"I'll miss the fucking horse"

Another short extract from David Storey's A Stinging Delight. This one contains a thumping dangling participle, but the book was published posthumously, so he probably never got to revise it as he would have wished.

I returned to Andrassay's, but soon afterwards I discovered that I could earn more as a bus conductor and applied to the West Riding Bus Company at the Belle Isle depot in Wakefield for their one-day training course. 

Held in a mock-up of a bus interior sets out as rows of chairs in an otherwise cheerless office, I was the only student in a room of men and women that included the driver of a horse-drawn shop, which had plied its trade on the estate throughout my childhood. 

"Times have changed." the ageing driver remarked as I sat beside him. "Though I'll miss the fucking horse."