; sadder than I’d expected to be. It wasn’t just that she was such a character (she features in a couple of my favourite anecdotes), nor that I would miss her novel turns of phrase: “I’m fit for a couple more trips round the gasworks before I pop my clogs, lad,” she’d replied to an indelicate enquiry, whilst sipping a tot of brandy at her sister’s wake.

It wasn’t even the memory of her many kindnesses to me as a child – her purse snapped open even more readily than her mouth, and the shiny silver sixpences of my infancy became insistently pressed ten bob notes by the time I reached my teens.

What hit home so suddenly and profoundly was that she was the last of her generation. Auntie Madge grew up with my grandfather – her brother. She was raised by my long-suffering great grandmother (who died when I was still a toddler), and my violent, drunken rogue of a great grandfather (long departed when I arrived). Might Madge have had fond memories of her parents? Had she known her own grandparents, I wondered – people whose lives would have stretched well back into the Victorian era?

Most importantly of all, Auntie Madge had known my mum when my mum was just a little girl.

All those stories that will now lie untold forever. All those years when I could have asked, I could have listened, but I didn’t.

When the rising death toll triggered the first Lockdown, I began writing down brief episodes – events from my own life and the lives of those close to me. My ‘anecdotal memoirs,’ as I called them, were my way of leaving a trace, just in case COVID19 rolled up and swept me away.

To begin with, I shared them with friends on Facebook. Each story gave me a manageable task to get me through the day, and offered a five minute distraction for those who bothered to read them. Quite a few people bothered. Many people liked them; some people loved them.

“Even very ordinary people can have quite interesting stories to tell,” as one Facebook acquaintance unflatteringly put it. (I paraphrase, of course, but that was the gist of it.)

Every life offers something of interest to onlookers (though telling it in an interesting way might take practice).

By the time I’d set down a sizeable bundle of these tales (sixty-five) I thought it might be worth compiling them into an ebook to offer to a wider readership. You, if you fancy.

Just to head off misconceptions and possible frustrations, I’ll point out that they’re not in chronological order. There’s no beginning, no middle, and (as yet) no end. The idea is, just like memories themselves, they appear when it suits them, and while one might lead to another, it doesn’t have to. Read one, read a dozen, read the whole lot at a single sitting – it’s up to you.

Having read mine, why not seek out the ‘anecdotal memoirs’ of your own life?

If you’re a younger person, sit down with your elders and encourage them to tell you a tale or two. There’s a knack to it (for instance, you genuinely have to want to hear whatever it is they want to tell), but you’ll soon pick it up.

If you’re an older person (like me) try writing down a few family anecdotes. It’s far less daunting than attempting the story of your entire life and, in the process, you’ll be crafting a tiny heirloom.

Old or young, you’ll be surprised (and gratified) by what you remember, or what you learn.

Once you excavate deep down into the fine detail of it, there’s really no such thing as an ordinary person living an ordinary life.

To settle your nerves, why not take a £1.99 punt and begin by having a read of mine. As Auntie Madge might have said: “Stop actin’ t’rubber pig, and ‘ave a do!”

How Auntie Nora Helped Uncle Ben Win the War

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I called round once, unexpectedly, just after noon. Uncle Ben greeted me. Auntie Nora was in bed with one of her heads. We all knew about Auntie Nora’s heads and they were nothing to do with hangovers and everything to do with her being a worrier.

Uncle Ben shouted up from the bottom of the stairs.

“Nora? How are you?”
“How do you think I am? I’m dying!”
“Well, hurry up and die quietly!” Uncle Ben grinned and winked at me as he shouted this.
(A muffled groan from the front bedroom).
“You don’t care…”
“Martin’s here!”
“Why didn’t you tell me, you daft devil?”

A minute later, Auntie Nora, wrapped in her pink towelling dressing gown, was downstairs, purse in hand, despatching Uncle Ben to the corner shop to “get some cream cakes.”

These three elements seemed to me to characterise Auntie Nora and Uncle Ben as a couple: worry, brutal but loving banter, and cream cakes.

Uncle Ben was tall. He served in the Coldstream guards during World War Two. Towards the end of the war, he brought home a trophy – a Nazi flag – which Auntie Nora decided to use as a tablecloth. This might seem a strange choice, but it was all to do with her being a worrier. No matter that the war seemed to be going well, this might all be propaganda. In her mind, storm troopers could arrive at any moment, goose-stepping through Bolton town centre and along her very own street. The Nazi flag was her insurance policy, her way of trying to protect her extended family (which would have included my mum) from being lined up against a wall and shot.

Having the flag to hand meant that, as the Germans came marching down her street, she could whip it off the kitchen table, run upstairs, and hang it out of the bedroom window (thereby making the conquering army feel welcomed). For those who feel this was less than patriotic, I ought to stress that Auntie Nora was no Nazi-sympathiser. She was never going to BE on the Nazis’ side, she just needed them to THINK she was on their side, in order to protect those she loved from a ruthless enemy.

Her other coping mechanism at this worrying time, was to bake cakes and send them off to Uncle Ben at the front. These were intended to boost his morale and keep his strength up. When the war was over and he was demobbed and home for good, she asked him if he’d enjoyed the cakes.

“They took six months to reach me,” he told her. “By the time they arrived they were that hard we loaded ‘em up and fired ‘em at the bloody Gerries. Why do you think they surrendered?”

Love moves in mysterious ways.

Read Martin’s story The Lost Art of Conducting Buses.

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I was not quite three-years-old when the factory closed, and we moved to Halliwell, close to the centre of Bolton. The ruins of the ancient cottage now lie at the bottom of the Jumbles reservoir.

Our new home, in a cobbled street among many other cobbled streets, was quite literally a two-up, two-down. At the top of stairs so steep no building regs would permit them these days, there were two bedrooms – my parents’ to the left, mine to the right.

One night, in the early hours, there was a terrifying crash and I woke with a sense that the whole floor had been shaken. I leapt from bed to rush to my mum and dad for comfort. To my horror, I wasn’t able to force my way into their bedroom. It was as if some malicious power were leaning against the door from their side, keeping me out. This was a waking nightmare: jolted from a deep sleep by an unearthly noise, stepping into the cold, pitch black and now blocked from safety and reassurance by some powerful demon (what might it have done with my parents?) I started to cry.

My dad’s voice, calming and, to my ears, at ease (though he surely can’t have been), told me to wait and not to fret. With some effort, accompanied by a peculiar scraping noise, he pulled their bedroom door open just enough for me to squeeze in, telling me to be careful where I put my bare feet. As I entered, for some reason (perhaps some sound, perhaps the cold air) I looked up. I could see stars.

A hefty part of the chimney had collapsed, falling through the roof, the Victorian brickwork taking a few roof tiles along for the journey, and the combination had then crashed straight through the ceiling of my parents’ bedroom.

Hence, the stars.

Read Martin’s story: The Lost Art of Conducting Buses

The post A Bedroom with a View appeared first on Quays Life.

The other member of the team – the one who saved the driver from having to deal with the general public – was the conductor. Although there were no female drivers at that time, besides conductors, there were also conductresses and for a short time, while we were still living in that cobbled street in Halliwell, my mum was one of them.

It was the conductress’s job to take fares, give change, reel off tickets, keep order and ring the bell (once to stop, twice to pull away, three times in an emergency).

For the most part, a driver and his conductor were a settled team – they worked the same shifts on the same route. My mum’s driver was called Gordon. She liked Gordon. She said he was a good driver which, since she never learned to drive herself, probably meant he made her feel safe and didn’t throw her or the passengers about when braking. There was also one trip when Gordon demonstrated what mum viewed as grace under fire.

As I’ve said, the driver’s cabin was entirely separate. However, just behind his head, was a small sliding window (meant only to be used by the conductor to pass important information) which opened into the downstairs section of the bus.

On a crowded, late night trip, one particular gent, ‘drunk as a lord’ in my mum’s description, tottered to the front of the bus and slid open this driver’s window. Whether his impulse was primarily homicidal or suicidal, we shall never know, but he then reached an arm through the opening and started to throttle poor Gordon.

The obvious thing to do was pull over, put on the handbrake and try to wrestle himself free before proceeding. Gordon, however, seems to have been determined – whether through professional pride or reduced oxygen supply to the brain – not to allow a hand around his throat to come between him and the proper execution of his duty.

As the bus alternately hurtled and veered, there was a certain amount of panic among the other passengers; some wailing, others screaming. No doubt, many of them had in mind the famous “Just room for one inside, sir,” story from the 1945 Ealing Horror, “Dead of Night”, which ends with a bus careening out of control, crashing through a bridge and falling into the river below. This particular bus was heading towards Turner Bridge, beneath which trickles the mighty River Croal.

Anyway, as they say in Bolton, cometh the homicidal drunk, cometh the man. In this case, the man was a fellow passenger who, grabbing the assailant firmly by his collar and the seat of his pants, yanked him away from Gordon and carried him bodily towards the exit at the back. In those days, there were no automatic passenger-doors, just an open platform for getting on and off. The hero of the hour asked my mum to get the driver to slow down around the next bend.

For the first time in all this fuss, the bus did indeed slow at the next bend and, with the valediction, “My life’s precious, mate, if yours i’n’t!”, the rescuer dropped the assailant onto the pavement like a sack of spuds.

A round of applause followed. The man nodded and took a seat.

Gordon drove on.

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