I went to primary school by bus between 1975 and 1982. It was provided by a local independent operator, Pynes, the firm later being taken over by Wrays who continued to operate the service from c1980. It was a private bus for us schoolkids. The firms also provided vehicles for our school trips, and I have a photo of me alighting from one of these - a couple of friends managed to narrow it down to one of around 3 Bedford vehicles. At some point I intend to obtain a Pynes fleetlist from that era via the PSV Circle library.
There were a couple of 'oddities' in the fleet. One was a rather short (smaller than I remember it!) Bedford VAL with a sliding door, EWT739C, which I used to refer, quite logically, as 'the slide door'. There's a pic of it at
https://thetransportlibrary.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=119562 dated 1967, it was quite a stalwart as it remained with the company until around 1978. The other one I remember, which I can only recall appearing on our school run once (and it was on the return home after school), was a front door Lodekka, which had come from Bristol. Pynes replaced the green on its NBC colour scheme with purple, retaining the white stripe.
At one point, the school bus was nearly always late in the morning, so it was re-routed. In typical 'crank' style (even though I was only 10/11), on the last day of it taking the old route, I went to the first pick-up to travel it in full.
We had a few regular drivers. One of them was Pat, who would do slalom for us on the long straight road down to school.
Not sure that would be acceptable nowadays (not sure it was then either!). Happy days.
I now live a 5 minute walk from what was the Pynes depot, and it is now a brewery. I called in a few weeks back and came home with a case of beer!