I have an unused ticket for the bus to Winnipeg. I don’t expect that it’s still valid. When I look through my box of St John’s stuff and see it I always smile – not because it makes me think of Sundays in Winnipeg, but because it reminds of the wonderful Mrs Cox, from whom I received that particular ticket and every other ticket, both bus and plane, that I used in my four years at the school.

We got into Selkirk from the school to catch the bus using Will’s Taxi. The school had a credit system arranged with Will’s, which (quite wisely) kept cash out of the equation. You would share a cab with a bunch of other guys and payment would be made using a “taxi slip” which listed the names of the passengers and was authorised by Mrs Cox or the Duty Master of the day. The fare would be divvied up and your parents would be charged as part of their fees bill.

You used Will’s to get to the bus on Sunday’s but, in addition, if you weren’t a serious medical emergency, it was Will’s taxi that took you to the doctor or hospital. In second year I was cutting gut out of an old snowshoe and the knife I was using – one of those cheap sheath knives with the red wooden handle – slipped, and the point ended up stuck in my forearm, luckily missing anything vital but deep enough (I can still see the scar today) that it was thought it might need a stitch or two. So, I was popped into a cab and sent off to Accident and Emergency. I didn’t get stitches but did get a tetanus shot (and the accident happened in the duty period after dinner so I missed quite a bit of study, which was cool). I cut myself a few years ago, went to my local A&E, and did get a couple of stitches. I asked if I needed a tetanus shot (I remembered that every few years you used to get booster shots and I haven’t had one of those for 20 years) and the doctor said, these days, you’d only be given a tetanus shot if you stuck a pitchfork covered with horse manure through your foot. Yuck, which has suddenly brought back a memory of someone sitting in the school infirmary who had stepped on a nail that had gone right through his foot. His boot and sock had just been eased off, the dark venous blood was welling out of his instep and Mrs Wiens was working to staunch the flow enough to stabilise it to get him to hospital. I didn’t stay around to watch. I’m sure with something that serious he would have been driven to hospital in a school vehicle. I remember hospital trips were also important supply lines in the first seven weeks of the year when we were restricted to school property. If someone cut themselves and was diagnosed as needing stitches but still walking wounded, word spread pretty fast and the patient, sitting in the front foyer of the Stone Building waiting for Will’s to show up, would find himself the recipient of cash and orders for various articles of contraband.

A Yellow Pages internet search suggests that Will’s is still operating today, but its office is on Eveline Street about half a mile from where it used to be – on Main Street, a bit north of the Selkirk Bus Depot. (The alternative to using Will’s was to walk from the school to town – I did this once (and only once because I was bitten by a dog from one of the farms that lined the road) – or to hitchhike. I remember hitchhiking back to the school with a couple of classmates, one of whom was Brian Koster. We’d started walking with our thumbs out and had made it somewhere past the silica plant when a guy stopped and offered us a ride. It was only when we were accelerating away that some of us noticed he had an open beer on the seat held between his thighs. We were starting to go pretty fast heading down that long curve on Breezy Point Road between the airport and the school, when the guy took a drink out of the bottle, finished it, chucked it out the window, reached under his seat to get another and started to open it. This sequence of actions required him to let go of the steering wheel a couple of times, particularly when he was opening the new bottle. Fortunately, Brian, who was sitting in the front seat beside him, had cat-like reactions, grabbed the wheel, and kept us on the road. When we screeched to a halt on the road outside the school, we all jumped out as fast as we could. I closed the door too quickly and slammed the end of my left thumb in it. Through the resulting explosion of pain, I realised that the driver was starting to pull away and was taking me with him. I managed to jerk the handle and extricate myself after we had gone a couple of yards. My thumb and nail were bruised black and blue. It took months for the nail to grow back. So, a cautionary tale of the dangers of hitchhiking, and, in this case, probably not the kind of danger your mother was thinking about when she warned you not to do it).

The Selkirk Bus Depot was a small room with a couple of chairs and a pay phone. It may have been a hotbed of activity on weekdays but there was seldom anyone in it on Sundays. Indeed, it is still a small room with a couple of chairs and a pay phone. It hasn’t changed. You can see it on Google Earth’s Street View at the intersection of Main and Dufferin in Selkirk – in fact, you can see the bus parked beside it. If you’re really keen, you can visit their website and see a picture of the friendly staff.

http://www.beaverbus.com/winnipeg-selkirk-service/

This was 1968, I think, it could have been 1969. We were coming back to the school from St Johns Cathedral church after Sunday service in the old yellow bus. Father Sargent was driving. He always had problems shifting gears in that old bus. We were about halfway between Winnipeg and Selkirk when he couldn’t get it into the next gear. He just kept trying to push it in, to much associated grinding. Finally, he pushed to hard, there was a huge “clunk,” and the bus coasted to a stop on the shoulder, the transmission completely shot. We all had to wait while the school was contacted and the small fleet of other vehicles (the VW bus and panel truck, etc) picked us all up. I think that’s the only time I ever heard Father Sargent use “questionable” language