Book Review: The Bus Drivers of Penzance

Sunday 14th July 2024

This delightful paperback book by Gray Lightfoot was published earlier this year and if you fancy a funny, irreverent, down-to-earth honest account of what it’s like to be a bus driver in the tourist hot spot of Cornwall, then this is definitely the book for you.

Author and poet Gray, joined First Kernow as a bus driver a few years ago and in this wonderful book he describes in an engaging and readable style his many experiences while out on the county’s roads driving a double deck bus.

Anyone who knows anything about the job of a bus driver will recognise Gray’s descriptions of the many varied circumstances he came across on his driving shifts which he narrates across thirty themed chapters in the book’s 320 pages.

I found it very much “a book you can’t put down” once beginning to read it. One chapter flows to the next as real life incidents ring true, ranging from school bus journeys to early morning and late evening shifts and, of course, experiences driving First’s extensive open top bus routes.

Gray is a natural storyteller; a true wordsmith and how refreshing it is that he’s turned these outstanding personal skills to describing the life of a bus driver.

It’s not often the work of a bus driver is related by a professional writer and poet which makes this book all the more special to those of us who love the industry so much.

Bill Arnott, International Travel Writer and friend of Gray has written the Foreword to the book and concluded “this bloke really is a master of his craft. I’ve now enjoyed this book multiple times, same as Gray’s previous work. Please don’t tell him I said so in case it goes to his head, but between you and me, I can’t wait to read it again.”

I share that feeling, as I begin another read.

Here are just a few taster mini extracts….

It’s not all harem-scarem though, sometimes you get passengers asking you to put the heaters on upstairs…on an open-top bus! You would think the weather conditions would put off many of the passengers from travelling on the open-top but not a bit of it. It seems to be that young tourists from the far east of Asia have some sort of itinerary that they must work to and travelling on the open-top is one of these criteria. I have noticed that these young tourists very rarely go to places not on their list. The pretty village of Mousehole is only recently becoming known to them and very few of them travel on past Marazion to places like Porthleven and Falmouth. It is apparent that they must go to St Ives, Porthcurno (for the Minack Theatre) and Lands End. I have had these happy-go-lucky young folk, see Sennen Cove from the top deck and run down the stairs of the bus to get off believing they have arrived at Lands End (the bus is usually ten minutes late by now, so the arrival here coincides with the ETA at Lands End). Despite the look of Sennen Cove, on being told that it isn’t Lands End, they go back upstairs to await arrival at the place they’ve been told to go to. Irrespective of the weather, it seems these places must be visited and I have seen these young folk standing in their rain-soaked cagouls, peering over the side of the bus like so many gargoyles in their misery……..

Now we do sometimes meet milk tankers in Madron as they head down from the farms beyond this small village, but this seemed to be an extra-large one. Like most Cornish villages Madron wasn’t designed around the traffic it receives now, including double-decker buses; so, once I had managed to get into Madron, which can be a trial in itself, I found myself between the high wall of a private house and the William IV pub and facing the articulated milk tanker. Now a bus can pass a car easily on this road, but the tanker had come down the funnel between a high wall and a line of parked cars (essentially a single lane) and then come around a bend to face me. There was no way he could back up. I had a line of cars behind me and he had them behind him. I could ask them all to back up but the tightness of the entrance to the village would still make this a difficult manoeuvre. In hindsight, I should have asked them all to back up and maybe take a road to their left so I could fo back. As we all know, “hindsight is always twenty-twenty” (Billy Wilder). In this sort of situation, drivers of large vehicles start to make assessments between each other. It’s a sort of telepathy that is often confirmed by a nodding of the head. The pavement was a low one and I believed I could pass the wagon taking note of an iron bollard on the corner……………..

Working on the evening shifts always made it more likely for a driver to make, shall we say, less well-informed choices when choosing their meals. In fact, it was one of the only things I enjoyed about working on lates, the fact I could comfort myself with chips. There was one duty we had in the evening that blessed us with a forty-minute meal-break in Falmouth, which I usually spent sat on the bus in the dark waiting to head back to Penzancde. I remembered a few weeks earlier, my wife had enjoyed a really good meal of fish, chips and peas, sliced bread and a pot of tea at this restaurant in Falmouth and recalled that they did takeaways. I knew it would take fifteen minutes to walk from Falmouth Moor bus station to the fish restaurant and then I could slowly walk back all the while eating my fish supper…and then I’d be ready to head back home. It didn’t work out that way, did it? …………

The Bus Drivers of Penzance is published by Graylight Publishing and can be obtained from the usual outlets for around £10. It really is a good read.

Roger French

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