On the Teddy Boys who Drove the 142 Bus from Bedford to Ampthill
and Beyond
This is obscure.
Deliberately.
The last few days, since my post about Getting Very Annoyed with Bob Dylan and even more about Giving Up Substack, the Diary has reached a new popularity.
Yay, you would think.
But I’ve always tended to run away from the possibility of a large audience. I like you — and I mean you — who are already here.
There’s something of Neil Young in me —
‘Heart of Gold’ put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people…
I recognise this, and fear it.
This is not to complain. I’m happy the entries are getting somewhere — although it’s interesting that the most successful is about possibly quitting the very thing we’re doing.
A lot of people have seen the words Giving Up Substack and thought, Yes, I’m thinking of that, too.
Press Like.
Anyway, today is still — I hope — of general interest, but it’s a bit ditch-y.
Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about the men (they were all men) who drove the council bus I used to take into school.
My stop was outside the Prince of Wales in Ampthill; my destination was Bedford Bus Station. And vice versa, at the end of the day.
I remember most fondly those drivers who were old Teddy Boys or Greasers, and whose hair was slicked up into DAs (duck’s arse hairstyles), and who sometimes had their collars popped, as if their uniform were a drape jacket.
If they were original rockers, from when Elvis and Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochrane and Gene Vincent broke, they must have been in their mid-fifties — and they had stayed true to that one time.
They’d started as riproaring Luton petrolheads, and had ended up chugging a double decker though Houghton Conquest.
Of course, none of them are still driving buses, and many of them are likely dead or in retirement homes. I hope they have access to Brylcreem and the vinyl they love.
What they made me think, at the time, as a schoolboy stepping onto their bus and buying my ticket from them, with cash, was These men know what they like and so they know who they are.
I didn’t know that at all. I didn’t have a stable identity.
In 1981, I was a New Romantic; in 1979, I’d been a 2 Tone boy; by 1984, it would all be about The Smiths.
But I loved other music, and other identities, as well.
I considered saving up for a Vespa and becoming a Mod and motoring down to Brighton. (I remember having actual dreams about this.)
I bought a Billie Holiday cassette, and for a month or so thought I might get totally into old jazz.
How could those old Teds have stuck it for so long with just the one thing?
When I went to Record Fairs in Bedford Corn Exchange, I heard them haggling with dealers over obscure Sun Records 7”s and Chess Records EPs.
They were still working on their collections. They were single-minded.
They knew what they liked.
After my years of thinking about them, I realise I was learning an important aesthetic lesson from them (though I had no words for that, at the time) —
I wasn’t, and was never going to be, one thing forever.
I wasn’t going to be rock’n’roll will never die or punks not dead or hip-hop you don’t stop.
Ever since my first craze, which may have been skateboarding, I have been one thing after another.
That’s why when I discovered Bob Dylan and David Bowie, with their different looks and personalities and belief systems for each new album —fully committed to each, hardly able to see beyond it, but knowing that they’d soon move on — I saw something I could do.
And have done it ever since.
(Paradox.)
