Magicplum's Blog

The Way To Lemon House

16 May 2010 10 Comments

by magicplum in observation Tags: asking for directions, bystander apathy, confidence, funny, helping strangers, insecurity, lost

On Wednesday evening I stood in a queue for a bus.  It came, big and red.  A tall well-built woman, perhaps about seventy, with a very big blue suitcase on wheels was in the queue before me.  Yet somehow, with the way it goes these days, with everyone pushing and shoving to get on an empty bus with room for all, I somehow ended up about to be pushed on in front of her.  I stepped back to let her on.  She heaved her case up into the bus. 

“Coom-ber-side”  She said to the driver, in an accent I guessed to be Jamaican, but I am not always right about accents.  “I was told to get a 51 bus to Coomberside”. 

The driver shook his head.  “Don’t know it.”   The woman declared “Oh, I’m in trouble, I’m in trouble!”   But she dragged her luggage down the isle anyway and stood in the empty wheelchair and buggy space.  I sat down two seats back from her.  She looked at me and asked “Do you know Coomberside?”. 

I said “No, sorry I’ve not heard of it”.  She shook her head and repeated “I’m in trouble, I’m in trouble”.  She asked the question again, louder, to the rest of the bus, but noone replied.

I thought about the name – ‘Coomberside’ -  which to me sounded like the name of a town - that I hadn’t heard of.  I suspected it might be that she was pronouncing the word in a different way and so I asked her how it was spelt.  She said she didn’t know, but that she had it written in a text message.  She got her phone out and looked at it, trying to find the right text. 

As she looked she told me that she had come down from Newcastle.  A girl in her late teens sat down next to me and I asked her if she’d heard of Coomberside.  She said she hadn’t. 

I had a thought and asked the woman-  “Do you mean ‘Coombside?’  She looked at me hopefully, but I had to explain – I didn’t know where ‘Coombside’ was either – just that I thought that maybe she was pronouncing it differently.

She carried on looking through her phone for this text message that I hoped might make things clearer – with a postcode or a landmark perhaps. 

 ”It’s horrible to be lost in a strange place.”  I said to the girl next to me.  She smiled and nodded. 

Then the lost woman leant over the head of the passenger seated slightly below me and handed me her phone – “There.” she said. 

I read the text.  I’d guessed right, it was ‘Coombside’, a road or a cul-de-sac kind of place name, and the postcode indicated that she was in the right town at least – but that didn’t mean that she was on the right bus!  I told her that it was ‘Coombside’, not ‘Coomberside’ but that I was sorry, I still didn’t know where that was. 

She called out  “Does anyone know where Coombside is?”  Noone replied.  She looked up and exclaimed again “Oh I’m in trouble, I’m in trouble!”

I excused myself to the girl next to me and called to a man adjacent to her, across the isle.  “Excuse me, do you know Coombside?  This lady needs to know how to get there”. 

The man answered - “ah, you need to get off at Glenmore Arms”. 

 The girl beside me called to the woman – “Glenmore Arms, that’s where you should get off, it will say it up there” and with an upward nod she indicated to the destination information display above the wheelchair backrest. 

 But the woman didn’t hear her, she was pulling her case to a seat that had become vacant up ahead of the exit doors.  She sat down and asked the woman next to her, seated by the window - ”Do you know Coombside?”  The window woman shook her head, but she stood up and squeezed past the lost woman and called down the bus, – “Does anyone know where Coombside is?” 

The man with the answer repeated ”Yes, she needs to get off at Glenmore Arms, it’s a pub.” 

The lost woman had stood up also and was leaning towards us to try to hear.  “What?!” 

The girl next to me called out to her ”GLENMORE ARMS!”, and I called it out too.

The woman leant further towards us and ‘repeated’ back to us…  ”Lemon House?”

The girl next to me choked as she spoke, stifling laughter, “no… It’s… Glenmore Arms.”

I had to choke back laughter too.  That the woman had managed to hear ’Lemon House’ out of ’Glenmore Arms’ was funny enough, but to hear someone else trying not to laugh about it was even funnier! 

I turned to this girl next to me… “Aw, Lemon House sounds really nice, I’d like to live there!” I said.  She smiled wide and nodded, “Yeah!”.

After this, the window seat woman went up to the driver and sorted out where the lost woman  needed to get off the bus.

And the next stop was mine so I got off.

As I walked the rest of the way home I thought about it, and wondered why on a crowded bus, most people had ignored her, but I and the NextSeat Girl and the WindowWoman and the AdjacentMan had tried to help… Some people may not have heard her, daydreaming, or with music in their ears, but most people had ignored an elderly woman ‘in trouble’.

I have no answer that everyone will agree with, there are lots of complicated sociological reasons.  After all there are psychologists who research this kind of thing, sometimes calling it ‘Bystander Apathy’ etc.  People on that bus will have had different reasons amongst them for not helping.  But I came up with one possible reason that made sense to myself on that walk home – that helping a stranger is not always easy…

Helping others, can require a certain amount of confidence.  If you have low self-confidence, it can be hard, in a public situation, to stand up and offer assistance to a stranger.  Helping them will draw attention to yourself as well as the person that is needing your help.  If attention to yourself feels uncomfortable, perhaps because you are embarrassed about some aspect of yourself, (your appearance, the way you speak, or some other insecurity) or you think that you may not be of any use, then you might hang back…to try to stay invisible.  Invisible means avoiding attention and any criticism that may come with it. 

I tried to help the woman on the bus on this occasion, but I’m no saint, I know in the past there have been times, when I felt low and down on myself and have hung back too.  It’s kind of an unintended selfishness - because it does mean that you are putting how you appear to others above the needs of someone else - but I don’t think that that makes you an evil person who doesn’t care.  I think lots of people want to help, but maybe are afraid and nervous for similar reasons.  And of course, if the situation were a life or death one, then it’s an altogether different matter, I think most people (hopefully!) would try to help, and how they look and what others might think of them would be the last thing on their minds…

I think that someone trying to help is what counts to a person in need.  Even if you are not able to come up with an answer or solution, that fact that you tried to help will leave that person feeling less alone and that they mattered enough for someone to stop and try.