The Colour of the Buses

Birkenhead buses were blue,
blue Guy Arabs for school,
bus stop in front of a bombed house
on Borough Road, the gap filled
by Camp Coffee and Senior Service.
The 86 was the best in the morning,
taking longer,
time to get full marks in the French test,
for Dave to check his homework against mine,
never noticing I was leaning away from his feet.
Mel usually missed it,
his mum with five to get ready,
another on the way with the lodger.
Bus late, had to leg it up Milton Road,
where Wilfred Owen used to live,
caught the 51 on Derby Road.
The 51, always in a hurry after school,
specially lurching on the bend
at the workhouse turned hospital,
pressing Port Sunlight shift-workers against us,
like bellows, puffing out Woodbines and Surf.

Wallasey buses were yellow,
yellow Leylands for the seaside,
the 11 always smelling new
taking us to New Brighton,
the oil-stained sand,
the washed up German mine.
Once, with Auntie Bessie and Uncle Frank,
the only time they made the trek to see us,
we stretched our legs along the prom
as far as Seacombe pier,
my dad and Uncle Frank in waist-coats
and suits, tacking trilbies into the wind.
The ferry docking at Woodside, squeezing
tractor tyres against the pier, the gangway
clattering above the oily Mersey,
the steep climb up the landing-stage at low-tide,
being hauled away from model liners in the ticket-hall,
Uncle Frank and Auntie Bessie waiting
outside the railway station for the single-decker
back to Chester, steam trains hissing,
weary sighs I didn’t know were premonitions of the axe.

Chester buses were green,
green Crosvilles for family stuff,
Auntie Bessie, limping from meningitis,
one leg shorter than the other,
screams in my mum's ears going back to 1910,
gave me port to try
and put Jim Reeves on in the parlour.
A child was playing with friends, she said,
and drowned in the canal.
They used to whip the horses up Watergate, said my mum,
they sometimes fell down outside her doctor’s.
A grandfather smelling of birdseed
sat all day in a rocking-chair by the bird,
neither of them spoke.
Uncle Frank carving bits of wood
in a shed next to the outside toilet,
its neatly ripped squares of newspaper
on a loop of string,
once he took me down to the Kop
at the end of his road to see the River Dee.
He had lung cancer and showed my dad where it was.

The dreary drone of the journey back home at night,
the fifties in the semi-darkness of the New Chester Road,
a child peering through a misted window,

to whom life seemed fixed the way it was.

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