Our big red bus ride
This text is about a journey that started in 1971 and went around the North American continent.
Gradually, out of the shimmering heat, a vehicle appeared – a big, red intrusion into the barren
landscape. As it approached, a curious spectator would see a bus, a double‑decker, bigger and
noisier than the single‑deckers they sometimes saw in that part of the world. It threw up clouds
of dirt and dust as it passed. It shouldn’t have been there, thousands of kilometres from
England.
This is the story of that big, red double‑decker bus. This isn’t a children’s story, and if you try
reading it to children, they’ll soon lose interest in the increasingly petty details of our daily life. In
one early letter to my parents, I wrote: ‘We had yet another meeting yesterday to sort out
grievances.’ This latest inquest had been into who’d drunk someone’s orange juice from the
fridge. The devastated owner knew some had been ‘stolen’ because he’d marked the level of
the liquid in the bottle.
I did try to write a children’s story one morning but was interrupted by shouts and a collision with
something overhead. Group leader Roger had decided on buying a ‘high‑decker’ (taller than
average) and initially we left a trail of damaged overhead bridges, power cables and telephone
lines wherever we went. This bus, our bus, had already covered many kilometres of faithful
service before Roger purchased it second‑hand. We’d each answered Roger’s advert to travel
around the world on this bouncing beast. We all had regular professions back home – a chef, a
nurse and so on – and had come together to share an experience. We’d taken delivery of a
1955 green double‑decker and decided to paint it red, the typical image of English buses. The
bus company remained very supportive, including sending spares out whenever we
encountered a mechanical crisis.
It’s difficult to envisage how cut off from our previous lives we were back then. Mobile phones
and emails weren’t yet invented. There was no internet linking different countries and cultures.
To phone home was expensive and public phones weren’t easy to find. I was away two years
and managed to phone home twice.
Our world was inside that double‑decker bus – an overloaded display case of rattling glass and
metal on wheels. People stared in; we gazed out. The interior of the bus had been completely
gutted, its normal entrance and exit doors sealed up. We gained access squeezing through the
emergency door at the rear. Roger’s new friend, Vic, was a skilled carpenter, magicking snug
bunk beds and ingenious storage seats downstairs around an almost adequate kitchen area/
table. The seats were removable – disappearing to reveal various emergency supplies, spares
and snacks nestled secretly beneath. No sliver of space escaped!
That bus traversed deserts and climbed mountains – setting an altitude record of 4000 metres
for such a vehicle. Rumbling across continents, only lack of money for diesel threatened to halt
its determined march. Beforehand, we’d hoped to sell advertising space on the side of the bus,
but that didn’t happen. Our targets each day were to make enough money from manual work –
mostly fruit picking – to cover growing expenses, and to overcome any lumps, bumps and
obstacles that lay ahead. A double‑decker bus is a heavy, awkward vehicle. On uneven or wet
ground, it’s less manoeuvrable than a whale in quicksand, but ever heard the expression ‘You
could get a double‑decker bus through there?’ Well, events proved that we could (until that
fateful last day when it sank on a raft crossing a river – don’t ask!).
We needed luck and to work together. Most of all we needed the bus to overcome conditions
that it had never experienced in years of commercial service. The six of us who lasted the whole
trip were two years older when we returned. Looking back, we displayed breath‑taking naivety in
assuming that we’d not be left stranded somewhere with no money and no hope of getting
home.
q1 You are Vic. Shortly after the whole trip ends, you write a letter to a friend telling them about
your experience.
In your letter you should:
• describe the preparations for the trip and how you came to be involved
• outline the different challenges faced once the journey began and how these were resolved
• explain what you think everyone learned through the experience and looking back what you all
should have done differently and why.
Write the words of the letter. Base your letter on what you have read in Text C, but be careful to
use your own words. Address each of the three bullets. Write about 250 to 350 words.
