On the Road Bike Read online

  ‘Remember the “Good Friday”, Ned? Not last year’s, but the one before that?’ This was the sort of casual testing gambit that would often be sprinkled into conversation with cycling folk, a group to which I scarcely belonged, but with whom I had more and more occasion to deal.

  ‘Sure.’ (Bluff.)

  ‘Well, who won the scratch race?’

  ‘The scratch race?’ (Playing for time.)

  ‘Yes. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Oh, I know who you mean . . . Damn! What was his name?’ (Playing for time and a bluff all in one.)

  Enough of the deceit!

  It was time for me to find out why it was that so many of the paths I’d followed in the lives of riders and fans of all generations seemed to meet and cross at Herne Hill. I would go and pay my respects at the oval-shaped tarmac cradle of Bradley Wiggins’s career, and the bluff would no longer be so naked. I would fill in the bald spot on my map of the known cycling world.

  As it happened, the Good Friday meeting was just around the corner. This, I had learned, was the very centrepiece of London’s track calendar.

  I had nothing else in the diary. I checked the weather forecast, not without trepidation. It seemed to suggest heavy downpours, a howling wind and occasional glimpses of watery spring sunshine: 12 degrees, but feeling like five. My resolve took an immediate knock. Perhaps, I plotted, if I exploited the almost certain reluctance of my nine-year-old daughter, I could use that as my excuse to stay at home instead.

  I looked at her over the Cheerios one morning. ‘Fancy going to the Good Friday meeting? You don’t have to.’ I added the last corrective rather over-hastily.

  ‘Is that like the Olympics?’ she crunched.

  ‘A bit like that. But not much like that. Although there will be chips.’ Why was I suddenly trying to sell it to her? ‘It’s a bike race,’ I told her, more realistically. ‘Well, in fact it’s lots of bike races.’

  ‘Cool.’ She loaded up another spoon.

  ‘It might rain. Heavily.’

  ‘I hope Liquigas are there.’ Crunch. She had a curious passion for the Italian superteam, mostly comprised of more-or-less reformed dopers. I hadn’t the heart to tell her that the two-time winner of the Giro D’Italia Ivan Basso probably wouldn’t be too sure what to do with the £50 Homebase voucher on offer for the runners-up of the Madison.

  So, when the day of the races dawned, we set off. We rode there, through more and more salubrious parts of London until we dropped down into Dulwich village itself, manicured and affluent and a long way removed from Lewisham, which we had left behind us. As we freewheeled downhill, coasting past the unfathomably expensive organic babywear shops and cutesy bakeries, I felt suddenly unsure that I had taken us in the right direction. We stopped so that I could consult the map on my phone. It seemed scarcely conceivable that there could be a bike track tucked away anywhere near here, still less an Olympic venue.

  But, turning onto Burbage Road (average property price £852,977), we stumbled across just that. Herne Hill Velodrome, as good as invisible to the passing motorist and set back from the road by some hundred yards, accessible only via a pot-holed track, is a patch of pure history, modestly disguised as nowhere very notable.

  We chained up our bikes, paid a few quid at the gate and walked in.

  It was a wide, shallow track, recently, and expensively refurbished in smooth dark tarmac. It was nothing like the tight, gleaming, polished bowl of the wooden bankings in Manchester or Stratford. It was low and menacing. Around three sides there were mature trees, swaying a little at the top. Behind that, some of London’s most exclusive houses ignored the bicycle shenanigans just over their garden walls, and turned their brick backs to the scene. On the home straight, ugly, plastic-seated, temporary stands occluded the real gem: Herne Hill’s old wrought-iron-and-wood grandstand, built with civic pride in 1891, boarded up and made unsafe at the hands of corporate neglect in the late twentieth century, a no-man’s-land of listed decay. But there it was, the link to the past: cycling’s Lords.

  A tannoy was announcing the upcoming race, with a nasal amplification more commonly reserved for platform announcers in Ealing comedies. Someone was selling cup cakes and slices of fruit loaf from a trestle table. The programme sellers were fumbling clumsy fingers in their pockets to change down fivers. Along the railings stood a healthy smattering of a few hundred folk, huddling chins in scarves, nudging one another, and casting worried glances skywards. Riders came and went from parked cars to the interior of the track, carrying bikes, and walking pigeon-toed on cleats. A judge in a blazer climbed a ladder, and with a sharp ‘crack’ from the starting pistol, the next race got underway to a polite ripple of applause. We went off in search of chips.

  I watched the day through my daughter’s eyes, deeply glad that I had her with me. She took in the sprints, loving the dead arc, the still moment of the cat and mouse chase when the riders dare not show their hand. She went saucer-eyed at the sight of a Devil race in full cry, she thrilled to the stink and noise of the Dernies, with their fat old men turning pedals in slow motion as their antique-looking motorbikes farted around the track. She passed chips unsighted from hand to mouth, her gaze fixed on the action.

  Two hours in, but only halfway through the proceedings, I asked her if we should go home. She looked at me as if I were simple. ‘It’s not the end. The scratch race is the end.’

  She threw a chip in her mouth.

  We stayed another two hours, then rode home, secretly pretending we were in a scratch race. I let her win. I’m good like that.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE SIX-DAY EVENTIST

  HE’S BEEN STANDING by the barriers for hours, along with his wife, Mia. Both of them are exhausted since their Paris hotel caught fire the previous night, and they had to evacuate. But despite the lack of sleep, the excitement of the day has carried them through. Maurice Burton is straining to catch sight of the newly crowned champion walking up the Champs-Elysées, and waving to the crowds. He would dearly love to make eye contact, a nod of recognition, anything. That’s the reason they’ve come to Paris, after all.

  Mia stands at his side, her iPad poised. She is ready to film the moment.

  But Bradley Wiggins, walking slowly back up the finishing straight, having just won the Tour de France, doesn’t appear to notice him. The cobbles are washed over with sound, and besides, on either side of the road, thousands of faces are turned towards him. The fact is that Maurice is just one of many.

  So he just walks by. I glance at Maurice to see if he’s feeling hurt. I can’t tell, really. But then I’ve never really been able to figure out what Maurice is thinking.

  Maurice Burton’s bike shop, De Ver Cycles, is on an unlovely main road in South London. As his business has started to thrive, so too has his brick-and-mortar empire. The canary yellow and black signage now straddles two properties, and the interior layout of the shop boasts three separate showrooms. One is for everyday bikes. One is for road bikes and another displays accessories and clothing. Behind that, there are workshops, two offices and a large space in which bikes get unpacked and stowed. But that’s only the visible part.

  One day, Maurice takes a set of keys and he walks me still further into the remoter reaches of his territory, through storeroom after storeroom, each one crammed to the rafters with all manner of bikes and bike parts. Back and back we go, opening doors, switching on lights, scrambling over boxes, through room after room. I lose any sense of the architectural integrity of the place as we turn through unlikely angles and move further and further back from the street. It’s like potholing, without the safety measures. Eventually, we reach a backyard of sorts, piled high with old wheels, the odd frame and assorted bits. It’s fair to say that he has a lot of space at his disposal, and perhaps not a great deal of control over its use.

  We stand there briefly surveying the chaos and speculating about how it could best be put to use. Maurice has been considering setting up a custom frame-builder’s
workshop. I look around the place imagining it. There was a time when a variety of independent frame-makers used to populate British cities. Up until a few years ago there was one very close to my house. Whitcomb Cycles of Deptford used to build beautiful handmade cycles, finished off in purple and silver and chrome. I often used to gaze through the window, but seldom got up the courage to walk in. And when I did, they tended to look at me like I’d just walked dog shit into their premises. They must have smelt my difference, instantly sized up my lack of belonging, my ignorance of their ancient artisan code.

  Anyway, they sold up, eventually, and disappeared. It seemed a bit perverse of Maurice to want to buck the trend towards mass-produced, imported bikes, a sentimental, rather than a commercial enterprise.

  Instead, in this ramshackle hinterland, I am seeing a café. I imagine tables, TV screens, the cough and gurgle of a coffee machine, and South London’s cycling community chatting away amiably. Instantly I have a plan in place. Book readings, film showings, social evenings.

  ‘A bit like the Rapha Club.’ I make reference to a very smart, very minimalist cycling café just off Brewer Street in Soho. Maurice frowns. ‘But a down-to-earth, South London version, Mo,’ I suggest, trying to make it sound more appropriate to the surroundings.

  He doesn’t look too impressed. And instantly I wish I’d kept my thoughts to myself.

  ‘I don’t know if that’s me.’ He thinks for a moment. ‘That’s not really me, Ned.’

  He turns the key, which closes the automatic door to the yard. My guided tour has come to a close, and we are turning to head back to the shop. It occurs to me that Maurice thinks of himself as an outsider. I later find out that the same thought, I am relieved to hear, has often occurred to Maurice too.

  ‘No, I don’t fit in any mould. I don’t want to fit in any mould really.’

  We’re sitting down with two cups of tea between us now. They are perched on the only free surfaces on Maurice’s otherwise overflowing desk. Invoices, orders, brochures, magazines: all the flotsam of office life. Maurice peers at me with his head bent to one side, and a half-smile. ‘But then, I don’t think you quite fit in, do you, Ned?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know about that,’ I mutter, thinking guiltily about my suggestion about the Rapha Club, my über-middle-class upbringing and my university education, in fact, the whole of my utterly conforming life.

  ‘Well, in certain ways, Ned, I don’t think you do. Sorry if I have to tell you that, mate.’ Maurice Burton looks at me and chuckles. I have no idea what he means. But, coming from him, I take it as a huge compliment.

  ‘Anyway, what do you want to talk about today?’

  ‘You, Maurice.’

  My café idea never gets mentioned again.

  One day in the middle of the 1960s, young Maurice Burton spotted something in a front garden in Catford that caught his eye. It was a touring bike. He stopped on the street and looked more closely at it. He could see that the forks were a bit bent, but otherwise it looked in good enough nick. He walked up to the front door and knocked on it.

  The lady who opened the door to Maurice explained that it had been in an accident, and that they were waiting for insurance money to get it fixed. He listened attentively to every word.

  But then, as he walked away, he already knew he had made a defining choice.

  ‘My dad wouldn’t let me have a bike. He was a bit anxious, and didn’t want his son squashed by a lorry. He couldn’t see the point of me riding a bike. That’s for kids, he’d say. He wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer.’

  His father Rennal had come to London, via the USA, from Jamaica in 1948. Once here, he’d found employment as a tailor’s presser, working for big fashion houses such as Jean Muir. By the 1980s he was preparing the clothes for Margaret Thatcher and Princess Diana to wear.

  It was at work that Rennal met his future wife, Grace Spires. She was a seamstress. Maurice’s parents were serious-minded craftspeople who had no desire to see their children take a backwards step in life. And bicycles were backwards.

  They had scant tolerance of, and little understanding of, Maurice’s growing passion. He did own a bike but it was a bit of a joke. It was the same crappy old thing he used for a paper round, and it was always landing him in trouble. Often face first.

  ‘“Look at that boy. Look how he mash himself up again. Look at him!” That’s what Dad would say.’ Maurice, impersonating his dad, breaks into a treacly Jamaican patois, at odds with his soft South London cockney.

  Not that he took any notice of his father’s warnings. He spent whole days rattling around London’s much quieter streets, enjoying the adventure, relishing his speed, getting to know his strength.

  But, it was true: he needed a decent set of wheels. So, standing outside that Catford front garden, young Mo knew already what he was going to do. There was no chance his parents would get him a nice bike like that, and there was no chance that he would ever be able to afford one either.

  ‘I kind of felt that I needed that bike, so I sort of, kind of . . . half-inched it.’ He figured that since it was insured, it would be a victimless crime.

  It was, in fact, a trademark Burton scam. Ten years later, when he was living and riding professionally in Belgium, he used to cross back and forth on the ferry, changing his registration plates to Belgian numbers on the way home to London, and vice versa on the way back to Belgium. He figured that with foreign plates he was virtually immune from prosecution for traffic offences.

  Until one day when he thought he was being watched. ‘I’d unscrewed one, but there was someone walking around the deck, and I hadn’t changed the other one yet.’ He drove off the boat with one British and one Belgian plate. It was another victimless crime.

  But, back in Catford, back in 1966, all that mattered was that he had his bike. He was up and riding.

  ‘I never got off the bike the whole day. Nobody could beat me. They couldn’t come close to me.’ It changed everything. ‘Me and my cousin Dexter, who lived in North London, used to meet on Blackfriars Bridge and just go off riding for the day. Chessington Zoo. Kew Gardens. We never went to the [country] lanes that much cos we never knew what to do, or where to go.’

  But the world of professional racing, the possibility that you could make a career out of messing around on a bike, remained hidden and alien, as it did to almost the entirety of the British population.

  One Saturday afternoon, as always, World of Sport was on the TV.

  ‘I remember watching the 1969 Tour de France. Ten minutes, they used to show on there. I told me dad, “I want to be like him. That man there.”’ He was talking about Eddy Merckx.

  ‘And Dad said, “You have to eat steak every day if you want to do that.” I told Mum that I wanted steak every day after that.’

  It was the following year that his school organised a trip to the Herne Hill Velodrome. He sat in the old wrought-iron stand and listened to a man called Bill Dodds tell him and his classmates from the Roger Manwood secondary school, ‘From here, you can go to the Olympics.’

  He gazed down from the wooden seats and looked at the wide, shallow track, the trees behind the back straight catching in the wind. He accepted the challenge.

  He would go on to win many races at Herne Hill. And then he would win even more elsewhere. But the Olympics? That bit never happened. Something much more interesting awaited Maurice Burton.

  ‘You’ve heard of Major Taylor?’

  I nod. Maurice looks knowingly at me, a look that signifies something.

  Although the name Major Taylor means something to me, I cannot say I could tell you with any certainty who he was or what it was he did. But thankfully Maurice takes my nod at face value. Talking to Mo often feels to me like a test of my inadequate grasp of cycling history. I have to judge when to feign familiarity and when to own up to ignorance. Too much of either, I reckon, will make him suspicious.

  But I’m grateful to Maurice Burton for pointing me in the direction of ‘The Wo
rcester Whirlwind’. Some time later, I get hold of a biography of Major Taylor and start to read. His story, I discover, bounces around between the boundaries of the credible. The more I read, the more I am astonished that his name doesn’t sit alongside the most celebrated in the history of sport. The perfection of Taylor’s narrative arc almost makes me doubt its veracity. Is he a fable?

  As the nineteenth century drew to a close, there was no bigger sport in the USA than cycling. Even small cycle meetings would regularly be attended by 20,000 or 30,000 spectators. And Marshall ‘Major’ Taylor was the undisputed star of the scene.

  Taylor broke multiple world records, in 1898 holding seven simultaneously. He dominated the track cycling scene in the USA and travelled widely in his latter years. His appearances in Australia, New Zealand and continental Europe, most particularly in the velodromes of France, attracted huge publicity and he commanded proportionate fees. There is documented evidence that his earnings totalled $35,000 per annum. And in 1904 that was a great deal of money.

  Two things marked him out as extraordinary: he was brilliant, and he was black.

  His entire career, and what remained of his post-racing life (he died, prosaically bankrupt and living in a YMCA during the Great Depression, having lost his fortune in unwise business ventures), were played out against a backdrop of what he called ‘that dreadful monster prejudice’. Repeatedly he found that access to races and to the institutions around the sport, from colleges to clubs, was blocked to non-whites. But worse was to come on and off the track.

  As the Worcester journalist Albert B. Southwick documents: ‘They would crowd him off the track, hem him in “pockets”, rough him up off the field, curse and threaten him. There is no telling how often he heard the “N” word, and other vicious epithets. After one close race (in Boston, no less!) a burly cyclist got him in a choke hold that made him black out before the police dragged the assailant off. In Atlanta, where he had planned to race, he was warned to get out of town in forty-eight hours or else.’