So they’re going to move the bus station and concrete over yet more of my childhood.
The Weighbridge! What a name to conjure with. The after school destination of our teenage years, where high heels and make-up were de rigeur, and where skirts were surreptitiously hoisted up to reveal the delicious combination of tan-coloured tights and knee-length white socks.
The Weighbridge was where we learned how to flirt, where we took “hilarious” pictures in the passport photo machine, where we set off tremulously for our first driving lessons to the din of cheers and whistles from our mates, and where we made a cup of tea last the length of a game of Bridge in the Terminus Café.
It was the beginning and end of our weekend forays to the beach, it was where we decided which party we were going to head for on a Saturday night, and it was where the older boys would stand on the bottom step to ask for a “half to Gorey please”.
I started catching the school bus to the Weighbridge when I was about fourteen, not because I needed to catch a bus home, but because it was where you had to go to meet up with the gang. I actually had to walk back almost as far as school once I’d been at the Weighbridge for half an hour, as I had dance classes most nights at David Place. But I couldn’t miss out on the bus trip ritual.
We’d swap our regulation school shoes for the chunky platform ones we’d brought with us from home – heels as high as our mothers would allow. We’d take our hair out of the sensible ponytails we had to wear at school. And then we’d try to coat our eyelids with bright turquoise eye shadow and electric blue mascara – which, I notice, made a brief return to the fashion pages last year.
We’d be dabbing at our eyes on a moving bus, and as we weren’t yet experts at decorating even a stationary target, this wasn’t easy. So we’d arrive, taller, and sporting Midwich Cuckoo eyes, confident that this would attract the boys of our dreams.
What we did attract was inter-school rivalry, and once, an invitation to a pre-arranged fight at Snow Hill. We – secretly terrified at the idea – of course said “alright” with an air of bravado we didn’t feel.
We spent two days wondering what on earth we would do on the day, quizzing the boys about fighting techniques (as if they knew) and hoping someone would put a stop to it. We breathed a communal sigh of relief when we heard on the grapevine that the head teacher at the other school had learned about the plans and had banned all her pupils from the Weighbridge for a week.
We were especially relieved, as we’d heard rumours of bottles and chains, and we didn’t even know what you could do with chains.If it was raining after school we’d all troop into the Terminus cafe. The manager, Simon, knew us and would sigh dejectedly as we all ordered “one cup of tea please”, knowing we’d make the most of our investment.
After an hour of chatting, completing the Sun crossword in competition with each other and playing Bridge (without the difficult bidding bit at the beginning) Simon would kick us out. He was good-natured about it, but insistent. He had his profit margins to consider, after all.
If there were no parties to go to on a Saturday night, if we’d been to the Cellar youth club the night before and there was nothing on at the cinema to tempt us, we’d often just get onto a bus for the evening.
We’d take a cassette player, some beers and maybe some snacks, and sit there listening to David Bowie while chewing the cud and wisecracking our way through the evening.
The Weighbridge was a rite of passage. Some cultures pierce the lips of adolescent youths, others send them out into the wilderness to hunt with bows and arrows. In St Helier it was the survival of the fittest at the Weighbridge.
You didn’t have to walk over hot coals, but sometimes it felt like you had. And it’s hard to accept that such a significant site may be getting a Mafia-style concrete overcoat.
It was where I first crashed my car, while driving past on the lookout for my recently ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend. I looked for too long, my eyes blinded by tears, and drove straight into the railings outside the then British Airways office. It was my mother who paid for those solid, ugly, grey railings that are still there now.
My car was OK though, a very solid and ancient Wolseley 1500 Mum had picked up for £50.
When I went to the parish hall to be interviewed by the centenier about the accident, I explained that I’d been crying as I’d just seen my ex with a new girl. He was very sympathetic, and told me to go out for a drink next time.
Presumably he wasn’t suggesting I should drive home afterwards.
And it was at the Weighbridge that I got onto a bus one day and found, scrawled on the back of one of the seats “Cathy Keir is a slag”. It was a shock, but an odd experience. I was far too young to justify such an insult but I was strangely pleased. It was as if I’d been elected part of street culture – such as it was.St Helier was hardly in the same league as the mean streets of A Clockwork Orange.
I notice that many of Jersey’s buses now say they’re heading for the “bus station” rather than the “Weighbridge”. This may be a small change, but it erodes another of the little things that makes Jersey different. Every town has a bus station, but only Jersey has its bus station at the Weighbridge.
It may confuse the holidaymakers, but hey, when I think back to the grockel pits we used to dig on the beach, surely a little eccentric labelling on the front of buses is a minor detail?
Jersey ex-pats like me are always moaning about how the place has changed, and I’m sure it annoys the people who still live there and want to enjoy the progress that happens everywhere else.
Why shouldn’t Jersey have a decent leisure pool and a modern bus station? I have no quibbles with the pool (except its exorbitant prices) and a bus station is generally best kept out of sight.
But why must the powers that be continue to make concrete the number one priority?
My grandmother would have said they must have shares in Ronez.
Now Jersey residents are being invited to have their say on what the Weighbridge area should look like in future. Should it be given up to hotel bedrooms and balconies, available only to visitors with a wad of cash to spare? Or should it become a public space without the buses?
My vote is for a public space with a few pieces of sculpture to commemorate the generations of Jersey youth taking their first tentative steps into adulthood…. perhaps featuring a half bottle of vodka discarded in one corner and a pile of vomit in another.
And there has to be a memorial to Simon of the Terminus Café, who dreamed up ever more ingenious ways to get us out of his establishment. I suggest a plinth (in granite of course) engraved with the words – “one cup of tea = 10 minutes”.Jersey’s future teenagers will doubtless form an unhealthy attachment to wherever the new bus station is. Perhaps, in their dotage, they’ll reminisce about “The Abbatoir”, inspiring confusion among eavesdroppers from “the other side”.
Or maybe the new bus station will be given a more feel-good, visitor-friendly moniker, like “The Waterfront”. This would at least allow future generations of yoof to feel an affinity with the first Wild One of them all.
But if the States really are going to tarmac over such an essential seat of learning, obliterating the island’s top training centre in the University of Life, then surely the Weighbridge is the only fitting site for the proposed University of Jersey – or at least for that part of the campus which prepares students for the world beyond formal education.
This article appeared in Jersey Now magazine in 2004
