Ian McMIllan on the slow road to the palace

This all began in 1967 with my mate Kev from school getting on the 37 bus and immediately bending down and scrabbling under the seats. I thought he’d seen a bob (pre-decimal days, readers!) gleaming on the floor but he hadn’t, he’d seen a discarded bus ticket which wasn’t unusual because, as I noted earlier, we were on the bus.

He picked the ticket up, folded it, and put it in his pocket next to his own ticket. Kev turned to me and said: “Giz thi ticket!” I shook my head. “What if the inspector gets on?” I asked. He wasn’t impressed. “Look, if he does get on I’ll give it thi back,” he said. Reluctantly, I passed him mine and he folded it and added it to the other two. “Buckingham Palace, here I come!” he said, so loudly that a couple of chapel women on the back seat tutted in unison.

“What are you on about, Buckingham Palace?” I said, my breaking voice sounding like an unsold jumble sale zither. It turned out that it was common knowledge, although it can’t have been that common because I knew nothing about it, that if you collected 1,000 bus tickets, you got a trip to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen who would give you a silver bus ticket and £1,000. I asked Kev how many bus tickets he’d got. He rummaged in his pocket, frowning and pulling out the tickets like a page boy preparing to chuck confetti at a wedding. “Seventeen,” he said, slightly crestfallen. He was better at mental arithmetic than me and he said: “Just the 983 to go.” I didn’t stop to check if he was right because I’d seen somebody get off the bus and drop their ticket in the aisle. I pounced on it and pocketed it: “999 to go!” I said, triumphantly.

And so began The Summer of the Buckingham Palace Bus Tickets. Our collections grew slowly but steadily over the long holidays, although to be honest the fabled 1,000 always seemed a long way off. Rumours abounded: someone in Wombwell had got the magic number and a Rolls Royce had arrived to take her down to London. Someone in Goldthorpe had got 5,000 and the Queen herself had knocked on his door and asked to count them and then flown him down to Buckingham Palace in a helicopter that had landed in the fields opposite the Goldthorpe Hotel.

By the end of August, Kev had 79 tickets and I had 34. We decided to combine them but we still didn’t feel like we were getting close. Because we weren’t. “When’s the closing date, anyway?” I asked Kev. He didn’t know but a big lad behind us on the bus (we were always on the bus, ticket hunting) said: “It was last week. And I won it. And I got a medal.”

We didn’t believe him and we kept collecting. In fact, I still am. Happy Jubilee everybody!