The Day the School Bus Caught Fire

I grew up in Blacon. It’s a deprived part of Chester which I have described in a previous post. My elder siblings attended Blacon High School. Dissatisfied with the school’s performance, my parents signed me up to attend The Bishops’ Blue Coat Church of England High School in Great Boughton.

A downside to attending Bishop’s High was a long bus journey from Blacon to Great Boughton and back again every day. I had few friends at first. I usually sat near the front of the bus but I wanted to be with the cool gang who sat at the back smoking, completely uncaring of the rules at the time which stated you could only smoke upstairs on buses. These cool smokers consisted of Jed Habersham, who was missing half a finger and reminded me of the villain in Hitchcock’s version of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Siddy Bartlett and David Babcock. They sat. They smoked. They swapped tales and told jokes to the prettiest girls who got a pass to sit at the back with them.

One day, on the journey back from school, Babcock had stolen some paint cans which he had dragged onto the bus in a dirty white sheet. I was sat near the front of the bus. I looked back to see Babcock playing around with a lighter near the stolen items. I looked away for a second and that’s when I heard this powerful whoosh and looked back to the rear of the bus to find it ablaze. The entire area the cool gang called their own had turned into a bonfire. The driver pulled the bus onto the kerb in seconds and I don’t remember running for the exit so much as being carried with the crowd. Everybody got off the bus as quickly as possible, and then bizarrely, Siddy Bartlett ran back on, dashed around the flames to retrieve his bag, ran round the flames again and exited the bus. It was a feat of daring that only increased my estimation of him. The driver put out the fire with an extinguisher and drove off, not bothering to check on the welfare of the students who fled the bus in a panic. The only passenger remaining on the bus was the driver’s son who attended the school, and would stand at the front near the driver’s cabin. No police officer or fireman would have advised the bus driver to keep the vehicle on the road in those circumstances. The rear of the bus was still billowing smoke, and God only knows if the engine or petrol tank were in a secure condition. The rest of us made the long walk home, tingling with excitement by the sudden act of violence which had broken the monotony of a long school day. By some miracle, no one had been seriously hurt.

The following morning every child who had been on that bus was taken to the assembly hall and told to write out a statement about what they had witnessed. We were separated and sat in silence so we couldn’t influence each other’s statements. I wrote exactly what I saw – David Babcock had been playing with a lighter near the paint cans and moments later they were on fire. I delivered the statement to the headmaster who seemed unimpressed. 

“So you didn’t actually see him light the cans?” he asked.

I had looked away seconds before Babcock brought the lighter to the cans, so I had to admit, following the headmaster’s train of logic, that I hadn’t.

Some of the statements were pure fiction. My friend Neil wrote that Jed Habersham set the cans on fire. Habersham was on a family holiday in Greece at the time of the fire. I never let Neil live that down. But it wasn’t long before Neil and I had graduated to the cool, back of the bus group. Neil got there first and I followed. The fire, it seems, had not lessened our ambition to join the gang.

I was with Neil and Siddy on the day we discovered a dead body in Blacon.