January 2025

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​A Christmas Story

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A Bus Driver’s Search for Christmas

Bryan Webster

 

One of the hazards of being old is that people assume your reticence is a sign of retreat and assume you are losing your marbles; you must be indulged rather than believed. I have therefore hesitated telling this story. But time has hallowed it, and Laura reminded me of it when I lunched at The Shore Cafe on Wednesday past. So here goes.  Report me to the District Nurse if you must!

It concerns Michael, a friend of mine. I have given up my car in the interests of survival for myself and other road users. Hence I have a bus pass and use the bus frequently, and, thereby, meet and talk to Michael. He once worked for the local council, in some technical post, but, scunnered with bureaucracy, he took early retirement and now drives for Aventour, the local bus company. 

Michael has a philosophical turn of mind, and once he discovered I had been a minister, he freely expressed his opinions on the follies and fancies of the human race. Please do not think he is opinionated; far from it. What he expresses are largely doubts. In fact, the only thing of which he is certain is the love and resilience of his wife, Margaret. Nor is he cynical; freely acknowledging goodness wherever he finds it. And he finds it everywhere. ‘Ordinary goodness’, he calls it, to distinguish it from the sterile sort: promised, but never quite delivered, by politicians.  

Thus, he has become a sort of homespun philosopher; taught, I may say, by life, not lectures: by his passengers, not professors.

In the weeks leading up to the story I am about to tell; the dark, dreary days of November he had set himself the task of finding the ‘essence of Christmas’’; that is how he titled it.

He sounded so serious when he told me this, that I, jokingly, suggested that no-one understands Christmas but a child, a young child, a child no more than seven years old. He laughed but rejected the theory. Christmas lay there, he said, lurking behind all the glittering activity of the season; present in most of it, but when you reach out for it, it disappears; like a child trying to catch a soap bubble, your hand closed on itself. But we ought to be able to grasp it and feel it, he believed, and this Christmas he had determined to do so.

He had been to St Giles in Edinburgh to observe what he called High Mass, which, of course, it could not be for St Giles, for all its name and splendour, is a member of the Kirk, the Church of Scotland, that firmly threw out the Mass with other Popish practices in the fifteenth century. The fact that some of them, like Christmas, have sneaked back in, does not trouble to-day’s Moderator or General Assembly.

He had also dropped in on the office party of his ex-colleagues at the Council, where he had joined in the silly games, eaten his full and had taken a drink or two, Most of all he had observed his companions, looking for signs of the mystery he had come to uncover. But nothing emerged from the rumbustious gaiety, except a touch of indigestion and satisfaction that everyone here, apart from old Grumps, had for an hour or so, found something to lift their spirits.

He had, to her surprise, (and it may be said, frustration) accompanied Margaret on a shopping expedition and experienced the cheering cacophony and colourful incandescence of Christmas in Princes Street Gardens.

While there, he had laid out a not inconsiderable sum on a real Christmas Tree (Ecologically Sourced with Drop-free Needles) and had spent a whole evening carefully dressing it with baubles, trinkets and twinkling lights.

He had gone to the Annual Lifeboat Carol Concert in Hecklescar Parish Church and thoroughly enjoyed the precision and harmony of the choirs and the boisterous bawling of the bairns from the Primary School.

He had even gone to the United Churches Annual ‘Meditation on the Nativity’ and if the spirit of Christmas is to be found in solemnity, he would have found it there. However, he suspected he came closer to it in the mulled wine and mince pies afterwards.

He had gone through this considerable list before I saw him a couple of days before Christmas, and he confessed that he felt flat; not depressed, but sad, rather like a child whose balloon had burst leaving him with just a string and flop of rubber. 

‘Do you remember that sketch,’ he asked, ‘when Andre Previn rebuked Eric Morecambe for playing all the wrong notes?’

I confessed that I had seen it.

‘And Eric Morecambe replied that he was playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.’

I admitted that too.

‘Well, that’s what my search for Christmas has been like. It’s all there; all the right notes. But it doesn’t make music; it doesn’t let us into the mystery.’ 

Being the honest man he is, he said that, though he had not fathomed Christmas, he would enjoy it. However, he insisted, there was ‘something far more ‘deeply interfused whose dwelling is the light of setting suns’. 

Wordsworth? I ventured. Precisely, he answered with a faint smile. Sometimes, he went on, in the twilight of these dark days of winter, when I step outside the bus in the country among trees or beside the sea. it seems to me that the whole earth is holding its breath waiting for that ‘something far more’.  And it’s there in Christmas - and I want to find it.

What a good, thoughtful, man he is, I thought - but on a wild goose chase.

 

Christmas passed and I did not see him again before the day the old year shook off the last of its days. That day, my friend Lucy had taken me for my messages at the Co-op and then to the Shore Café at St Abbs for a cup of coffee.

It was then that Laura who served us, another good friend of mine – and Michael’s - told me the story I have been working up to. The one I have been reluctant to repeat.  

It happened on Christmas Eve, she told me, just as darkness came down.  Michael came into the café and said that he had half-an-hour to wait before he had to drive his bus back to Hecklescar. He sat with his coffee for a few minutes, talking to himself, she said – he often did that.

Then, suddenly, he got up, rushed out of the café without paying, and returned a minute or two later with a young woman and a child.

‘A tinker’ she thought, in worn thin clothes, looking cold and miserable. Michael bought them both a hot meal, then a large Santa gonk the little boy admired. After settling the bill, he left the café with them.

I said to Laura that this did not surprise me. I knew him to be a kind man.

She agreed but did not move away. Clearly she had more to say. She sat down at the table with me.

‘It was strange,’ she said. ‘When he next came in, the day after Boxing Day, when I praised him for being so generous, he knocked it back and said it wasn’t his idea; it came from the young man who came in just after him. He had told Michael that he had seen the woman and boy sitting shivering on his bus, waiting for the driver, Michael, to return. That, Michael told Laura, was why he had gone out to fetch them – because of what the young man had said.

‘I listened to him,’ Laura said. ‘And I thought about telling him what I saw, but he was that certain I didn’t want to contradict him. So I just let it go.’

’Let what go?’  I asked.

‘The young man he said that had sat with him.’

‘And what about the young man?’ I asked.

She stared at me.

‘There was no young man,’ she said seriously.

‘No young man?’

‘No.’

I paused, studied her a little while, smiled, and said quietly,

‘Perhaps you were busy, and didn’t notice him; he couldn’t have been in long.’

‘No! Certain! We were quite quiet. If there had been a young man I would have seen him. But there was no-one with him. I asked the others; they hadn’t seen any young man. He was on his own; talking to himself – but, then, he always does that. ‘

 

When next I saw Michael, I did not mention what Laura had told me. How could I? But he did say that he had ‘bumped into Christmas on Christmas Eve’. I asked him where and how. He did not answer directly, but said,

‘It lies among us, If we are in the right place at the right time - and in the right mind, we hear the music. Christmas cannot be understood, only heard, felt, embraced - and acted on.

There the conversation ended. To discuss it further would have trampled on his joy.

However, the story is not complete unless I relate something else that Laura told me. When I asked her what more she could tell me about the mysterious young man.

She said, ’Michael told me his name was Gabriel.’