Читать книгу Every Split Second Counts - My Life with Fast Carts, Fast Women and F1 Superstars - Martin Hines - Страница 9

It’s hard to believe your life is going to be ordinary when your birth is greeted by local church bells ringing for all they are worth. Of course, there are people who will tell you that the clamour outside the window of the maternity ward in Hampstead at precisely noon on 22 April 1946 was to mark the start of the annual fair, and that those bells had pealed like that on Easter Monday since the nineteenth century. But I prefer to believe they were a signal, telling me I was especially welcome into this world.

That was certainly the way my dad, Mark William Hines, once of Ipswich but by then a successful entrepreneur in Finchley, made me feel. And my mother, Maudie Lavinia Hines, saw me as a very special gift. She loved children and always said she wanted five or six, but she suffered several miscarriages and one son was stillborn, so I turned out to be her only child and was spoiled rotten by a very special mum.

They took me home to our large Victorian house at 26 Church Crescent, Finchley, where the council had moved them when their place in Long Lane was bombed during the war. By the time I was born, Dad had managed to raise a mortgage and bought the place for £2,250. Mum’s parents, Alfred and Maude Cushing, lived on the second floor and we also shared the house with a series of dogs. I’ve always been a dog lover, which may explain why I’ve known a few of the two-legged variety over the years.

The house was just a few hundred yards from Dad’s bike business and, as I grew up, the double-fronted shop next to a chemist’s became one of the centres of my universe. Dad started the firm shortly after World War Two. He’d made a few bob when he came out of the army by buying vegetables and selling them from a big carrier on the front of his bike. Rationing was still in force and, as a sideline, he would also collect people’s ration books and then go to the local grocer or butcher and negotiate a deal that meant everyone had their ration and he received a bit extra to sell on the side.

His best friend was Wally Green. They became mates in the army, where their sparky spirits often got them into and out of a variety of scrapes. At one stage, they were separated from their unit in a battle but managed to find their way back to their base, by now wearing bits and pieces of borrowed uniform. Parts of it had been cadged from officers, so the pair of them managed to pass themselves off in the officers’ mess until someone realised their accents weren’t quite pukka and had them slung out. Dad eventually left the army as a sergeant major first class, despite facing a court martial for pushing a local off a bridge in India after the guy had spat at the troops marching by. Dad was acquitted.

Dad and Uncle Wally – it was normal in those days for kids to call their parents’ friends Uncle or Aunt, even if they weren’t related – quickly built up the bike business and Hines & Green became renowned among serious riders as a place where the owners knew their stuff. The 1950s was the golden era of cycling. Only the wealthy could afford a car, so bikes were the most popular transport for ordinary people, and Dad and Wally sold a lot of standard machines such as Raleigh and Sunbeam. But their passion was for producing specialist models, crafted from lightweight materials, for racers. They were precision bikes, customised to the rider’s personal taste and specification. Dad and Wally were very good at what they did and also produced frames for leading manufacturers such as Kitchener and Claud Butler.

I started to hang round the shop from a very early age. It was a treasure trove, packed with bikes, saddles, wheels and parts, every surface covered in chains, handlebars, puncture repair kits and all sorts of odd bits of strangely shaped metal that made sense only to someone who knew bikes. There was a workshop out the back where Dad would sit and ‘true up’ wheels that had been buckled during a race, while downstairs in the large basement Wally and Harold ‘Pete’ Peters would build chassis and make repairs. Our bikes were much sought-after and a Hines frame was the first by a British manufacturer to finish in the top three of the Tour de France. Among our customers were ‘the forces’ sweetheart’ Vera Lynn, a massive singing star at the end of the war, and King Hussein of Jordan, who would turn up in his limo and send his chauffeur downstairs with a mauve velvet cushion on which sat the part he wanted replacing.

My first school was St Mary’s in Finchley, halfway between home and the shop. My grandfather had been the school caretaker for thirty-five years, so we knew most of the teachers and they treated me well despite the fact I was a bit mischievous and used to chase the girls even in those days. School was OK but it quickly became obvious I was never going to be an academic, and, however hard the teachers tried, most of what they taught me went in one ear and out the other. I never seemed able to concentrate and most lessons had me staring out of the window, wishing I was at the shop. The only subjects I enjoyed were art and, especially, maths – I could work things out in my head more quickly than the other kids, a talent that has stood me in good stead in many negotiations since. Throughout my school career, maths teachers loved me while most of the others were glad to see the back of me.

As soon as the bell rang for the end of the day I would usually make for the shop. I’d pack the odd parcel and try to look useful, but mainly I just enjoyed the chance to chat to Dad and watch him work. I got to know him very well and we started to form a bond that lasted until he died. It was never the most tranquil of relationships. We often fell out and had titanic rows and I knew at those times Dad would contradict whatever I said and, of course, I’d argue black was white if it suited me. But our bust-ups never lasted long and we always knew that beneath it all we loved each other. I have a similar volatile relationship with my son Luke. I hate it when we fight and I sometimes wonder if Dad is somewhere watching us and laughing because Luke is putting me through the same frustrations I inflicted on him.

Dad was the man I admired above all others. He was only about 5 foot 7 inches tall but he was a big man in every other way and strikingly good-looking, something he has clearly passed on to his son. OK, so some people might argue with that but no one can doubt the massive influence he had on me.

He taught me almost everything I know and made me the man I am today. He was strong-willed – after years of smoking eighty to a hundred cigarettes a day, he just stopped at the age of sixty-four and never lit up again. He was smart and inventive, always looking for new angles, new ways to stay ahead of the competition, and later he encouraged me to do the same.

And he was honest. He ran his businesses as a sole trader rather than a limited company because he didn’t think it right that when things became tough you could bale out and let others take the losses, then set up again under another name. He told me, ‘Your debts are your debts and you pay them. I stand by my business and I make sure I have the money to pay my bills.’ I’ve always been a sole trader, too.

Dad made a good living from the shop but we were by no means wealthy; yet, when the time came that I needed to go to a private school, he somehow found the cash. It came about when I found that being good at maths wasn’t enough to get me through the eleven-plus exam for the grammar school. Instead, I ended up at Alder School, a secondary modern in Finchley, and started to hang out with the wrong set. The whole area was full of gangs and I tacked myself on to one of them. I’d been at the school only about nine months when kids from a rival gang attacked me and split my head open with a steel ruler. I was lucky: three months before another boy had been stabbed and died from his wounds.

A split head was quite enough for Mum and Dad. They took me away from Alders and paid for me to go to Clark’s College in Ballards Lane, Finchley. But money can’t buy you love, and it can’t buy you a love of books. I was already behind the other kids, so they put me in a class a year younger than I was. Some would have seen that as humiliating, but not me. It was brilliant. It meant I was bigger than the rest of my group and, together with John Golding, another lad who was older than the others, I found I could wield power.

John and I worked our way through school, always the biggest in the class and always able to get menial jobs such as homework and lines done for us. The only person who got the better of us was a rather attractive French teacher who caught us writing notes about what we would like to do to her. In a novel, of course, she would have been the flattered older woman who introduced us to the delights of sex. But this is non-fiction – and she put us in detention.

All in all, school took up valuable time I would rather have spent on other things, such as my pigeons or going speedway racing. I haven’t a clue where my interest in pigeons came from, but, around the age of nine or ten, I suddenly decided there was nothing I would rather do than race pigeons. I persuaded my friend Geoff Barker to give me a hand building a small loft in the bottom left-hand corner of our garden.

Geoff and I were good mates and got up to all the normal things that small boys do, such as scrumping apples and hiding in the bushes on the golf course and nicking the balls ready to sell them back to the club shop. But this was a much grander project. Before long our pigeon loft stretched right across the bottom of the garden and was filled with birds. There was a corner of Petticoat Lane set aside for pets and we used to go up on a Sunday morning, using our ‘expertise’ to pick out what we thought looked like the quickest birds in the group. We didn’t realise they had probably been rounded up from Trafalgar Square the day before and were as likely to end a race on top of Nelson’s Column as back in my loft.

Even at that age I liked to win, and I gradually built up a reasonably competitive group of birds. I joined a local club and bought all the equipment you needed to clock the birds in at the end of races. I can still remember the thrill of taking the baskets to the station to send the pigeons on their way, then sitting impatiently with Geoff, scouring the skies for the first dot that signalled a bird returning from up North or across in France. But it wasn’t all fun. Geoff read in a magazine that we had to check regularly for canker because if one bird went down it could spread throughout the loft. The article had some vivid pictures of what the symptoms looked like and, sure enough, after a few weeks I realised that one of my best birds had been struck down.

‘You know you have to wring its neck, don’t you?’ Geoff said.

I was horrified. I mumbled, ‘I’ve never done anything like that. I don’t know if I can.’

‘You have to or all of them will die.’

I knew he was right. I grabbed the sick bird with one hand, put my other on its neck, looked away, swallowed, squeezed its body and twisted and pulled on its neck as hard as I could. The pigeon’s head came off in my hand. I felt sick but at least it wasn’t going to spread canker in the loft.

Just as I can’t recall how my interest in pigeon racing started, I can’t remember when it came to an end or what happened to the loft and the birds. It’s a puzzle, because you can’t just open the door and let them fly away – they would just come back again! Possibly I passed them on to Geoff, because about a year ago out of the blue I received an email from him with an attachment containing an article from a pigeon-racing magazine. He’s still picking up prizes for his birds and, asked in the article how he’d started, Geoff replied, ‘I got into it through a school friend, Martin Hines. I went on to become a fireman and still race pigeons; he went into motorsport and became a millionaire.’ Well, he was right about the motorsport.

My love of speedway is easier to explain. It was a family thing. Wally was a top rider for West Ham and England and runner-up in the 1950 World Championships. All the Hines family were fans. Of course, Dad couldn’t be content with just watching: he had to be down in the pits helping Wally with his bikes, and he even began to sell some mopeds and motorbikes from the shop. Eventually he started to organise events for the ACU, motorcycle racing’s governing body in the UK, and at one stage ran the High Beech track near Loughton, Essex, where speedway started in this country back in 1928. My memories tend to be of watching races with Mum, then going down to the pits with Dad and Wally.

Speedway is a fantastic family sport, as important to petrolheads as football is to deadheads. The setup is much the same, with clubs around the country competing against each other. Back then, the obligatory kit for followers of sport wasn’t overpriced replica shirts but a home-knitted scarf, a bobble hat and a wooden rattle to cheer your team on. I’ve still got mine at home.

As a kid I loved everything about speedway: the great atmosphere under the floodlights that seemed to shut the rest of the world out in the darkness beyond, the courage of the riders, the thrill of the races and the shower of cinders that sandblasted you if you stood too close to a bend. Above all I was hooked on the night air laced with the unforgettable smell of burning Castrol R in those old Jap engines. As far as I’m concerned, you can keep snorting cocaine, just give me that distinctive Castrol R scent and I’m high. If Chanel could find a way of bottling that perfume, women would find it much easier to keep their men at home.

The highlight of the speedway year was always the world championships at Wembley, where the crowd’s singing of ‘We’ll Meet Again’ – as traditional as ‘Abide with Me’ at the FA Cup final – always made me tingle with anticipation. But that was nothing to the feeling I had when my first sporting hero, Jack Young, took me round the track on his bike.

Jack was an Australian superstar who came to this country in 1949 and, having won all six races in his first meeting, stayed on for ten years. In 1951 he became the first rider from a Second Division British club to win the World Championship and then became the first rider to retain the title. It was traditional for the World Champion to do a lap of honour before racing started the following year, and you can imagine the feelings of a seven-year-old when Jack lifted me up on to the kidney tank and took me round in the dazzling glare of the spotlight. I can remember looking out into the semi-darkness and glimpsing the crowd as they stood and applauded. It blew me away and I guess I’ve loved being the centre of attention every since.