Aaron B. Cohen
A little toy bus takes me back to my first transatlantic flight. It was 1961. I was seven. We’d be away for six months in Bristol, England, where my scientist Dad would work with his mentor.
We flew from New York on a British Overseas Airways Corporation turboprop. Once airborne the stewardess gave me the bus, a pair of silver pilot’s wings, and a few other knickknacks. She sure knew how to please her little customer, who wriggled in his seat and had to pop his ears with each change in cabin pressure.
“Hold your nose and blow!” she instructed, miming the move.
My small hand eagerly accepted the bus; high over the Atlantic, it became an instant icon of the warp-speed expansion of my childhood world.
I can still feel the sensory smorgasbord—the airliner smelling of cigarette smoke, its narrow interior muted in the beige glow of incandescent lights, the propellors whirring and whistling like giant box fans.
“Coffee, tea, or a Coke each?” the stewardess asked my sister and me, her syntax foreshadowing further linguistic adventures.
“Are they speaking Dutch?” we wondered on our first day of school, when a gaggle of kids surrounded us, wanting to know everything about us.
Dressed in our school uniforms and beanies we learned how to navigate on green double-decker buses, which were perfectly safe for children to ride alone.
I adored British vehicles of every kind and implored my obliging parents to build my Dinkey Toy collection. Little English cars, vans, and lorries soon joined the bus on my journeys across the living room floor.
The following decade, in college, I spent a year in Jerusalem, where I came to adore the fleet of Leyland Royal Tiger buses of Egged, the Israeli transport cooperative. The drivers would floor them and fling them around at the limits of adhesion; slamming through the gears coaxed a guttural song from the diesels, which was music to my ears. My, those Leylands handled well!
“My BOAC bus is a Royal Tiger!” I realized, when I returned home and examined it in detail. Sixty-five years on, its blue and white livery presents well, and the BOAC decals are largely intact.
Today, traveling is simpler and less exciting than it was back then. But when my wrinkled hands hold my little bus, my seven-year-old eyes reopen, I cherish the gift I was given and contemplate my next adventure.