Nastiness on the bus

On my way home by bus this evening, a young mother with a babe in a buggy got on the bus after I'd taken a seat next to the area used for passengers with wheels, so I got up and moved to allow her to sit opposite her child. Then a couple with two small children plus pushchair got on the bus. Dad had the babe in one arm and the toddler attached to the other. He made his way to the seats at the back of the bus, leaving Mum with empty push chair. As it was much larger than the buggy, she decided to fold it and put it in the small luggage bay, having declined non-verbally the other mother's invitation to share the space where her buggy and baby were parked. With a little effort, the unwieldy pushchair was parked and she joined her husband and children at the back of the bus.

Then a woman behind me started off in a loud voice attempting to raise debate with fellow passengers on why the second mother had not been able to park her pushchair in the assigned area - despite the fact that the space available wasn't big enough for both to any common sense observer. It soon became clear that the woman was making an effort to draw attention to the younger mother. Did I mention the fact that she was wearing a hijab? What then started was a diatribe against 'all these people coming over here and taking over everything that's ours', just loud enough for it to be audible to the mother who was subject of conversation, and others in surrounding seats.

It was an ill-judged interference in a normal interaction between two mothers with children, apparently satisfied with the compromise they'd made and uncomplaining about the journey they were taking. Rather than endure the journey saying nothing, I felt the need to say something, as the woman behind kept repeating herself more audibly, as if she was making the most of the chance she'd seized to humiliate someone different from herself. So, I took a deep breath, turned and addressed her in a voice loud enough to carry up the bus.

"Would you please keep your voice down and your thoughts to yourself", I said. She protested she had a right to say what she liked. "Your opinions aren't mine." I said. "I regard them as inflammatory and offensive. You do not speak for everybody." She told me to shut up, and so did the man sitting next to her, who had been her closest audience. After some mutterings, both lapsed into silence. The young mother in a hijab got off the bus at the next stop. 

I watched her walk straight from the bus to the door of 9 Cathedral Road, the home of BAWSO a support organisation for ethnic minority women. I hope she was going there because it was her destination, and not to take refuge from being persecuted on a bus by a woman in my age bracket, a woman who should have known better - we the baby-boomers, raised in the shadow of the Jewish holocaust. 

This incident has haunted me ever since. I intervened because silence would imply approval for harrassing someone on the grounds of race and culture. But did I have to be so middle class intellectual in the words I used? A cosmopolitan Cardiffian would have said something like: "Look luv, cut out this racist twaddle will you? We're all mixed race and religion round here. Live and let live I say." 

I'm better after the event than in the moment - the habit of many years as a (hopefully) eirenic clergyman, has left me handicapped when it's a matter of coming to the point, telling it how it is, calling a racist a racist.