Riding Route #93

A few weeks ago, an elderly friend - in my mind, my pseudo-great aunt (PGA) - told me a story about travelling on a Number 93 bus in London during the Second World War.  She and her husband had been to the theatre and coming out found they couldn't use the underground due to an air-raid.  They'd caught the first vaguely suitable homebound bus and found themselves in Putney.  From there they'd caught a Number 93 to take them across the river to their home in Wimbledon.  Amongst the few other passengers on the top deck was a woman huddled deep inside her coat a few seats behind.  Suddenly, the woman got off the bus, leaving behind a package on the seat.  My PGA's husband snatched it up and dashed downstairs to look for her but without success.  He returned to my PGA clutching the package and announced that they were now the proud "parents" of a tiny kitten - for that's what was in the package.  The kitten was named Lucky and provided my PGA with many years of welcome company (for her husband was an airman); along with plenty of wonderings about how many other apparently unwanted kittens the woman had left on buses that day.

I decided to take a ride on a Number 93 bus - not in the hope of finding a kitten (I'm sorted in the feline pet department) but because I've often thought about travelling random London bus routes for the joy of it and the Number 93 seemed as good a one to start with as any.  Looking it up on the Transport for London website, I found that rather than running between Putney and Wimbledon, as I'd supposed from my PGA's story, it continued to North Cheam, which felt as if it might be rather a long way into Surrey.  I was still undecided about whether I would travel the whole route or just the part in my PGA's story when I arrived, by tube, at Putney Bridge to embark upon my adventure.

I'd thought I'd spend the ride trying to imagine what had changed along the route from when my PGA and her husband took it, thinking about her and a woman abandoning kittens on buses in the hope that they'd find good homes.  What actually happened was that I got absorbed in the fast changing and contrasting views from the window, listened to a really amusing radio show, and observed some intriguing bits of human behaviour.  No kittens, but there were a couple of dogs.

We passed huge houses on Putney Hill and in Wimbledon Village, more modest homes in suburban North Cheam (yes, I went all the way) and South Wimbledon, flats in huge blocks in Morden and over shops along the London Road.  There were chic exclusive boutiques in Wimbledon Village, the full range of chains in Wimbledon town centre, a modest mixture of both on Putney High Street and all sorts of one off and seemingly very useful shops set just back from the A24 at the southern end of the journey.  Several still bore 01 telephone numbers on their fronts as reassuring badges of longevity; it must be getting on for 25 years since BT started messing around with the London dialling code.

The bus ran alongside the edge of first Putney Heath and then Wimbledon Common and later Morden Park.  The tranquil, non-urban, rural-feeling wildness of the first two was surprising to me.  There were huge solid oak trees, frothy cow parsley at their feet, and glimpses of blue, which I hoped, with ridiculous optimism, might be bluebells but turned out to be forget-me-nots.  I imagined that the wildlife living a little further back from the road might be somewhat more exotic than the usual pigeons, squirrels, rats and foxes that inhabit the more inner London patches of green.

As we reached Wimbledon station, where, I suspect, my PGA and her husband would have alighted, I was listening to The Unbelievable Truth on Radio 4.  Over Rhod Gilbert's fantastic expanding tongue twister of lies about soup, I gradually became aware of the familiar tinny noise of an overloud iPod.  Suddenly, from the back of the bus, an expletive-loaded shout came forth, instructing the iPod user, in no uncertain terms, to turn his music down – or else.  Tension rose palpably, the iPod wearer (across the aisle from me) looked startled, adjusted the controls and peace descended.  The potentially difficult situation averted, I relaxed back, struggling not to laugh out loud as the tongue twister lengthened with each additional imaginative untruth.  Then there was movement from the rear of the bus.  The complaining passenger was alongside me.  He turned, tapped the iPod user on the shoulder, said "Thanks mate" and gave him a cheery thumbs up before descending the stairs and getting off.  He was wearing a green Celtic shirt; perhaps his concerns about the imminent last Old Firm match of the season were the real cause of his outburst?

The end point of the route was a seemingly random, unremarkable junction in North Cheam, right in the middle of streets of conventional and comfortable 1930s semis and short terraces.  Flags of St George fluttered from three or four first floor windows.  Were they for St George's Day, which had been the day before?  Or even the Queen's birthday a couple of days earlier?  Was there a forthcoming England sporting event that I had overlooked?  London is full, of course, of flags at the moment, but they are Union not England ones.

I changed buses for the return journey.  As soon as we were back on the main road, a couple got on with a solid, low to the ground, light brown dog.  I don't know what variety it was: I'm a cat woman.  They sat at the back and very firmly instructed it to lie under the seat in front.  It seemed to know exactly what was expected and settled straight down.  A few stops later, a man got on with a similar shaped, but black, dog.  I waited for a canine conversation but there was none.  The man carefully removed an empty Red Bull can from a seat, dropped it on the floor, patted the upholstery and encouraged the dog up onto it.  Another obedient hound: straight up onto the seat for a comfy snooze.

I rode the return bus as far as Wimbledon and felt that I'd done justice to my PGA's recollections and had had an interesting insight into parts of town that I'd rarely or never visited before.  I'd observed some contrasting human behaviour and enjoyed some good radio humour.  A good use, I felt, of a couple of hours.  Still wondering what those flags were about though.