|
I hurry on past a small cottage with a low
wall of gapped bricks. This is the point when I remember that the
openwork wall was once solid brick, until so many speeding cars crashed
through it that the owners decided on a more easily rebuilt version.
I am relieved to reach the lay-by and wait for my rural bus to appear.
How I travelled
I do not hate the motor car. Far from it, I
positively love the beauty of its fine engineering, the space-ship
allure of dashboard dials and gauges, headlights sweeping a night-time
lane, the red dash of a fox transfixed in pencil beams. I loved reading
my brother’s Boys’ Annuals, with pictures of gorgeous sports cars in
madcap pursuit of adventure on the open road.
My only problem with the motor car is that I cannot actually drive one.
Because I grew up in London with a choice of bus or tube or train close
by, I have always taken it for granted that I can go anywhere and
everywhere under my own steam. This held true for most of my thirty-year
career as a film-maker, travelling all over Britain and abroad. But now,
in retirement, and in spite of a husband who drives and the kindness of
friends, my independence in this rural area is threatened by shrinking
transport services and a world dominated by the private car.
Life as a non-driver
When we moved here in the nineteen sixties,
it was easier to be a non-driver. The buses at the end of the lane were
frequent and I had no problem loading myself, kids and pushchair onto
the friendly bus. In the days of one-car families, there was even a
volunteer lift to the baby clinic that met once a month in the back room
of the Foresters’ Arms.
The big road at the end of the lane was
hectic in summertime. Our neighbour Fred, who has farmed down our lane
for nearly half a century, remembers the summer Sunday ritual of
neighbours leaning over their cottage gates to marvel at the parade of
motors toiling back to London on the A22 after a day at the seaside.
Winter days were eerily quiet.
Forty years on, with mushrooming development along the London to
Eastbourne corridor, the A22 is dense with traffic every single day of
the year. Attempting to cross by foot or car in rush- hour is
hair-raising. How long before every rural junction will have its own
mini roundabout or lights?
My double decker taxi
And the buses? Most services going my way
have been reduced to four a day (nothing at night or on Sundays), and as
you wait and wait, there’s ample time to ruminate on a system that can
no longer attract customers. In my neck of the woods there are virtually
no other customers. My bus, when it eventually arrives, often amounts to
a double decker taxi just for me.
Friends equally concerned about choked roads
and polluted air are hardly likely to leave the convenience of their
cars and stand in wind and rain for buses that can be up to 25 minutes
late. Nor could they tolerate the prospect of it tearing along five
minutes early, only to sail by oblivious of the contract between company
and customer that we call a timetable.
Horror stories
I cannot bear to see friends’ eyes glaze as
I recount travellers’ tales fit only to be shared by those of us
stamping numbed feet and turning leeward from the freezing rain. Horror
stories of buses seen disappearing down the wrong road or the driver who
asked his passengers the way home have become part of our bus stop
repertoire.
Believing in rural transport is like
believing in fairies, and yet I do so want it to be happy ever after.
I’ve seen it work elsewhere. In Sweden, buses are on time and they
connect with trains. Most working people we knew kept their cars for
long journeys. They used buses, trains or bikes (on bike lanes) for
daily business and shopping without feeling any loss of status.
Brave or mad?
Bus travel round here in Sussex is viewed as
a Third World experience. It is as if that sleek metal box has begun to
insulate us from life beyond the windscreen. Someone said to me
recently: “Jenny, you are so brave! I simply wouldn’t know what to do if
I got on a bus”.
Thirty-eight years ago, returning from four
happy years in America, I wrote about America’s fatal love affair with
the car; the drive-in society where the car seemed like an extension of
the body, where taking your baby for a walk appeared eccentric, even
irresponsible. I saw an advert in Chicago for a machine to enable you to
“walk in the privacy of your home”. What an uproarious
concept that seemed – then!
Now the madness is literally on my own
doorstep. Sometimes I wake from dark dreams of a time when you and I are
grid-locked into a world in which our grandchildren can no longer
breathe what we still call the “open air” or walk in safety down a
country lane. Please please get on a bus and campaign for more transport
options for those of us living in the country.
|
