It was lucky that the bus was behind schedule – mainly because the driver had stepped out to take his own photograph for social media (#endofanera) – otherwise the young lad in the hoodie might have missed it. ‘Is this the last bus?’ he asked as he fumbled for change. ‘It’s the last bus from Mousehole Harbour, ever,’ the driver replied, before waving him on without paying.
People rarely get as nostalgic about buses as they do about trains. Flanders and Swann wrote a song about the 1960s Beeching cuts. It pretty much consists of Michael Flanders reciting the names of closed rail stations to music – and it is an elegiac masterpiece. The only time I ever saw my father cry was when someone sang it at a village hall concert. The Flanders and Swann song about buses, on the other hand, is a jaunty satire on the monarch of the road and its misanthropic drivers.
Last Saturday, however, was the last day of the bus service into Mousehole after more than 90 years – and the passengers were sentimental. Not just those whose idea of romance on Valentine’s Day was to make the round trip one last time but locals for whom this was just another stage on Mousehole’s journey from a living Cornish community to a theme park. A couple returning from fish and chips in Newlyn tell me that the bus drivers know their regulars, and if someone misses their usual trip, the old deputy harbour master is tipped off and pays a call. A ‘Mousehole maid’ called Jane tells me that she remembers her mother handing violets to the drivers. (The premium on Cornwall’s flowers in Covent Garden, which can bloom a month before the rest of the country, has kept many fishing families afloat when the husbands are not.) The blue bus left on the hour and on the half hour and it managed to negotiate the narrow streets of the village perfectly well, reversing without cameras or sensors or irritating beeps.
Cornwall Council spends £12 million a year on subsidies for buses, but this subsidy directly covers only about half the routes. The other half – including Mousehole – are supposedly self-supporting and run on a commercial basis. But this means that if a bus company decides to give up on a route, the council has little say on its replacement. The ironic result is that residents have less influence on public transport when they live somewhere that people actually want to visit. Like Gretchen in Mean Girls, Mousehole can’t help that it’s popular.
The new bus service is using bigger buses, which, the new operator Go Ahead says, would not be safe to drive into the village. As of this week, you will have to walk out of Mousehole, along a road not much wider than a car, with no pavement, which is not obviously much safer. It’s fine for tourists – the stroll down to the harbour past quaint fishermen’s cottages is part of the Mousehole experience, after all – but less so for residents. The local campaign group Save Our Bus Stop has plenty of stories about elderly villagers who can’t manage the steep climb – as you would expect when 40 per cent of the residents are over the retirement age. The village has already lost its post office, its butcher, its general store; losing its link to the outside world is the final stop before it ceases to be a community at all.
You might think that if the bus company has made a commercial decision to use larger buses, that must be a reflection of consumer demand. The go-ahead director from Go Ahead has said the service will be self-supporting only if capacity is increased. But I’ve taken the old Mousehole bus – a jazzed-up light commercial vehicle that locals derided as looking like an ice cream van right up until it was taken out of service – and it’s only ever at capacity just before 9 a.m. People going to work and school, obviously, but also pensioners who, for reasons best known to themselves, need to be standing outside WH Smith at 9 a.m. waiting for it to open.
Cornwall Council pays £6 million a year for pensioners to have free bus travel; it is only reimbursed by central government for travel at off-peak hours. In this month’s budget, the council toyed with the idea of reducing pensioners’ free travel to after 9.30 a.m., but the proposal to use price mechanisms to manage demand went the way of all consultations on whether people like free stuff. It’s not a purely commercial decision when the market is distorted like this. Another irony: the elderly are the ones suffering because the council is too generous to the elderly.
I didn’t voice this as I travelled back and forth from Mousehole on Saturday. It would have been as impolite as disembarking without thanking the driver. I have lived in Cornwall long enough to find London buses, where you leave at the back without thanking the driver, deeply unsettling. Here, of course, everyone says ‘Thank you’ or ‘Goodbye’. Or, last Saturday, ‘Adieu’.
Comments