On the Road Bike Page 22

  ‘The UK became a refuge. I discovered that there was so much right that was going on over here, compared to what was going on over there.’

  Perhaps, I suggest, at the core of what was right, was the abiding amateur heart of the British scene?

  ‘That’s what we mustn’t lose as we become these corporate sportsmen. As we become mega-money-orientated and success driven, we might forget about the purity of it all.’

  And then, in a sentence, it sounds like he hits a nail right on the head.

  ‘We shouldn’t lie to ourselves about where we’ve come from and what we’re going to become.’

  Is he talking about himself? Or is he bemoaning the inevitability of change? On reflection, I am no longer sure which nail it is that he has just hit.

  The football match is coming to an end, and soon I will be nursing a frozen child back to warmth in the car. But before I hang up, we have a brief chat about his book cover. I tell him how, when out riding with Gary Kemp, I met the excellent Nadav Kander, who it transpires is godfather to David’s baby Archie. He tells me how much his wife Nicole thinks that Kander’s photo perfectly captures him.

  I opt not to tell him what I really think.

  ‘He came back. That’s the only way I can describe it. He came back. My David came back.’

  David Millar’s mum and I are heading towards what she describes as being a ‘deep and meaningful’. She and her son often stay up until deep into the night, talking stuff through.

  ‘Geography is nothing. Places are not your home. People are your home.’

  That’s true, I agree. But, I put to her, there is still a value in the shared identity, which spreads beyond the intimate confines of the nearest and dearest, the identity that is defined by a sense of place.

  Actually, where cycling is concerned, it is defined, literally, by geography; by A roads and hill climbs and lanes and dual carriageways, by westerlies and sunshine and showers.

  ‘Yes,’ she agrees. ‘There’s always a significant lay-by somewhere, where people will congregate.’

  What, we both wonder, will become of those homely cycling clubs in the Great Leap Forward?

  Seen through the refracted experience of the Millar family, what appeared, twenty years ago, to be impenetrable, arcane and musty, suddenly seems gloriously soulful.

  Avril Millar, being exceptionally good with words, expresses it very neatly.

  ‘I think there was a time when we were truly blessed. There is something really wonderful about that. People would do it come hail, rain or shine, for no glory and no prizes, because they absolutely loved it. The sheer, visceral joy. What I think I saw, and I hope it still exists, is a complete love in the turning of your feet. In the pedals. On your bike. On Sunday. On a club run.’ She pauses, and resettles her glasses on her nose.

  ‘I don’t think that’s gone.’

  She points at the three bikes that clutter up her hallway. After years of resistance to cycling, she too has found her will broken. She has started to ride.

  ‘I would love to turn up one Tuesday night, at Longwick, with David, and do the ten mile time trial. That’s on my tick list of things I have to do before I die. I will do the “Longwick Ten”. With David.’

  That would close a chapter.

  CHAPTER 14

  BECKETT OF THE BEC

  I HAVE NEVER been a member of a club, unless you count the Young Ornithologists, briefly, in 1979. They gave me a badge and a copy of the Observer Book of Birds, but there was no annual dinner, and no transparent, democratic process for electing the club secretary.

  More recently, I was made honorary president of a Putney-based cycling club. Flattered, I have since proceeded to attend not a single one of their society functions, for which I am honestly sorry. It’s just that I am not well suited to this world in which the bottom bracket is king: the cycling club.

  You might have seen members of Britain’s many strangely named cycling clubs (often known as ‘wheelers’) riding on the roads, in pairs, their kits matching like the neatly pressed clothing of identical twin children dressed by the same proud mother. Or perhaps you’ll swerve out into the middle of the road to avoid wiping out a cluster of them, stretched out along the gutter of some unprepossessing hill on a Sunday morning, their differing ages and physiques as quaintly dysmorphic as their Lycra is joyously absurd. Huffing and puffing into the winter air. How do you get drawn into their fold? And is it a happy world, once you’re there?

  ‘I’m in David Millar’s VCRC club. Do you know about that?’ Gary Kemp had asked me, lowering his voice to a whisper that I could barely make out over the howling and grind of coffee machines. ‘It’s slightly Masonic.’ I nodded conspiratorially.

  The VCRC. What could that possibly stand for? As soon as I’d got home from meeting Kemp, I had googled it.

  The Internet contained a disappointing lack of information. In fact, all it presented me with was a list of organisations to which David Millar, for all his breadth of reading, surely had no affiliation.

  The Vasculitis Clinical Research Consortium. The Virtual Catalogue of Roman Coins. Or the Vietnamese Christian Resource Centre. I guessed it was none of them. Then I stumbled across the merest trace of it.

  Someone had posted on their personal blog, an account of spotting David Millar riding in Richmond park one day. They had noticed that his jersey bore the name Velo Club Rocacorba. What could that mean? they wondered.

  Now we were getting somewhere. The initials matched. The location fitted, Rocacorba being a few miles outside Girona in northern Spain, where David Millar and Nicole now live. And a strange twitter ID then confirmed that I had tracked them down. The profile @velorocacorba followed five people, had tweeted three times and was followed in turn by absolutely no one. The profile read: ‘Velo Club Rocacorba. President – David Millar.’ I clicked on ‘Follow’ and got the message ‘Pending’. It seemed I had to be approved first.

  I even emailed him about it. ‘David. What is the VCRC?’ No reply.

  How fitting that David Millar should somehow be involved in a mysterious, elite-sounding institution that counted Gary Kemp among its number, and left no trace of its existence in the outside world.

  After all, membership of a club with bizarre rules and hidden rituals has always been a part of his life. He’s a British cyclist.

  It surprised me not one bit to learn that we had another mutual connection. Cycling’s small world seemed to shrink further with each acquaintance I made. So there was nothing unusual in the fact that the last time I saw David Millar was not in Paris or Biarritz, but Croydon.

  You see, we had both been invited to lunch by the same man, Garry Beckett.

  The Bec Cycling Club (originally from Tooting Bec) is one of many dozens like it up and down the country. Garry Beckett (the ‘Bec’ at the beginning of his name is merely a happy coincidence, like Arsène at Arsenal) is some sort of ill-defined honorary figurehead, or, as he himself sees it, the club drunkard. The Bec was established in the 1920s to ‘increase sociability among cyclists’. Garry Beckett is still working hard at that bit.

  This was not the first time I had been invited to the Bec Cycling Club’s annual lunch. On my first visit in 2010, I was even the guest of honour. It took place in the top room of a mock-Tudor pub called Le Chateau. It was the afternoon that I had first been introduced to Maurice Burton. Germain, his son, had collected the key prize of the day, the youngest-ever winner of the ‘Bec Hill Climb’. There were many prizes; a trestle table, covered in a tablecloth, groaned with silverware waiting to be handed out.

  Few of the guests, apart from Garry, had a clue who I was, which meant my hilarious anecdotes about life on the Tour de France fell rather flat. But to my relief and surprise, it didn’t matter much, because almost everyone in the room was so plastered they barely knew who they were themselves.

  Sitting cheerfully around four or five round tables, the thirty or so guests, with associated toddlers charging about the room, tucked into a h
eart-warming Sunday lunch, that was loosely modelled on school dinners. It was served from under domed stainless steel lids. After the lager, which we had guzzled on arrival, came the white wine, and after the white, the red. Then the ‘cross toasting’ began.

  Garry kicked it off. He banged the handle of his knife loudly on the table. Then he stood up.

  ‘I would like to take wine with anyone who has not finished taking wine.’ At which point, anyone who wanted to carry on drinking had to stand up, and drink. The penalty for a dishonest reply was, I guess, drinking.

  Thump thump! Another gentleman stood up.

  ‘I would like to take wine with the ladies of the Bec and their guests.’ The three or four ladies, including Kath, who I had dragged along, had to stand. They took wine, except for Kath, who doesn’t drink. Sheepishly, she just sipped an apple juice. I pretended I didn’t know her.

  ‘I would like to take wine with anyone who hasn’t yet stood up to take wine, or indeed anyone who has been asked to stand up and take wine.’ We all stood up and took wine.

  ‘I would like to take wine . . .’

  Thump . . .

  ‘. . . take wine . . .’

  Etc . . .

  Weeks later, when I had found my way back from Croydon, and located my phone and wallet, I rang up Garry. Those fleeting, snapshot memories (all that survived the declaration of chemical war I had pronounced on my synapses) of the Bec and its membership had fired my interest. If anyone could claim to incarnate the unpretentious soul of the typical British cycling club, then it was probably the Toastmaster General Garry Beckett.

  When he’s not the life and soul of the Bec, Garry Beckett is a soigneur (or ‘swanny’, as he insists) for Team Garmin, with a special attachment to David Millar. A swanny’s duties are manifold, covering everything from massage to message running. In the early season, Garry will spend whole days on a motorbike, with Millar riding on his back wheel, trundling up and down the hills around Girona. That makes him, in other words, right on the inside, where he has been for most of his life.

  Every summer I see Garry on the Tour de France, driving a minibus full of wide-eyed, big-mouthed corporate VIPs. This, seemingly, is another one of the occasional responsibilities of the twenty-first-century swanny. I struggle to think of a man less suited to the job of indulging the precious whims of a bunch of middle-management types from Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  But here he was, one day in 2012, in the searing heat of Luchon, culturally as far away from South London as it is possible to travel and yet still be in the neighbouring country. The elegant spa town in the Pyrenees was putting on a show. The bars and restaurants of the Allée d’Etigny were coining in the money from Europe’s itinerant cycling flock.

  I was just on my way back from unloading a disproportionate amount of euros at a town-centre mini-branch of Casino Supermarché, stocking up on appalling snacks for the long transfer that awaited us at the end of the day, when the voice of Beckett called my name.

  ‘Wotcha, Ned.’

  Dressed from head to toe in Garmin’s largely black uniform, he was gloomily traipsing back to the restaurant where he’d taken a group of American VIPs for lunch. One of them had left their iPhone, or wallet, or wife, there.

  His language, when describing this particular individual and their general carelessness, was choice. Choice, of course, is the wrong word to use here. It was filthy.

  In 1956, a year before Garry Beckett came cussing and kicking into the world, an institution known as the ‘Bec Hill Climb’ was born.

  Every year since then, when the leaves start to fall, you may witness a peculiar pilgrimage to a junction just off the B2024, some way below Croydon on the map. Riders and spectators too, of all ages and builds, on tandems, on mountain bikes and often simply in cars, head south from London into the North Downs to celebrate a festival of unutterable pain under some cheerful bunting strung between trees, where kindly volunteers sell milky tea in Styrofoam cups for 50p.

  On 14 October 2012, I paid the race a visit.

  That Sunday was blessed with perfect autumnal weather, the sort of bright, breezy day that you see featured in heart-warming adverts for soup or double glazing. The kind of weather for children in scarves and primary-coloured wellington boots, scuffing their happy way through mountainous piles of crisp dry leaves. It looked picture-perfect, but it was keeping its horrors hidden. The Bec Hill Climb had towered over my diary for many weeks, growing taller, darker and more imposing with each passing day, until, like a dentist appointment, I could no longer escape it, and stood gazing up at its terrifying edifice. The day had dawned.

  I had been severally warned that what I was about to undertake was the most nauseating thing you could do in cycling. But I had not taken these warnings seriously and, as a result, I was on my way to take part in, to race no less, a hill climb.

  There is an amusing Wikipedia entry relating to hill climbs, which has clearly been written by an American cyclist, as it refers to events in San Francisco and Hawaii. But it is also quick to reference the thriving British scene, which is pre-eminent:

  In Great Britain there is an end of season tradition of cycling clubs promoting hill climb time trials in October, for small cash prizes. The hills tend to be relatively short, usually taking between three and five minutes to complete, and the races attract many spectators, including locals not otherwise interested in cycling, who come to watch the pain in the faces of the competitors.

  It was, you will understand, the final sentence that caught my eye. Wanting, though simultaneously fearing, to know more, I picked up a copy of Cycling Weekly. There was a preview of the race.

  ‘The atmosphere is always superb. The final metres will be lined three deep with screaming supporters driving you to the finish, just at the moment that your legs are pleading for mercy. You’ll be doing well not to topple over, let alone race.’

  Had I chosen the correct option when answering, ‘OK, then’ to Garry Beckett’s harmless sounding question? He’d simply asked me if I fancied riding ‘the Bec’.

  But Garry, whose race it is, just happens to be the kind of guy you end up saying ‘Yes’ to. Even when all of you means to say ‘No.’

  I first met Garry at the Tour Series evening bike races. He used to hang around the pit lanes; a lugubrious presence, tall, and long-striding, he was attached to various teams, helping out. He’d drive cars, change wheels, fill bottles, shout encouragement. And swear. Garry loves to swear, investing his F-words with a fullness and a texture that make them rich and admirable.

  Publically, he describes himself as a ‘big-nosed, baggy-eyed cycling nut’.

  Privately, he describes himself as a ‘big-nosed, baggy-eyed, bald geezer who likes a drink’.

  I have also heard him described as London cycling royalty, spoken of in terms of awe, but also with genuine affection and occasional wild amusement. He is a warm-hearted and foul-mouthed chap, who I am now lucky enough to count as a friend.

  I am not the only one. He has many friends.

  Bradley Wiggins and he, for example, go back years. They first met when Garry was a constant presence at the Herne Hill Velodrome, and Wiggins, pre-sideburns and celebrity, was ‘just’ a prodigiously talented teenager from Kilburn. Garry has a collection of photographs of him and a young Bradley Wiggins that publishers will have been scrapping over as 2012 produced a sudden welter of Wiggomania-related literature, all needing to fill their colour plates.

  They maintained their close relationship as Garry went on to work as a swanny in the GB Cycling set up. And when Wiggins signed his big money contract with Sky, he took Garry out for a posh dinner and offered him a job. So for a while in 2010 he was Bradley Wiggins’s personal batman.

  For various reasons that appointment didn’t last a huge amount of time. But Garry’s never really stuck at anything for terribly long, except for the Bec Hill Climb.

  For all the time he spends on the road, swearing at foreigners (and as I write this he is currently boarding
a flight to Japan, swearing at someone), he is never happier than when he comes home.

  One day I pinned him down, in between international race obligations with Team Garmin, and we arranged to meet up in town.

  London Bridge, the scruffy old station, cheek by jowl with the absurdly refined Borough Market, had been the spot where we’d agreed to meet. Garry was coming up from his South London suburb, and I, too, from mine. Our two railway lines would converge there, and so it seemed convenient.

  Wafts of fragrance hung in the air of the newly gentrified quarter. Flavours competed for attention. Chorizo buns were being prepared right in front of me, the sausages griddled to perfection, and slapped in a sourdough bap with a fistful of rocket and a drizzle of lemon juice and olive oil. Beyond that stall, and into the sizzling heart of the market, I made out cheese stands, charcuteries, game butchers, fishmongers, bakers, wine merchants, and, yes, greengrocers. Crawling all over this foodies’ carcass were the middle-classes, picking at their endives, sniffing at quiches, pinching a nectarine. Journalists from the nearby Financial Times, barristers from the inner-London courts, bankers from over the river. Tourists, clutching damp maps, gazing on in delighted mystification at this cacophonous arrangement, mentally converting from pounds to dollars, pounds to yen, pounds to euros. Three euros for a cucumber! Borough Market, a point of reference for London’s health or wealth. A barometer for its aspirations. Where, if you please, was the recession?

  I stood in line for my chorizo bap, fingering my £4.95 in my left hand. Unwittingly, I touched the peak of my bright pink Plowman Craven cycling cap. It was in homage to a now defunct and largely unsuccessful domestic cycling team. They’d given it to me as a present and promptly gone bust. I’d hoped the two events weren’t linked. Subliminally drawn towards it, I had chosen its neon pink shape to place on my head as I left the house.

  ‘I know that fucking hat.’ Garry, also smitten by the smell of frying chorizo and the obvious lure of the sponsor’s day-glo colours, had ended up in the same queue, and was right behind me. His gruff South London voice, at least two octaves lower than is audible to most humans, was unmistakable.