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    The Nut Behind The Wheel
    The Nut Behind The Wheel
    The Nut Behind The Wheel
    Ebook136 pages1 hour

    The Nut Behind The Wheel

    By Celia Chandler

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    About this ebook

    When a former teacher decided to get a Passenger Carrying Vehicle Licence and become a coach driver, a new world of life behind the wheel opened up. The Nut Behind the Wheel follows a rookie coach driver learning to drive a full sized coach and passing the test. Then over a 10 year period the reader goes along the road with the ups and downs of working as a professional driver. From regular contracts for Social Services and public and private organisations and clubs, we travel the Welsh valleys and beyond on trips with vulnerable children, golf club members, rugby supporters and to office parties. The laughs and travel horror stories are seen from the driver’s point of view, one which is seldom considered and rarely written about, interwoven with personal reflection.
    Anyone who has ever organised, or been on a coach trip as well as seasoned drivers will be able to relate to the stories told in The Nut Behind the Wheel. Set in the 1990's against a Welsh backdrop, there are glimpses of local speech and quaint customs to give colour to the true tales of the wonderland of life on the road.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCelia Chandler
    Release dateJul 31, 2014
    ISBN9781310165344
    The Nut Behind The Wheel

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      Book preview

      The Nut Behind The Wheel - Celia Chandler

      The Nut Behind The Wheel

      By – Celia Chandler

      Copyright 2014 – Celia Chandler

      Smashwords Edition

      Smashwords Edition License Notes:

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with other people please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this ebook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy.

      Thank-you for respecting the hard work of this author

      The Nut Behind the Wheel

      This book is dedicated to everyone who has sat behind the wheel of a passenger-carrying vehicle.

      You must be nuts!

      Some names and places have been changed to protect the innocent, the guilty and the easily embarrassed, although most coach drivers no not fall into the last category.

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1 - Learning

      Chapter 2 - Volunteering

      Chapter 3 - PHAB

      Chapter 4 - The Interview

      Chapter 5 - Minibuses

      Chapter 6 - Special Needs

      Chapter 7 - Escorts

      Chapter 8 - A Night on the Town

      Chapter 9 - The Writing on the Wall

      Chapter 10 - Golf

      Chapter 11 - Star Travel

      Chapter 12 - Entre'acte

      Chapter 13 - A Day at the Races

      Chapter 14 - Christmas is coming

      Chapter 15 - A Morning in court

      Chapter 16 - Hereford Races

      Chapter 17 - London

      Chapter 18 - Stag Night

      Chapter 19 - Travelling Hopefully

      Chapter 20 - Mine head Revisited

      Chapter 21 - The Committee

      Chapter 22 - Wedding Party

      Chapter 23 - Murrayfield

      Chapter 24 - Promotion

      Chapter 25 - A Little Common

      Chapter 26 - Country Lanes

      Chapter 27 - Change of Direction

      Chapter 28 - Post-script

      Chapter 1 - Learning

      Learning to drive a passenger carrying vehicle requires ability, motivation, determination, a vehicle to practice on, a good instructor and cash to pay for lessons. I had everything except for ability. Only my instructor, the ever patient Trevor, would be qualified to say if I was his worst ever pupil but I felt I was.

      Getting into a big bus and sitting in the driver's seat was very strange. Having had a car licence for 30 years and having driven nothing bigger than the occasional mini bus, getting behind the wheel of a 42- seater bus was a shock to the system. The width, height and above all the length of the thing and the idea of getting it around corners or, perish the thought, reversing it, seemed like a Herculean task. Then there was the feel of the air brakes, so different from a car and the aggressive hiss of the hand brake, on my right hand side, for goodness sake, all adding to the feeling that this was an alien space-craft not a common, mundane bus. Having six gears didn't help, nor the position of the gear lever, somewhere behind me in the void.

      We spent the first few lessons trying to get up and down hills in the Rhondda valleys, around roundabouts, ideally without demolishing kerbs, lamp-posts or railings, knocking mirrors off parked vehicles or shunting other road users off mountains. From my perch in the driver's seat my view of the world changed and as my skill and confidence grew and Trevor teetered towards a nervous breakdown, I came to believe that being able to see over hedges and all the cars in front of you, was the only way to travel. Getting back into my car at the end of a lesson was like getting into a Dinky Toy.

      Then Trevor introduced me to reversing and I felt as though I was back at square one.

      From now on everything would be viewed out of two wing mirrors. I was Alice backing through the looking glass into the wonderland of passenger carrying vehicles. We started off in the yard reversing between cunningly positioned poles and cones, to which I could do minimum damage. The blessed things seemed to move from the time I went through them forward to the seconds later when I was supposed to reverse through them. Although the bus had power steering, manoeuvring at low speed is still sweating hard work – not quite on a par with childbirth, but a similar experience for the upper body. We laboured on.

      Although the long-suffering and well-paid Trevor said I should have passed my test first time, I didn't. As I drove around the test route, I could see the examiner trying not to look tense, writing little notes about the errors I was making, so no surprises when I failed. I re-sat a week later, drove brilliantly with a different examiner on a different test route, got back to the Test Centre knocked a bollard down reversing and failed again. I didn't actually cry until I passed my test at the third attempt when the examiner said I was safe if somewhat unpolished. Former colleagues joked that the driving examiners had me on the list for their Christmas party, they knew me so well. But if it was good enough for the examiner, it was good enough for me. I could take my new qualification to an employer and earn my living driving the unsuspecting public on nice day trips to the sea or visits to places of cultural interest. What planet was I on?

      'You must be nuts' said Trevor.

      Chapter 2 – Volunteering

      At about the same time as I started taking lessons for my Passenger Carrying Vehicle Licence, (PCV) I signed on with a volunteer bureau to drive mini-buses. It turned out to be useful in terms of getting used to the width of a bigger vehicle but was of little value in terms of length, as most of their vehicles were mini-buses, only about one third the length of a full size coach.

      On the vehicles, volunteers worked in pairs, a driver and an escort, whose duties were to help the passengers- mostly frail-elderly, disabled or with dementia, on and off the bus, assist with seat belts and escort them to their front door if necessary. My first team-mate was also a driver, so we alternated the driver-escort duties. In this way I got to know my passengers, who went once a week to a club for blind and partially sighted people. They chatted all the way there and all the way back and probably all the time they were at the club too. More than all the nagging from Trevor, having real passengers on board made me much gentler on the controls.

      'Ease not Squeeze.' he would say when I did my Nigel Mansel impressions around the streets of Tonypandy. When you see your passengers lurching from side to side on their seats and mumbling 'Iesu Mawr!' you know it's time to slow down. I soon learnt my way round the old terraces of the former coal mining villages of the Rhondda Fach and the Rhondda Fawr and jerry-built council estates where most of the clients lived, many in quiet, lonely isolation. I began to realise why a once weekly trip to a community hall for lunch, bingo and a sing-song was so important to them. One fine afternoon when we were taking them home one of them called from the back:

      'Come on driver, it's too nice to go home. Let's highjack the bus and go to Porthcawl.'

      'Not today, I've got a hot date' I told them. Yeah, with an engine when I get back to the yard.

      I did go to Porthcawl before long but with a different group and a different escort.

      The bureau received a request from an old people's home at the top of the Rhondda. When we got there, the matron told us that all the clients were in various stages of dementia and we would be accompanied by a number of care assistants who would hold hands of the elderly, push wheel chairs and give any personal care necessary. We got the passengers, Zimmer frames, wheel chairs and carers on board and strapped in and set off, rattling over the vertiginous pass that takes you from the Rhondda to the Ogmore valley. The old boy behind me just kept saying 'Oh God' over and over all the way there...and I thought my driving was improving.

      The day's plan was a pub lunch, a stroll around Porthcawl (you can see it all in five minutes), a bracing walk along the promenade- it's always bracing, if not verging on storm force, a visit to the fun fair where we would have to content ourselves with watching other people being flung around on the 'Waltzer' and turned upside-down on some overpriced nausea-inducing contraption. The bus ride back over the Bwlch Mountain

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