The school bus

In the idiom of the day, you were ‘put down at birth’ which mercifully didn’t mean then what it means now, but that your father felt it necessary to give these institutions large, interest-free loans for a number of years in order to secure places for me and my brothers. When it became clear in all three cases that this had been something of a miscalculation, we were sent to a Sixth Form College, whose excellence came guaranteed by my father’s mate who also happened to own it. Which is one of many reasons I never made it to university. Different times, I guess.

Spooling back a few years, I was packed off to prep school where I presented myself aged seven, acutely aware of the need for a plan with which I might bolster my credentials to my new dorm mates. So I told them I grew up in the back of a Rolls-Royce.

My miscalculation was to expect to be believed. If you tell a lie, get caught, and you find yourself sliding down the credibility snake rather than ascending one of its ladders as intended, that’s factored into the quantified risk you know you’re taking when you first open your big, fat trap; and while it might be an unsatisfactory result, it is undeniably fair enough. Finding yourself still slithering down the serpent’s spine when for once in your short life you’ve actually told the truth, is an altogether less palatable outcome. For back then and for several years before that, I had really spent inordinate amounts of my leisure time playing in the back of an enormous and very yellow Rolls-Royce.

I’ll explain. The Rolls was a 20/25 model, built in 1931, but bought by my father in 1967 when I was a toddler. And as anyone old enough to remember such times will tell you, old Rollers weren’t exactly valuable. On the contrary: if you look through the classifieds from that era, you will find the going rate for a well-used 1931 Rolls-Royce 20/25 Park Ward saloon was about £600 or, put another way, quite a lot less than you’d have paid for a second-hand MGB. It was yellow with black wings, roof and wheels.

He bought it because he thought it was funny, the MPV had yet to be invented and he needed the seats. Technically it had seven if you include the two jump seats in the back but as it became far and away the most popular school run car in the neighbourhood, he’d often disgorge up to ten tiny children at the school gates (before we were old enough to be outsourced). Indeed it was christened the school bus and to this day when it crops up in conversation between me and my brothers, it is never referred to as anything else.

Building work at the house ruled out the use of the garden and kitchen, so me and my mates just larked about in the back of the bus instead, building Meccano, flinging Dinky toys through its lambswool carpets and, of course, sitting behind its vast Bakelite wheel and pretending to drive. And when the building was done, I felt no need to return indoors to where noisome things like parents and brothers could be found, so the school bus also became my playroom.

Indeed I enjoyed the car far more than my father who soon realised he’d made a terrible mistake. It was desperately slow – 50mph was a rare and real achievement – but we refused to go anywhere in anything else, not because we wanted to be paraded around in a Rolls-Royce for I am quite sure I had no idea what a Rolls-Royce was, but because we loved its looks, its smell, its space and the entirely bogus sense of strength and safety it exuded. He ended up keeping it for years.

Eventually, inevitably we overplayed our hand. One summer we insisted we took the school bus for our annual drive through France, instead of whatever nice, interesting family saloon – an Alfetta usually – was also at our disposal. By now it was the summer of 1976 which some of you will remember was a touch on the warm side. Oddly enough it wasn’t the engine that couldn’t cope nor, so far as I recall, the occupants. It was the tyres or, specifically, their inner tubes.

I can’t remember the exact details and no one who could is left alive to tell, but my memory of that holiday is being stuck at the side of the road while my father found ever more inventive ways of sourcing Dunlop Fort inner tubes in Brittany and the Loire. Eventually some bright spark realised there was a truck tube that would fit and the problem went away, but then we took it to the beach and returned to find the car had turned red. Upon closer inspection it turned out it had become cloaked in a wrap of several million ladybirds, all inexplicably drawn towards its yellow paintwork. I feel faintly phobic about them to this day.

So we limped slowly home and the school bus got sold after 10 years’ valiant service. The only evidence I even have of its existence is this single grainy photograph of your intrepid correspondent aged two, sitting astride its radiator wearing what appears to be the world’s worst jumper and some heroically short shorts. It was the first car I truly loved and would give anything to see it again, but in truth I don’t even know if it survived; and because we lived in Jersey, even its registration number (J864) is of no use.

But some reading this may remember my dad’s old Dino popped up out of the blue not long ago, so I’ve not lost all hope the school bus may too one day. And if finding the Ferrari after all those years was something of an emotional journey, finding the bus will likely leave me a complete wreck. It’s a risk I’m prepared to take.