The tradition of running jokes continues today with the so-called “heritage routes”. These are now the only buses with conductors. Naturally their destination is the Royal Albert Hall.

With such thoughts running through my mind, I drove a bus every day from Brixton to Oxford Circus, then back again, then back again after that (and twice more after that) and sometime in 1991 I began to develop the idea that I might become a writer. Maybe get a newspaper interested in a column about bus driving from someone “in the know”. Ah, the life of a writer! I had this picture of myself sitting in a pub with other like-minded people (writers, artists etc) drinking pints of Guinness and watching the world go by.

Actually, I did this on my days off. I’d started writing bits and pieces; a friend was labouring over his haiku poetry and another preparing a play about Richard Savage. But none of us was being paid and we couldn’t do it full time. So I carried on driving my bus. Then I got a break. Through sheer luck I managed to land some pieces in the right hands at The Independent and this led to a column that ran for 15 glorious weeks. It all ended just as abruptly. One week, in exactly the same place that my column had been, there was a new item entitled “Bridget Jones’s Diary”. I decided to give up on newspapers and write a book. In the meantime I carried on driving.

It’s odd to think that the darker passages of The Restraint of Beasts (set in rural Britain) were conceived hauling a 109 up and down the A23. There was a mode of operation on the buses known as the “spreadover” (or “split shift”). This involved working the morning and afternoon busy periods and taking a long break in the middle of the day. I had a deck chair in our backyard at home and around noon I would spend an hour sitting in the sunshine and pondering my new book. When the sun dipped behind the chimney I knew it would soon be time to go back to work.

As a professional writer, I’d have been able to stay there all day. My increasing determination to earn a living as a writer coincided exponentially with my fading enthusiasm for bus driving (I was beginning to miss stops if I didn’t like the look of the people standing there) and the two trajectories crossed in 1998 when I was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. At last, I could quit my job. It was disappointing, however, that the press were barely interested in my book and only wanted to ask me about the bloody buses! So I became the bus driver-turned-writer who was automatically consulted whenever a school bus was hit by a train on a level crossing; or when someone else wrote a book about buses. (In the same way, I suppose, Christine Keeler must get a phone call every time a new book is published about hard chairs.) I was now a full-time writer and I quickly realised that sitting in the sunshine all day was quite boring. I soon concluded that apart from paying off the mortgage, little had changed and that being a writer was no big deal. So I got a job as a van driver. That lasted for five years, but all of a sudden I heard the call of the buses again.

Now I’m back on a double-decker, patrolling Oxford Street four times a day. In many ways, writing fiction is similar to bus driving. After all, both involve taking the public for a ride. A recurring theme in my books, how people can be unkind to one another without meaning to be, is often reflected in real life. So next time a bus driver leaves you behind, remember that he may not have done it intentionally. But, then again, he might.

Magnus Mills’s latest novel, Explorers of the New Century, is published by Bloomsbury

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