Debut Dispatch from Our (Occasional) Bus Correspondent
The sign by the bus shelter is proving harder to fathom than expected. A bus is, perhaps, due any minute. Or is that the time it’s scheduled to leave Kendal? Which side of the road? And where is this maybe due bus going to anyway? Confused, I seek clarification from the all-knowing, all-seeing village shop. Shoulders shrug. Phones are produced. Heads bow. An online search proves inconclusive. Google Maps directs me to the Slip Road or Heaves Hotel. I decide to wait it out. My sister had given me a tip-off from her Yealand WhatsApp group about a new route and if the intel Is correct the next bus to come through Levens would take me right past her front door...
I don’t have long to wait. The 552 to Carnforth rounds the corner. Levens Village Shoppers look on in surprise as the driver pulls in to allow me to get on. Ha ha, I feel a frisson of victory as I pay my £3 to Yealand Redmayne and walk past a handful of passengers in raincoats, aside bags full of shopping, to take my preferred seat at the back.
We rattle through Heversham, Milnthorpe, and over the Bela on to Sandside, where to our right the estuary comes into view with the Lakeland fells in the background. The tide is in for a change. A man opposite smiles and catches my eye.
“Lovely, isn’t it?” he says.
I think back to the previous day in Carlisle, when after a week of car hell, a stressed-out me had finally handed back the keys to the rental company. Keys to a control freak. An ‘upgrade’ - a brand-new MG. Two huge dazzlingly bright screens for a dashboard. Day after day it had bleeped at me for any number of perceived misdemeanours. Messing with my head. ‘Focus on your driving!’ it berated, grappling back my steering wheel if I dared to overtake a cyclist. ‘Pull over and take a rest!’ It took me two days to work out how to turn down the volume on the radio. (I have a theory as to why they keep giving me these upgrades. Hoping I’ll prang the car as retribution for refusing their in-house insurance). The woman at the front desk had smiled sweetly at my helpful feedback and pointed to a QR code.
Compare that experience with this one, now not having to worry about a thing, being chauffeured along above other road users through idyllic countryside, looking over hedgerows, across fields, into gardens. Catching glimpses of village life.
“Yes, wonderful!” I reply, nodding like a mad woman. After Silverdale, I have the bus to myself. Twisting along the narrow country lanes through a rolling green landscape, I marvel at the driver’s skill. Past Leighton Moss and elusive Hawes Water. What views! I’m in some sort of trance at the magic of it all when all too soon (perception is everything) we’re in Yealand.
The plan had been, after the family barbeque, to cycle back to Levens. I’d already mapped out a route on OS Maps along another set of back roads. But three glasses of Prosecco later that was no longer an option.
“I’ll drive you,” offers a helpful nephew. But I have a better plan. Whilst the 552 journey had been both picturesque and door-to-door, the nippy 51 to Carnforth would connect me with the iconic 555, a bus I have a soft spot for. Nobody seems to remember a time when its double-deckers weren’t ferrying passengers between Lancaster and Keswick. Sitting at the front on the top deck is the best spot. Although, in my teenage years riding it to and from school it’s unlikely we ever lifted our heads up to clock the spectacular view from the brow of Church Street over the estuary, as I did now!
Since that first encounter with the southbound 552 I’m more clued up on its schedule, along with the 530. “Forget it!” someone had told me at the Hare & Hounds earlier in the year when I mentioned I was buying a small apartment in the village and looking to make the most of public transport. Just as she spoke, an empty bus crying out for passengers rattled by.
In fact, over twenty buses a week take an optimistic detour through Levens, heading to Kendal, Grange, Cartmel, Arnside, Carnforth and scores of villages in between. Any more and people would complain they were clogging up the roads!
This article was contributed by a local resident. Opinions are the author’s own.