Roy remember how one night he drove his bus off the route
Resource Type: Audio | Posted on 22nd July 2011 by Liam Physick
Roy describes how one night, he had two female passengers on his bus who lived off the route, so he agreed to take them home. He was in big trouble with his employers over this, as, by going off the route, he had caused the company to lose track of the bus, necessitating a search party, but got away with it because the bus was all right! The explanation for this apparently bizarre reasoning was that he was driving the E2, one of the first of the Atlantean buses, that did not use a conductor
Interviewee: Roy
Interviewee Gender: Male
Interview Transcript
Roy: I can remember one night being on the E2 and we came from the 86, and we came out to Woolton, cos we were on the four, the four route, number four from Pier Head to Woolton, and we used to do that, and we met of couple of, would you say, young ladies, and we were on the bus, and we decided, with the A2, the . . . did I say A2?
Paul: E2
Roy: E2, the E2, it goes out to Woolton . . .
Terry: I don’t like the way this is going . . . (he and Pat laugh)
Roy: . . . and these two young ladies, these two young ladies, lived off the route, so I, as a driver, said, being a gentleman, “I’ll take you, where do you live, I’ll take you down that road” . . .
Terry: You went off your route!
Roy: . . . so we took her down that road . . .
Terry: That wouldn’t happen now, would it?
Pat: No, certainly wouldn’t.
Roy: No, but we took them, dropped them off where they lived at, but then we goes back to Garston, and we goes back to where we has to go to, to Garston depot, and when we get there, the whole night shift, and all the mechanics and everybody else who are looking after the bus, and E2 was something special, wasn’t it, cos it was the first, of any, Atlantean buses, the first two buses, E2, E3, and we took these two girls, dropped them off where they lived, and made our way. We gets back to Garston, and they said, “Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you” . . .
Terry: A search party out!
Roy: . . . they’ve sent a special bus out to look for us, to the terminus, but we’d gone off the terminus route, hadn’t we (Pat laughs), in Garston, in, in Woolton . . .
Terry: Speke.
Roy: No, in Woolton . . .
Terry: Woolton, sorry.
Roy: In Woolton, we’d dropped them off, and we made our own way back.
Paul: So, how, how did you get out of that one, Roy?
Roy: Because I was almost taken up and reprimanded . . .
Paul: Yeah.
Roy: . . . for being wrong, but the big surprise, the big thing was, thank God for that, E2 is still safe, you know what I mean, they haven’t, there’s no . . . (Pat laughs).
Terry: That’s all they cared about, the bus was safe.
Roy: . . . no problem about E2, and all the engineers and all the mechanics and everything else were all right. Everybody was at, gobsmacked that E2 had gone off the radar (Jenny and Pat laugh), if you like, for that period, and we were being rude, taking two girls that we fancy and dropping them off . . .
Terry: You can’t, you can’t, believe you could take a bus and (indecipherable) up the street, can you?
Pat: No.
Roy: . . . and we took them down side streets, took them down side streets in Woolton, and went back and got back, and when we got back, we were in Hell, we were in shit, if you like (laughing heard) but, whatever, we got away with it.
Paul: Because the bus was OK?
Roy: It was OK, but, you know . . .
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