The Bus Nightmare

This is a recurring nightmare that haunted me when I was a small child living in post war Liverpool.

Times were pretty grim, home was just two rooms of a shared two bedroom terrace in darkest Homer Street. My family consisted of my mom and infant brother (my dad had run off after some serious fisticuffs with mom).

Both mom and me shared the same dark bedroom, my brother slept in a small cot which sat in a damp corner.

I was regularly beaten as a child and grew up believing that that was normal. As a result I was terrified of mom, who I saw as a moody and threatening figure.

The nightmare began shortly after dad had vanished, I remember to this day him turning to mom and saying he was going for a walk.

Some walk!

The nightmare consisted of me running frantically down the middle of a road, being pursued by a huge green bus. No matter how hard I tried to run the bus always seemed closer. At last I could run no more and turning to face my pursuer, I saw to my horror that the radiator under the bonnet had been replaced by my moms face screaming at me.

It went on every night for months and left me shaking and terrified. I'm sorry to say that even now as I approach my sixty third birthday, I still find mom a horrendously frightening thing and still have that image of the bus etched on my subconscious.