Nothing modern
Nothing new
Fear and coping
With the few
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And it really is only a few who make the difference. The difference between a group of dynamic, joyful young people sharing snippets of their fun and interesting lives for the relatively short duration of a bus ride to school… and a seemingly endless moving prison, full of unimaginable menaces at every turn.
As a bus driver myself (in my adult life now and as a young adult many years ago) I know for a fact that it all starts with the driver. And while I don’t want to place all the blame on that grumpy old retired farmer who drove the rural school bus route I had to endure those few years before I found my own transportation to school, my adult bus driver self can’t help but give him most of it.
I don’t recall anything very severe happening. No one died on our bus. And I don’t remember the driver having to call the police or anything. But he sure could have done something to keep down the bullies a bit. But he didn’t. He just shouted a lot, and occasionally stopped the bus to get up and go to the back and try to threaten them. Be he was too old to threaten the really bad ones. The only fortunate thing was that the kind of bullies that rode our bus, were guaranteed to be driving their own cars or motorcycles to school as soon as they could. Or riding with their older brothers. Most of them seemed to come from the same place too.
King’s Park.
King’s Park was a small, isolated group of houses down by the Zumbro (“Scumbrow”) River. A quick Google search tells me that there has been a recent restoration of the area and I’m sure other developments over the years have changed it dramatically from what I knew back in the 70’s. When our brand new and modern little nuclear family arrived a few miles down the road, Kings Park was notorious and to be avoided at all costs. I didn’t even venture there until I was well established in high school, but the teenagers that lived there all rode our bus (again, only when they had to) and were also the first to be picked up.
Just before me.
So every morning after my chores, I would have to get ready and get on this bus that I HATED! to get on. Those Kings Park assholes would of course dominate the back seats and there were only a few other timid little kids on board, cowering in front. Usually I would chose a seat halfway between and sit quietly, waiting for one of the other good boys down the road to get on. There weren’t many and just like every prison movie I ever saw, I was “new meat” and I knew it. My only salvation may have been that they were still tired that early in the morning and (having only just got on board themselves) needed to wake up a bit before getting bored enough to start looking for entertainment outside their own.
Quite often I could hear them fighting among themselves and/or talking about whatever crimes they were planning for the day. By the time they were ready to start really getting at the other kids on the bus, several other, more obvious and predictable targets had got on after me and were sitting between myself and them.
Whew!
Eventually a few things happened that kept me from ever becoming one of those sorry souls unfortunate enough to become a target for our school bus bullies, and I’ll now have to get into a few stories about that when this will again have to be…
To be continued…
