Mum treated her bus pass as proof that the buses were there for her personal use.
By 2014 she was seventy-seven and still living in the Portchester house. Dad had been dead for six years. Peter and I both offered lifts, though Mum accepted them according to a system she did not share with us.
She took the bus for shopping, appointments and visits to people she described as old, some of whom were younger than she was. She knew which services were reliable and which ones had been altered by people who clearly did not use buses.
I worried when she changed at Fareham or waited near the road in bad weather. Mum said she had managed buses before I was born.
‘They were different then,’ I said.
‘Yes. They had conductors and came on time.’
This was not the reassurance I had been after.
Alan sometimes drove me over to Portchester on a Saturday. We would find Mum ready in her coat even when she had told us she was staying in. If we offered to take her shopping, she might agree, or she might say she had already been.
‘On the bus?’
‘That is what the pass is for.’
She kept the timetable folded in her handbag, although she knew most of it. If a bus was late, she did not complain to us until she was safely home. Then she gave a full report, including the number of people who had failed to move down the aisle.
There were changes I could see. Mum walked more slowly. She checked the kerb before stepping down and preferred a seat near the front. Heavy shopping came home with Peter or me. She refused to describe any of this as needing help.
Once, after an appointment, she let me collect her. I arrived early and found her waiting outside.
‘You could have waited indoors.’
‘I was indoors. Then I saw your car.’
I asked whether she wanted to stop for tea. She said no because she had milk at home and no intention of paying for somebody else to put water in a pot.
I drove her back to Portchester. She told me where to turn, though I had been making that trip for years.
Before I left, I asked whether she needed anything the following week.
‘No. I have my pass.’
The next morning she rang to ask whether I could bring a large bag of potatoes.