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no one said it would be easy

managed to let it run backwards into a lake. She is a tough and intrepid Aussie who would be a good addition to the gang. She’d just ridden the freight trains of Canada for 1,100 kms, so clearly her sense of adventure had not lessened in the couple of years since I had seen her.

To get around, Roly bought a 1956 500cc BSA B33 from a Kiwi who was going home. Russell was an interesting, likeable character who had contacts in the motorcycle world and he sourced some cheap tyres for us. I had worked out that we should start off with road tyres and only switch to the chunky Trials Universals when we got to the unsealed roads of South America. Each bike would carry two spare tyres. Probably on some spectrum, Russell could remember all the number plates of every vehicle he'd had. Becoming friends, we shared a lot of tales as motorcyclists do … but he topped everything we could throw in the pot with one from earlier in the year. His daily ride was a snorting Norton Atlas, almost as powerful a bike as existed at the time. He’d had an occasion to park the bike near a biscuit factory and when he returned to the bike he found all the factory girls lined up at the bus stop opposite. As young men do ... he strutted over to his steed, went through the pre-starting rituals, then fired her up with a mighty lunge. A 750cc four-stroke, tuned, twin-cylinder motor truly stirs the soul and Russell could imagine the collective hearts all a-flutter at his masculinity and derring-do. Spotting a gap in the traffic he dropped the clutch to smoke away in great style. The panache that he hoped would impress, was somewhat negated by the act of forgetting to remove the large chain from through his back wheel to the neighbouring lampost. The result was spectacular with all the spokes being torn from the hub and the bike collapsing to the ground in a shower of sparks. He reckoned the guffawing could be heard for miles and his humiliation rendered him speechless and lolly-pink with embarrassment.

I chuckle when recalling our lack of professionalism and the almost third-world conditions that were available to us for our bike preparation. Not always allowed to work inside the flat, and mainly having to work at night it meant adapting to what was available. The London Taxi had a large passenger area interior with two fold-down seats facing the rear where the main full-width bench seat was. Rebuilding Bessie’s engine was done in the back of the taxi, on the street outside No 46 with the inside light on, occasionally augmented by the use of torches. We sat on the fold-down seats with the engine on the sturdy back seat. To our surprise, when