Volunteer reunites with his old school bus driver

A volunteer bus driver at Juniper Hilltop, Lyall, has discovered that one of the residents he now drives on outings, Lionel, was once his own school bus driver, nearly fifty years ago.

Lyall started volunteering as a bus driver at the residential aged care home after his own mother became a resident there. It was during one of his visits to see her that he got to know Lionel, a fellow resident who was often sitting out the front, ready for a chat.

“I’d met Lionel here coming to visit my mum,” Lyall says.

The two men got talking one day about what Lionel used to do for work.

“I said, what did you do? And he said, oh, it was MTT bus driver,” Lyall says. “And I said, well, I used to go to Trinity, and I told him about the boys on my bus.”

Lionel spent about twenty years driving for the old Metropolitan Transport Trust. One of his regular routes was the special bus that picked up Trinity College boys after school and dropped them on Adelaide Terrace, where Lyall would catch a connecting bus home to Manning. Lionel drove that run too, and Lyall’s street was the end of the line.

“There were many different bus routes south of the river that he could have got,” Lyall says. “But he actually got mine.”

For Lionel, realising the man now visiting Hilltop each week had once been one of the schoolboys on his bus was hard to believe.

“I thought, I’m talking to a kid I used to see every day,” he says.

Lyall remembers the pranks he and his schoolmates used to play on the drivers.

“I told him about some of the things the boys used to do to annoy the drivers, like pull the bell,” Lyall says. “I said, you must have been very resilient.”

Lionel remembers it well. The old buses had a leather cord that rang a bell up near the driver, and it wasn’t supposed to be pulled until the bus reached the terrace.

“Boys were just being boys,” Lionel says.

These days, the roles have reversed. Lyall drives Lionel and the other residents out on their weekly outings, to places like Hillarys Boat Harbour and Tomato Lake.

For Lyall, the chance to give back has meant more than he expected.

“I never would have thought of doing this until I’d come here, and I wouldn’t have come here if Mum hadn’t been here,” he says. “It’s just great seeing the smile it gives them, getting them out and about.”

Looking back, Lyall says the school bus rides are still among his fondest memories.

“That’s one of my best memories, coming out the school gate, getting on the bus after school.”