Why I should sit on the top deck of the bus more often - Ian McMillan

The other day I was on the X19 bus coming home from Doncaster. I’d been at the head of the queue which meant that I was able to scuttle upstairs and sit at the front and pretend that I was in one of those observation cars on the Canadian Pacific Railway.

It’s amazing how much you can see from the top deck of a bus; the back gardens, the park you can only glimpse from the lower deck, the swings swinging in the breeze, the slide empty and tempting. I almost got off early just to have a go on it.

Doctors call this “Top Deck Enthusiasm”, a syndrome perhaps caused by the sunlight magnified through the bus windows and heating the brain.

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The X19 passed under the A1 and rolled into Marr, a place where I used to ring bells in the mid-1970s, and then it began to roll along the wide A635 towards Hickleton. At the far end of Marr, I glanced right, as I always do, to catch a glimpse (perhaps a final glimpse before the trees got completely painted in their spring colours) of Brodsworth Hall.

Ian McMillan reflects on his journey on the top deck of the bus.Ian McMillan reflects on his journey on the top deck of the bus.
Ian McMillan reflects on his journey on the top deck of the bus.

These days Brodsworth Hall is quite rightly a jewel in the English Heritage crown and I’d recommend a visit if you’ve not been and a revisit if you have.

The hall’s story is a fascinating one; the owner, Mrs Sylvia Grant-Dalton, lived on her own in the house and as she got older she locked up the various rooms and lived in the next one.

When she died in the late 1980s, it was found to be a perfectly preserved Victorian country house, which is now open to the public. I remember as a young man seeing the house from the top deck of the X19 and wondering exactly what it was but never getting off to find out, not that I’d have been allowed in.

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Back in the present day, as the bus rumbled through Hickleton, I strained my neck to catch a glimpse of another of the big houses that still dot the post-industrial landscape of South Yorkshire, Hickleton Hall.

This was, in the 1930s, the residence of Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, and I remember a sign in the tiny village green that read “Lord Halifax Invites You to Rest awhile and Enjoy Hickleton”, although years ago somebody rested awhile, enjoyed the village and nicked the sign.

Hickleton Hall is a grand house that was a Sue Ryder Home when I was a young man, and has recently been sold to someone who is trying to restore it.

One bus ride: two halls so far. For a writer like me, each of these halls is a book of unwritten stories waiting to be told and, if we look hard enough, we can find these untold tales and maybe start to tell them.

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Tell the stories of their relationships with the land around them and the people who helped to build them and keep them going; stories of their heyday and decline. I should sit on the top deck more often!