On the Road Bike Read online

  There was no ceremony, no daubing my forehead with the entrails of a magpie, nor tying me to a stake dressed in a bridal gown, but I felt uncommonly proud of my achievement and, for the first time since our shaky start in the Somerset gloom, ‘one of them’.

  And eventually, it was done. By the time we crossed the line, beaming, covered in crusty layers of perspiration and snot, our party had been whittled back down to just four. Almost nobody was there to watch us, four abreast, nor were any of the casual onlookers even vaguely interested in the immensity of our mission, and the glorious poetry of its execution.

  It is often the way with greatness, that it goes unappreciated in its own backyard.

  I wish I wasn’t a MAMIL. There is almost nothing about the species, seen from the outside and, indeed, observed from the inside, which isn’t at best laughable, and at worst, ghastly. And when compared with the more exotic leisure rider from the Continent, whose numbers feature many more women, considerably more pensioners and a large cohort of terrifyingly able children, the narrow demographics of the British MAMIL are depressingly slight.

  But this is what I am. No use pretending otherwise.

  That evening a clutch of us, including the heroic, battered Joad who’d put his bike in the boot of his Saab, and driven all the way to the finish to be with us, sat in a truly disgusting pub in Torbay and ate the worst fish and chips we have ever been served. Fortunately the beer was just as bad, so at least there were no discrepancies.

  It tasted bloody brilliant.

  The next day, with £24,000 of bikes back on the top of a car worth less than £500, we drove home again. Our dander was up.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE LORDS OF LIFE

  IRRITATINGLY, ON MY way out of an NCP car park in Liverpool, I ripped off my roof rack, bruised my bike and bent all four doors to my car.

  Seen from any one of a dozen CCTV cameras pointed down at my stationary vehicle, the accident must have seemed comically avoidable. There was no clear and present danger; just a Renault Scenic with a man behind the wheel trying to exit an otherwise deserted car park one Friday morning.

  I had wound down the window, pulled the car park ticket from between my teeth, and slotted it into the machine. As the ticket was ingested, and the barrier prepared to rise, a moment of time elapsed that was short enough to have passed by inconsequentially, but long enough, surely, for me to have understood the impossible physics of the manoeuvre I was about to execute.

  It was like this. I had a bike on a roof rack. Ahead of me was an exit barrier with restricted headroom, clearly marked with the words ‘Restricted’ and ‘Headroom’. The barrier went up, I slipped the clutch and drove forward. It was, in short, a bit bloody stupid.

  The sound was visceral. A crack, followed by a boom, which faded into a teeth-clenching ripping, metallic howl as the clips that held the roof rack to the car heaved free of their homes, bending the metal of all four car doors as they did so. A twang.

  Then a tiny slice of silence, as I sat in my car in horror, eyes raised roofwards.

  Next came a comedic clatter, like the cartoon dustbin lid that continues to spin long after the collision. But that wasn’t quite it. The bike falling over was the last noise, slapping sideways onto what remained of the roof rack. This produced a cacophony of clattering spokes and chains and pedals all resonating their own distress like an orchestra (whose members all hate each other) warming up in order to perform a particularly unpleasant contemporary symphony.

  I sat still, my hands on the wheel. I wore Wallace’s grin from The Wrong Trousers, with the ticket held once again between my teeth.

  Then the barrier came down, blocking my exit.

  It was a good job that the man I was about to visit had a refined sense of slapstick.

  Tony Hewson was the winner of the 1955 Tour of Britain, a veteran of the 1959 Tour de France, and the author of two fine books on his experiences. As one of British cycling’s pioneering road racers, he had traversed the Continent in a retired ambulance that doubled up as a makeshift mobile home to three aspiring cyclists. Bits falling off and the regular heart-stopping mechanicals were a fact of life for him and his band of unlikely comrades, They were known as ‘Les Nomades du Vélo Anglais’, which he used as the subtitle for his excellent memoirs In Pursuit of Stardom. Tony’s writing is full of encounters with chaste French ladies in the confined space of the ambulance, bumping heads and tripping over tables. His life on the road was like a monochrome episode of Terry and June, but set in July, and in France. He had a career like a particularly awkward-to-unfold deckchair.

  And yet, when it came to owning up to my moment of mechanical chaos, I still hadn’t quite the courage to admit my folly to him. An hour after the incident, and en route to visit him, I was still adjusting myself mentally to the havoc I had inflicted on my self-esteem and my possessions. I was going to be a bit late, too, which I hated.

  I dialled his number and waited till he picked up his phone. ‘Hi Tony.’

  ‘Is that you, Ned?’

  ‘It is. Listen, Tony, I may be a bit late.’

  I was standing in a windy, drizzle-flecked car park outside Birkenhead, while a man in a Halfords boiler suit wrenched at the mangled remains of a roof rack with a crow bar. He stopped and, dropping the tool down temporarily to his side, actually scratched his head in the way that you might imagine someone acting a perplexed mechanic in a second-rate drama would do.

  ‘I’ve had a problem with my car. They’re just having a quick look at it.’

  I did not dare confess that the damage I had done had started with a serious injury to a bicycle. I had learned after a few years of exposure to cyclists, that harming bikes, as well as neglecting them by failing to clean them and allowing them to rust, was sacrilegious. The bike, in whatever form, was an object of reverence. Like the idol of any cult, the bicycle inspires great passions, peculiar sensibilities and blind devotion. Turning up to an appointment with an ex-pro sporting a mangled racer I’d casually driven into a height restrictor would be like attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with a can of Diamond White.

  Tony, now seventy-nine years old, once told me about a dream he’d had. In fact, it had become a recurring dream, and was starting to cause him some distress.

  ‘This is the nightmare.’ He looked intently at me. ‘I lose my bike. Right?’ There was a pause while he let this horrifying notion sink in. ‘I lose my bike’ he repeated, with added gravitas.

  The dream over recent years had taken various forms and guises, but recently had settled down to this scenario. It takes place on a hill on the outskirts of what he calls a ‘large town’. I imagine it to be Sheffield, his birthplace.

  ‘I am standing outside what I think is a fish and chip shop, but it turns out to be a sort of refuge for the homeless. Outside, there’s a little congregation of young lads. I’ve got my bike with me. It’s my latest bike, my Trek. It’s leaning against me. I haven’t got my hand on it. I’m looking in this shop because I want to buy some fish and chips or something. And when I look back, the bike’s gone. It’s disappeared.’

  In his dream panic sets in. He turns to the boys hanging around, and asks them where it is. They look blankly at him. ‘Did you even have a bike?’ they ask.

  ‘Then I look up this long hill, and there’s a guy running away as fast as he can. But he hasn’t got a bike with him. That’s the illogic of it.

  ‘Standing at the side of me is a policeman on a motorbike. So I appeal to him. “Look, I’ve lost my bike. I think that guy might have it, running up the road.” The copper’s got no time for me. He says, “What are you doing riding a bike at your age?”

  ‘When I wake up in the morning after this dream, with the sunlight streaming in through the windows, sometimes I have to stop, and I have to think, “I’m here. I’m not there.” And the bike is in the garage. I know it’s safe.

  ‘The bike, of course is a symbol. It’s a symbol for loss of youth and vigour and all the crap that c
omes with old age. It’s loss, basically.’

  That was what bikes meant to Tony Hewson.

  Pressing the phone to my ear in that desolate Halfords car park, I did not want my host to think that I had so casually mangled his youth and vigour. Lee from Halfords had disposed of the wrecked roof rack by now. And I had taken off the bike’s wheels and squeezed it into the boot. No one could see it. It would be my guilty secret.

  ‘I’ll be with you at lunchtime, I hope.’

  Tony didn’t seem too put out that I would be late.

  I drove the rest of journey with my mind elsewhere, still slightly buzzing from the morning’s absurd messiness. I stopped to refuel near Chester and spent an extraordinary amount of time in a terrifyingly neglected toilet, scrubbing my hands like an oily, male, Lady Macbeth.

  But as Cheshire yielded to Shropshire, and I turned to head along the A49 towards the Welsh Marches, a calmness took hold of me again. It’s an unreal landscape, long plains and valleys populated by hills that can only be described as hillocky, perfectly naked and green, as if drawn by primary school children. As I passed the little town of Church Stretton, I glanced to my right. A road led up the side of the hill, straight up its flank, making no allowance for the crazy gradient. Again, a child’s drawing, almost dream-like in its simplicity of purpose.

  ‘Up!’ It said.

  And just past Craven Arms, which is a town not a pub, my traumatised car came to rest outside the lovely secluded house of one of British cycling’s great thinkers. I rang Tony Hewson’s front door bell, with one more downwards glance at my fingernails, checking them for oil.

  ‘Do you think this table is solid?’

  I glance the length of the pleasant wooden dining table in the Hewsons’ airy, modern extension. Everything about it looks solid. In fact everything about the room, and their house, the Golden Placket, looks solid. Kate and Tony Hewson have retired to a patch of English soil so perfect, with its terraced garden and sweeping views to the west across acres of Shropshire farmland, that it fills the soul with just that: solidity.

  It’s not only metaphysical. The food is solid, too. Kate has made lunch. Or rather, Kate has ‘put on a spread’. Home-made bread, English cheeses, a light salad, and thick slices of salty, succulent ham. It is all just exactly right to perk up this miserable October Friday, already prematurely darkening. The man to my side (Kate has left the house, leaving us alone) hasn’t stopped talking, energetically, amusingly, fluently, while I haven’t stopped eating, also fluently. He claims he can’t do both at the same time. ‘I’m a bit like that famous American president who couldn’t walk and chew gum. I know that if I start eating, I can’t talk and eat.’

  And now we are talking about particle physics.

  ‘Do you think it’s solid?’ He wraps his knuckles on the wood, and looks playfully at me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, knowing that the correct answer is clearly no but not wishing to spike his big revelation. ‘Yes, it must be solid.’

  ‘No. No.’ He’s thrilled I’ve got it wrong. ‘It’s full of empty space. In fact you could roll up all the solid matter in the whole of the human race into one little ball.’ He cups his hand, and we both stare at seven billion bodies, scrunched up and sitting in the slightly tremulous hand of the winner of the 1955 Tour of Britain.

  ‘There’s great mystery. The universe; it’s spellbinding.’

  Tony Hewson looks at me from his seat at the table a couple of feet away. He is slim, upright, with a full head of white hair, parted to the side as it was in those black-and-white photos of his racing days. His eyes search you out. He looks directly at you, and he talks as he thinks: in the moment.

  Although I have heard these arguments about the nature of matter rehearsed over dinner tables many times before, I find myself listening to Tony Hewson’s retelling of them as if I were listening for the very first time. He has that effect. When he stopped racing, he became a teacher. He must have been a very good one.

  The first time I ever saw him was at that gala dinner in 2010, to celebrate fifty years of British cycling, the one where it all began. After the food had come and gone, whisked onto plates and then whisked away, we were all left with coffee and a small foil-wrapped chocolate leaning against the hot cups and gently melting onto the saucer. It was time for the speeches.

  The evening’s proceedings had been hosted by a Sky News presenter, who I understood was heavily into cycling, having discovered it, like so many of us, fairly recently. Dermot Murnaghan made his way to the lectern at the high altar on the far side of the hall from where I was sitting. The lights dimmed in the auditorium, and a hush descended. Murnaghan introduced the event as if he were coming back from a break and rounding up the news headlines. He was slick, imperiously slick. Before long, he was inviting selected guests to stand up at their seats in the hall. Tony Hewson was the first man to be called upon.

  A spotlight swooped onto him. A microphone appeared. Seated behind him, but directly in line with the beam of the spotlight, I could make out his form only in silhouette: white hair against the darkness of the hall. He started to speak.

  In measured Yorkshire tones, he started to tell the hall about the 1959 Tour de France, which he had ridden as an independent (a kind of semi-professional) in an ‘International Team’ alongside three other Brits: Jock Andrews, Vic Sutton and the great Brian Robinson. His words were crafted to reflect their age, his wit was sharp, his pride never too far from the surface, with a humility that ran deeper still. All these gifts were rolled together as he recounted the horrors and the honour of being in a race against the greats of the day: Anquetil and Gaul, Robic and Bobet. That hall in Manchester fell quiet. He had turned it black and white, in an instant, with his words.

  But, the spell, once cast, was easily broken.

  Five minutes into his account of the race, it became apparent that Tony Hewson had gone off message. He had clearly not been briefed as to what it was the organisers required. Indeed, he had been hideously misinformed. Worried-looking officials, conscious of the ten other guests still expected to talk and of the fifty names still to be inducted into the Hall of Fame before the evening was out, appeared at his side, pointedly looking at their watches.

  Murnaghan was fidgeting. They were all looking for a way to silence the talker.

  But Tony sailed happily on. His eyes on the notes, and occasionally looking up towards the blinding light shining down on him, he would have been quite unaware that they were preparing to drop the guillotine.

  ‘And so we came to Stage Four, two hundred and thirty kilometres from Roubaix to Rouen . . .’

  ‘Tony! Hello? Tony!’ Murnaghan virtually shouted at him from the lectern.

  Tony stopped, and looked up, surprised at the interruption.

  ‘Are you going to tell us about every stage of the 1959 Tour, Tony?’

  Caught in the glare, he looked around the hall, as if taking it in for the first time. His audience, most of whom now avoided his gaze, started suddenly to unwrap their miniature chocolates or to fiddle with their cufflinks. And without another word, mid-sentence, mid-story, mid-Tour, he sat down.

  There was a ripple of sympathetic applause. Murnaghan moved on.

  ‘I suppose this book you are writing is called The Great Eccentrics of British Cycling.’

  Back in the Golden Placket, Tony has rumbled me, it seems.

  ‘No. Not at all.’ The fact that my editor and I were still fighting over differing titles for the book was no longer in the back of my mind. ‘But maybe, something a bit like that.’ And, briefly, I wondered if I shouldn’t suggest exactly that as a book title.

  To my profound surprise, Tony Hewson picks up a copy of my previous book. The bookmark suggests it’s half-read.

  ‘I always get a bit embarrassed when real riders read that book,’ I tell him, truthfully. It wasn’t intended for them, but for those on the outside.

  He starts to quote some of my writing back at me, which is hugely discomforting,
and although it is very well intentioned and he is being very flattering, I find myself eager to move the discussion on. I ask him if he remembers that evening in Manchester and his speech being cut short.

  ‘It was an ambush!’ Tony is fond of military phraseology. ‘I started getting all this barracking from Dermot Murnaghan. He doesn’t really know anything about cycling, I don’t think. And I was thinking “I’ve got to finish the story.”’

  That, I tell him, is exactly why I am now sitting at his table, listening to him, and all the while stuffing his excellent ham into my mouth. It’s time for him to finish it.

  Tony Hewson is passionate about the story, not just his but the national story of cycling in Britain, and its associated backwardness. He has a Continental spirit, and wistfully imagines an alternative life spent in France, rather than ‘at the coal face’ of a Kent Comprehensive, where he taught English for twenty-five years after retiring from racing. He’s a self-confessed Francophile, and his attention has always drifted over the choppy waters of the English Channel.

  For him, a moment of great significance in the early, backwards, evolution of the sport in this country occurred on 21 July 1894, when a rider called F.T. Bidlake, in the company of two other cyclists, overtook a horse and carriage while nearing the finish line of a handicap race. The horse reared and the three cyclists fell. Though no one was injured, the lady in the carriage complained to the police. The issue gathered traction nationally, and within three years the National Cyclists’ Union (a forerunner of British Cycling) had voluntarily banned racing on the road.

  That was the moment that British cycling, forced underground, embraced the time-trial culture that still, to this day, defines it. It was to be a path of separate development, involving semi-clandestine, early-morning starts on half-deserted roads, or else hammering in isolation up and down dual carriageways, the only roads wide enough peaceably to accommodate both car and bike. The Testers (as time triallists are sometimes known) held sway, unopposed, for the next half-century.