The depot keeps one old bus, a half cab with an open platform at the back and a bell cord the conductor pulled to tell the driver to go. It lives in a locked shed and goes out for parades. Every night at a quarter to eleven the bell rings. Once. Then again, forty seconds later. Then again. The gaps are the stops on a route nobody has run since 1968, and the platform at the back, on the camera, creaks under somebody stepping on and off.
I am the volunteer who looks after the heritage bus at a depot, and I am a retired driver, which is how I know what the bell means.
The bus.
A half cab from the fifties, with the driver in his own cab at the front and a conductor on the open platform at the back, and a cord along the ceiling that the conductor pulled to ring the bell in the cab. One ring, go. Two, stop. It lives in a shed at the back of the depot and it goes out twice a year and it is the thing the depot is proudest of.
At a quarter to eleven the bell rings.
The rings.
One. Forty seconds. One. A minute and ten. One. Thirty. One. And so on, for about fifty minutes, and then two, and it stops.
I wrote the gaps down for a month and I took them to the depot's historian, who is older than me, with the old timetables, and he timed a route from them on the map, and the gaps are the stops on the old fourteen, from the depot to the pier, as it ran in the sixties, at the speed of a half cab, and the two rings at the end are the terminus.
The fourteen was pulled in 1968. The pier went in 1971.
The platform.
The shed camera shows the back of the bus, the open platform with its pole. At each ring, just before, the platform creaks, and the bus moves on its springs the small amount it moves when a person steps on or off, and the pole is touched, the brass of it, I can see the light change on it where a hand goes round, and there is nobody there.
Between rings the platform is still. Then the step on, or the step off, and the pole, and the ring, and the bus on its springs, and nothing else, because the bus is in a shed and does not go anywhere, and whatever is getting on and off is getting on and off at stops that are forty years gone, at a pier that is in the sea.
What has been checked.
The bell. It is a mechanical bell on a cord. I took the cord off. The bell rang. I took the bell off. The shed rang, with the sound of it, from the place on the ceiling of the cab where it had been.
The shed, at a quarter to eleven, by me, on the platform. I stood on it with my hand on the pole. At the first ring the platform moved under me with somebody stepping off, past me, brushing my arm, and the cord above my head, which I had put back, went taut and slack, once, and the bell in the cab rang, and I stood on the platform of a bus in a shed going down a road I drove as a boy, and I could feel the stops, each one, the step off and the step on, and the bell, and I did not get off till the two rings.
Who.
A conductor. On the fourteen. The historian found him. A man who had the fourteen for twelve years and had, on the last night of the route in 1968, worked the last bus to the pier, and rung it in, and rung the two at the terminus, and gone home, and the route had gone, and he had been put on another and had not liked it, and had left, and had died in the seventies.
He is running the last fourteen. Every night. From the depot to the pier, with the stops, with the passengers getting on and off, and the bell, and the two at the end.
What is done about it.
The bell in the shed at a quarter to eleven is heard by the night engineer, who has heard it for years and thought it was the building, and has been told, and has said that it makes no odds to him what rings in a shed as long as it is not his buses.
What I do.
I look after the bus.
A conductor rings one for go. The driver goes. That is the whole of the arrangement and it has not been kept for fifty years because there has been nobody in the cab.
I am in the cab. At a quarter to eleven I sit in the driver's seat, in the half cab, where I sat for thirty years on other buses, and when the bell rings once I put my hand on the gear lever and I say, right you are, which is what you said, and I sit there, and the bus does not move, and I am driving it. Forty seconds. The bell. Right you are. A minute and ten. The bell. Down the old fourteen, stop by stop, to the pier, in a shed, with my hand on a gear lever that has not moved since the spring parade.
At the two rings I put the handbrake on. It is already on. I put it on anyway, and I say, all change, and I get out of the cab and go round to the platform, and I say, thanks, mate, to the pole, and the brass is warm, and I go home.