Lady Theresa

I hope that I never have to meet Lady Theresa again. Its actually not her fault but the driver's because Lady Theresa is the bus I rode to get from Valletta to Paceville this afternoon. I suppose the proper name should be Leyland Bristol but I prefer to use the name Lady Theresa which was proudly painted inside at the front just above the driver. This chance meeting was the result of an instantaneous decision I took this morning after dropping my son at my mother's house. The morning trip to Valletta was fine. I do not even remember what the bus was like but the afternoon ride I will not forget no matter how much I would like to.
It was one of those box-like buses which was at its best fifty years ago. The driver was about ten years older than his bus. Slim, with long white hair and a black baseball cap. The first part of the journey was typical for such a bus, that is, very noisy and half the exhaust fumes entering the bus instead of polluting the road. When we reached Pieta the driver stopped in the middle of the road, got out of the bus and started offending somebody on the bus stop because apparently he raised his hand to signal for the bus to stop but changed his mind. Most of the people on the bus were foreigners and they could not understand what was happening. This experience seemed to have effected his mood and his driving. The next stop was at Msida in front of the old people's home where a nervous foreign lady who was sitting right behind the driver pushed the bell button twice. What a mistake. He turned around and shouted at her "I know I know. I am not deaf".
By the time we went past the roundabout his mood was even more lousy. An African man who was sitting at the back did not jump off the bus too quickly and by the time the bus started moving he was still fighting his way through more than a dozen bodies to the front of the bus. The other passengers asked the driver to wait and somebody even pressed the bell button. Another mistake. He again turned round and started to shout at this poor man "One hour you take". At least the driver was not racist and did not reserve his comments only for dark-skinned persons. From the next bus stop he started to urge the passengers who were getting off to hurry hurry. At the next stop in Gzira two wise Maltese girls with three young children decided to avoid his wrath by starting their journey to the front of the bus while the bus was still taking up passengers so that they would reach the front of the bus by the time it reached the next stop. The chaos this caused had to be seen to be believed. As is to be expected this brought about another tirade from the driver. This time it was "Hurry up. A million times I tell you to hurry up" but he wouldn't listen to them when they tried to explain that they did want to get off at that stop. While this group was getting off the bus a foreign lady decided that she too wanted to start moving to the front of the bus before it started to move. This time getting to the front of the bus was even more difficult as the lady was pulling a large piece of luggage behind her but before he had a chance to open his mouth with a fresh tirade she started screaming at him that it was all his fault because he sent her to the back of the bus when he should have allowed her to sit at the front. She was a real fighting lady but he fought back like a real Maltese patriot by shouting even louder at her to "shut up I want to work not talk" but her impact on him was dramatic. Of course he would. He had never been shouted at by a little old lady before. He became so depressed that he remained quite for the rest of the journey and decided to vent his anger by driving dead slow except when he was approaching a bus stop. There he accelerated and then slammed his foot on the brake throwing all standing passengers on top of each other. This part of the journey was so slow that by the time we reached Spinola Bay in San Giljan two other buses had overtaken us. No wonder the number of passengers has decreased so much and this man has his job guaranteed for the next ten years with the new company that will be running the new bus service next year!