KONSTANTIN IVAN KERFUFFLE JACKSON.

A poor boy, unwanted at birth, has a dream...

First, his birth and his parents, the Jacksons.

They wanted a girl but they got a boy, and so decided to demonstrate their unhappiness about the way the gods had dealt them a hand that meant they would only ever have the one child during their married life because something went wrong with her tubes during a really horrible birth.

And to show their discontent they called their little unwanted cherub Konstantin with middle names that showed their malcontent amounting to misery, that they’d never have a Mary or a Jane, and those were Ivan and Kerfuffle.

And so Konstantin set off in the world but soon dropped the awkward first monica due to spelling difficulties when he was five after being slapped by Miss Boggity at End Street Infants School for getting it wrong and wasting paper.

End Street was one of those schools left over from the Victorian age and almost forgotten, and good hard slaps were the order of the day, and they were often ministered with the edge of a ruler on tender palms. So he called himself by a middle name which was easy to spell, and settled down as Ivan.

He was terrible at school. He day-dreamed too much for Miss Boggity to hold him in anything but contempt. But that day-dreaming was given life by what he saw out of the rather high up classroom window. Vehicles went past but all he could make out was the upper floor of double-decked buses, and he dreamed that one day he would be up there with his cap askew and ringing the bell to stop the bus at every stop.

Which led to his dreams becoming the driver, unseen by the boy in the classroom but most definitely there. In control which is what he always wanted to be.

“You’ll get nowhere!” barked Miss Boggity into his ears, “you stupid, stupid boy!” Nothing was supposed to be at all wrong back in those days if a teacher called a boy stupid, because, in all honesty, he probably was.

“Sorry miss,” he mumbled.

“You’ll get nowhere in life, and that’s a promise!” she barked as if she was an arbiter of what the future held for one and all.

“Yes miss,” he replied, but in his head and most certainly not aloud, which by some mental mechanism going very wrong was as it came out loud, “but I’ll be a bus inspector one day, just you wait and see!”

That earned him a back-hander, right across his head, and it hurt. But back-handers were also allowed in those days and he winced and wept, and the rest of the class laughed, which made Miss Boggity feel good.

His next school was worse. He failed the eleven-plus, an exam which, in those days, sorted the bright from the stupid and sent the bright to Brumpton Grammar school where they might end up in University, and the dim to Brumpton Secondary modern, which had the sort of reputation that discouraged the better teacher from applying for a job there.

It was there that he did history which became his favourite subject, and learned a little bit about political systems and parties and decided he didn’t like any of them because they didn’t seem to have anything to do with his family. Dad was usually unemployed by then and mum had gained a reputation for enjoying the company of a handful of young men who could pay her for what they called services. But neither parent aspired to be more than they were, and mum even aspired to be less as the years passed and she happily chose to go what she called all the way with half a dozen males in a day, though the pay for her services shrunk as the hair on her head changed from brunette to grey. But she was happy.

When he left Brumpton Sec .mod., as it was known colloquially, it wasn’t in the company of the two who found a place in a red brick university (what they used to call non-Oxford of Cambridge houses of learning) and with no hope of ever becoming a bus inspector, which to him was equal to ruling the world.

Instead he pleaded to the bus company for a job and said that he had dreamed all his life of working on the buses, and Mr Jenkins who was in charge of recruiting and incidentally one of his mother’s favourite customers because he demanded the least from her, gave him a sweeping brush and showed him where to sweep.

He was in, and he didn’t mind sweeping. And he was still known as Ivan, which caused amused comments about his sweeping being terrible.

Somehow he managed to learn enough to become a bus conductor, and that enough was more than the sum total of everything he’d learned at his two schools seeing that his mum had taught him to read in between sessions with the lads, and his dad that two and two makes four, or five after too many pints of best bitter.

But his eyes were on higher things.

Ans somehow he learned to drive, passed his test for driving cars and then for driving buses and was given a brand new hat.

He could drive the number sixty four out to Swanspottle and back! And what’s more, he was on his way to ruling the world! Or that part of the world that would be his, the Brumpton District Charabanc Company! Next step was Inspector, or virtual king!

But every optimist has a breaking point, one that is external to him but which threatens to bring him down. And his fall lay in hands he didn’t know existed!

His bus was a twice-daily return to the village of Swanspottle was the source of his downfall, because, and this has been noted elsewhere many times, in that village lived an old woman by the name of Griselda Entwhistle, and not just any old woman either. She had witch-like qualities and even meddled in the dark arts and consequently was widely avoided by all but a select few who for no reason I can fathom actually trusted her.

And she hardly ever caught the bus because her chief mode of transport was her besom broom.

Now I know that such things cannot possibly work as flying machines, but hers did. She only had to give it a whispered order and it rose majestically in the air and went wherever she wanted it to go.

Back to Ivan in his bus. It was a double-decker and not his normal single decker because that was being serviced, and she was flying close to it without thinking or even looking.

She didn’t have to think because the broomstick did that for her when it came to navigation, and that worthy device did it for her, and that worthy device didn’t bother to look because what was there to look at? Just boring old fields and a few trees that were mapped precisely in its unearthly brain. If you could call it a brain. It certainly wasn’t a silicon chip or anything modern like that!

And the inevitable happened and Griselda flew majestically into a window on the upper story of the bus being driven by Ivan, smacked straight through its double-glazed window, which must suggest something about the speed and force behind her flight, and ended up buried deeply in the shoulder of elderly Tom Parker who liked to be called Tom Parker Esquire on account of his being invited to a garden party actually at Buckingham Palace a decade or so earlier, which he was sure entitled him to be an esquire.

None of the above could be called Ivan’s fault even though he had seen something odd out of the corner of his eye, but no human has sufficient skill to react in a microsecond whilst driving a double decker bus.

The good thing is that Griselda escaped unmarked and unflummoxed and even her broomstick pulled itself away, virtually undamaged. But Tom Parker Esquire had a damaged shoulder and he knew one thing: he was going to get the driver of this bus in the courts and he was going to take him for everything he had.

Which gave both Mr Jenkins and Ivan Jackson headaches.

TO BE CONTINUED

© Peter Rogerson, 01.07.22