The Mystery Tour

The Mystery Tour

West Cowes, to the Buddle Inn, Niton, Isle Of Wight

1955

I recall an occasion when my Auntie Min and Uncle Don, both of which lived as lodgers at my grandmother’s house in Moorgreen Road, as a special treat taking me on a mystery tour one evening in a charabanc. I remember being very excited as we climbed into this beautiful shining cream and green charabanc and although Auntie Min was sat chain smoking cigarettes beside me I was allowed the window seat after we had all boarded. The charabanc picked us up from opposite The Westwood sports ground in Park Road, in West Cowes but unfortunately not long after we had set off it began to rain, a dark stormy squall blowing across the island from the Solent, I remember being so disappointed.

I was told later by my Auntie Min that by the time we were passing through Newport I had fallen sound asleep I had not even wakened when we had reached our intended destination, our rendezvous with mystery. Evidently this mystery tour was bound for a small village at the southerly tip of the Island called Niton and the warm and welcoming hospitality of the village inn, the famous Buddle Inn.

Although I discovered later, it came as no surprise to me that a convivial evening was being enjoyed by all, all that is except myself and another child, a little girl whose name was Myra. She was not very pretty and had difficulty in speaking coherently due to her suffering the disability of a cleft palette which gave her a massive overbite so much so as she took on a beaver like resemblance. We both sat there together for the next two hours playing I Spy which with Myra’s speech impediment made the long evening all the more surreal to say the least. Occasionally the door at the front of the charabanc would slide open with a bang and a cheery soul beaming from ear to ear would bring us crisps, cheese rolls and bottles of American Creme Soda.

The mystery tour had been organised some time ago by members of the social committee from my uncle’s pub, The Commercial Inn in Cowes High Street, and amazingly the coach driver who was enjoying the evening and imbibing with the rest of the gathering from the charabanc was no less than the Landlord of The Commercial Inn himself.

I have vivid recollections of a very noisy and boisterous return journey to West Cowes and it was still raining heavily, the rain drops running like tears down the patterned glass of the saloon bar in the Commercial Inn where we all had followed each other from the Charabanc back to the pub.

It was much later, well into the early hours of the next morning when they both finally decided to leave. I remember all too well, the sorry sight of my auntie and uncle as they weaved from one side of the pavement to the next as they struggled back from the Commercial Inn, wherein they had been enjoying and celebrating the fruits, of a what they told me, was a ‘Lock In’. The memory of that night will remain in my mind for ever, the comical sight of my auntie and uncle, arms linked as they sang tuneless inane songs at the top of their voices as we were making slow and tedious progress towards Moorgreen Road in the pouring rain.