I was part of a miserable incident on a bus. This was one evening just before Christmas and I had somewhere to be. As I got on, the driver was trying and failing to communicate with an old man holding a shopping trolley. “He says he wants to go to Enfield,” said the driver. The poor chap with the trolley looked at me and said nothing. His hands had a tremor about them. “Enfield?” I asked. He just stared at me. If he really had wanted to get to Enfield, far north London, by bus, from where we were in far west London, he was in for a very long night indeed.
Wondering if his English wasn’t good, I tried every other language I could muster. He said nothing, but when I tried Croatian on him, there seemed to be some reaction. A Polish woman pitched in but got no further. I had no clue what to do, where to take him or what anyone else could have done for him. We didn’t even know his name, and he was either unwilling or unable to tell us.
The bus controller radioed for us to get going and bring him to the depot. But at the next stop nobody could get on as he was standing in the way. Gently, I tried to usher him to a seat, but he cursed and pushed me away. Stalemate. We were going nowhere. A couple of other passengers tried out yet more languages on him. One woman pushed past me and him, cursing us both. An argument ensued. Still the poor man stood there, shaking, stuck between anger and confusion. Another bus pulled in behind. Our driver got out of his seat to join in our discussion. More opinions and suggestions, kind and unkind, helpful and unhelpful, were exchanged.
Then someone said, “He’s gone!” And he had. “There he is!” shouted someone else, pointing at the bus that had been behind but was now passing us. And there he was, with his trolley, standing, still shaking, in the same place on a different bus. We all made sad faces at one another, making a poor job of disguising our relief that he was now someone else’s problem. I can’t get him out of my mind.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
