The bus is a great way to travel in Brighton. On Friday, after doing some shopping in town we hopped onto the number twelve. It was pretty crowded - this is a popular route - and Paul & I sat on little fold-up seats. Just past the pier a young woman with a baby in a pushchair boarded. The pushchair was quite big, with splayed wheels and the mother was having difficulty finding somewhere to put it. Paul & I gave up our seats so that she could wedge herself in. She and her machine took up about four seat spaces. I found another seat next to a chatty woman of about my age.
"I remember getting the smallest pushchair I could", I said "one that would easily fold up on the bus." "Oh yes", she said "Baby Buggies."
In My Day
The girls basically had two forms of transport. When they were tiny, I used a carrycot which went on foldable wheels. If I needed to go on the bus, I put them into slings which buckled onto my body. Once they were able to sit up they went into the Baby Buggy. This was a very basic framework of a deckchair-type fabric slung onto a frame that could be closed up, using one hand and a foot, to little bigger than an umbrella and slung over one arm.
They were made of aluminium and were very light. Travelling on the bus was easy!
The buses in Eastbourne at that time were single-decker. You got on at the front to pay your fare and got off either at the front or the middle. The driver relied on his mirror to tell him that people were alighting from this middle door. My routine, once Lizzie was walking, was to alight with buggy, open it up on the pavement, then reach up and get Lizzie down and pop her in. Easy! However, this routine had to change and this is why:
On one occasion, I was getting off the bus at Hampden Park. Door opened and I alighted and opened up the pushchair. Turned to get Lizzie only to see, to my horror, the doors closing and the bus beginning to pull away. Seems that the mirror used by the driver didn't give him a view of the lower down position of a toddler. Fortunately the bus was still quite full and, as I ran alongside the bus, passengers yelled at the driver to stop. I grabbed Lizzie and changed the routine to child-out-first. A similar thing happened to Beatrice with Becky some years later.
At least this was unlikely to happen to the woman on the Brighton bus as she was taking up about half of the lower deck and could hardly be missed.
1 comment:
Nice story but not practicle with two children under two also sadly the general public can be very rude and ignorant as was the case with Natasha when she was on the bus with my two grandchildren and people who could have moved and help her showed her no consideration at all.
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