Lessons That Last: Life on the school bus

I nearly went to school without my pants on once.

Not deliberately, I should add.

I was a school-bus kid and our stop was straight across the road from home. Our driver was Mrs Armstrong, who was terrific. She knew all of us, knew where we lived and, if she spotted me racing out the door a little late, she’d often wait.

One morning I was more than a little late. I was still asleep. In fact, it was the sound of the school bus arriving that woke me.

What followed must have been one of the fastest transitions from bed to school uniform ever attempted. I leapt up, threw on my clothes, grabbed my things and bolted out the door while Mrs Armstrong and a busload of kids waited across the road.

I’d made it.

Or so I thought.

As I reached the bus, I became aware that the other kids weren’t simply looking at me. They were laughing, pointing and absolutely losing it.

I looked down.

Shoes. Socks. Shirt. Jumper.

Bright blue jocks.

In my haste, I’d forgotten my school shorts.

I don’t remember ever retreating across that road quite so quickly.

Mrs Armstrong waited for me again.

What a woman.

Where you sat mattered

For those of us who travelled by bus, the school day started well before we reached the school gates.

Everybody seemed to know where they belonged. The younger kids generally sat towards the front and, as you got older, you gradually worked your way backwards. Eventually you were old enough to sit down the back with the bigger kids, which seemed like quite an achievement at the time.

In a country town, the back seat had another attraction. Hit a decent bump and you could leave the seat altogether.

Where you sat, and more importantly who you sat beside, could become surprisingly serious business. Turn up one morning and find somebody in your usual seat and there could be trouble before we’d even made it to school.

Mrs Armstrong seemed to know everything that was going on anyway. School-bus drivers had an ability to keep their eyes on the road while also knowing precisely which kid was mucking around six rows behind them.

We thought we were getting away with plenty.

I doubt we were.

Give us a toot!

Then there were stories I’ve heard about school kids in remote country towns waving at truckies.

Generations of Australian school-bus kids did this. A truck would appear and you would start pumping our arms madly through the windows, trying to convince the driver to give us a blast of the horn.

When they did, the bus would erupt.

It was such a small thing, but when you were a kid, getting the bloke driving a semi-trailer to let rip with that enormous air horn felt like a major victory.

There were the bus windows too, which seemed either impossible to open on a stinking hot day or perfectly positioned to send an icy blast straight at you in winter. Add the vinyl seats, schoolbags, dusty clothes, wet jumpers and whatever somebody was eating, and every bus probably had its own familiar smell.

The morning and afternoon trips were completely different. Plenty of us were still waking up on the way to school.

By 3.30pm, we’d been released.

You can imagine the difference.

The long road home

School buses in the country generally stopped wherever the kids lived. We’d pull up at house or nearby corner, one or two would get off, then head another few hundred metres (or kilometres) down the road and do it again.

The bus gradually emptied as we went.

A lot happened on those buses over the years. Friendships were made, arguments broke out and were usually forgotten, and by secondary school sitting beside a particular person could suddenly become far more important than it had been a few years earlier.

“Can I sit here?”

Four innocent words that could make a 15-year-old’s trip to school considerably more interesting.

And through all of this was the driver, taking responsibility for a busload of other people’s kids twice a day.

Mrs Armstrong did it with good humour and, in my case, considerable patience. I remember her being kind and willing to wait when one of her regulars was racing across the road at the last minute. Even if, occasionally, that regular had to turn around and race straight back home again.

More than 40 years later, I can still picture that bus sitting across the road and Mrs Armstrong behind the wheel… and a busload of kids pointing through the windows at my bright blue jocks.

This article is part of ‘Lessons That Last’, a new Starts At 60 series exploring the memories, traditions and school experiences that shape Australians across generations, presented in partnership with Schoolblazer Limited, a specialist school uniform company that works with hundreds of schools internationally. Through Lessons That Last, Starts At 60 is exploring the memories and experiences of school life across generations of Australians.

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