Читать книгу One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers - Tim Hilton - Страница 16

The first British cyclist to ride the Tour de France was Charlie Holland, a hero from Birmingham. A member of the Midland C & AC, he spent most of his life as a newsagent but had a short professional career before the war. In 1937 (the year Roger Lapébie won) he survived the Tour until its eleventh stage. He could have gone further, but was eliminated as a result of one of Henri Desgrange’s most absurd regulations. The father of the Tour had decreed that riders could not carry more than two spare tubulars. Holland suffered from punctures during the stage between Perpignan and Luchon, so was ruined.

It had been a brave contribution to the Tour. Charlie Holland had never even seen a bigger mountain than Snaefell on the Isle of Man, so the Galibier – the fearsome, snow-capped col that rises above Briançon, the highest town in Europe – was a challenge beyond his experience or imagination. That year the riders had to struggle through thick mud from melted Alpine snow. On his dogged way to the summit of the Galibier Charlie passed Maurice Archambaud, sobbing by the wayside, unable to continue. And Archambaud was a champion, the holder (like Desgrange before him) of the hour record sur piste, an experienced man of the Tour who was willed on by thousands of French fans. Holland had no one at all to support him. As far as the bosses of British cycling were concerned, he might have been riding on the moon.

Charlie Holland’s pioneering ride in 1937 was a high point in British cycling. High, and also remote. Eighteen years would pass before, in 1955, there was again a British presence in the Tour de France. To this day (2003) only fifty-one British cyclists have ridden the Tour and only twenty-one of them have completed the race. This is a modest number. But let us be grateful to the BLRC. If it were not for the League there would have been even fewer British riders on the continent. All of the earlier British riders in the Tour were brought up in the BLRC. Tom Simpson – the dead king of British cycling – was an utterly characteristic Leaguer whose early career was formed by BLRC attitudes.

Why have there not been more British cyclists in the Tour de France? Dozens of our boys had legs for the job. Alas, they were not encouraged by our official bodies. The professional class was weak and big cycle companies like Hercules and Raleigh retreated from sponsorship. We were all absorbed in the domestic sport of time dialling. And always in the background was the innate pastoralism of our cycling culture. This attachment to rural rambles and the gentle pleasures of the countryside is most obviously seen, I think, in cycling poetry.

The Britons who raced on the continent are a different breed from those who wrote poetry after riding their bikes in the English countryside, but there is some common ground. The racing men and the poets understand each other, for they come from the same background in British cycling club life.

Poetry!? By racing cyclists!? Yes, though mainly by recreational cyclists. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, have become poets with no other reason for writing poetry, or writing at all, than their devotion to the bicycle. On my shelves is a collection of their verses. It is a small anthology in proportion to the huge total number of cycling poems written since the 1890s. The tradition continues and flourishes, not quite in secret but in privacy, for the poems are published in club magazines and nowhere else.

The themes of cycling poetry are quietly stated and the verse is not obscure. Cycling poets write in conventional ways. They describe the weather and the alternation of the seasons, matters that everyone can understand. Time dialling is a common subject. Our poets are also inclined to discuss age and death, for the further ends of life are a cycling preoccupation. Yet they don’t treat death as a drama. Oddly enough, I have never come across a poem about the death of Tom Simpson. Perhaps they don’t get published. I wouldn’t be surprised if Simpson poems exist or once existed. They would be sealed in a feeding bottle and then buried under the stones at the horrible monument on Mont Ventoux. People take anything to this shrine.

Passionate love poetry is rare. Cyclists do of course write about attractive women. The most favoured women are barmaids. Next most popular are the owners of traditional cafes and teashops. In third place, some way behind, are other cyclists. Here is the author of ‘Lines written after a chance encounter with a charming member of the Merseyside Ladies’ Cycling Association’:

A presence brought enchantment to the ride

A presence, riding with me, by my side …

There are also many poems which address a favourite bicycle as though it were a good old wife:

We’ve had some pretty good times together

Awandering up and down the hills and dales …

Other categories of cycling verse include the very important rolling-road poems, with their tales of memorable rides:

At the witching hour one winter’s night, snow thick upon the ground

Some Clarion lads from Manchester left Handforth homeward bound …

And there are many good-cheer poems:

There’s an inn down in Surrey that’s known far and wide

For the welcome extended to all those who ride …

At one time it was also common for clubs to sing as they went along the road together. The club run, especially after it turned for the homeward ride, but before the final ‘blind’, became a wheeled choir. If the run was well attended there had to be a choirmaster in the middle of the bunch to coordinate the tempo and remind clubmates of the words of songs. The effect was probably ragged, but a singing club run must have been an impressive thing, astonishing to a bystander.

Some songs – I write of days long gone by – were from the music hall or were well-known ditties such as

Summer rain brings the roses again

After the clouds roll by …

Less often, clubs sang the classics of choral music. Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ was a favourite, though no one knew the German words and there has never been a translation into English. Ignorance of the words of songs led cyclists towards mockery. ‘The Soldiers’ Chorus’, for instance, was sung as ‘Beer, boys, and bugger the Band of Hope’, probably as the Sunday club run passed some nonconformist chapel.

Some clubs had their own poet who wrote songs and coached other members. The Catford CC was one of them. This song comes from the Catford:

We’re boys of every sort, in all the branches of the sport,

The road and track boys, the lady-back boys,

Our object is good sportsmanship, our racing is good fun,

Our motto is Good Fellowship, for each and ev’ry one …

A ‘lady-back boy’ is the owner of a tandem who has a girlfriend. This Catford song probably has an early date, since the singing club runs were most popular in the 1920s and 1930s. The last report I have of a club wheeling through the lanes in song (a CTC section: it would be, wouldn’t it?) comes from the mid-1950s. I never myself experienced a singing club run though I know some people, rather older than me, who recall the phenomenon. One of them points out that only cyclists would have joined in such a practice. ‘Other people aren’t crazy enough.’

The songs, recitations and poems began with the first Clarion ‘smokers’ and the birth of club magazines. Some of them relate to a minor development in English literature. In the 1890s there was a vogue for rolling-road poems from the pens of such official writers as Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton and John Masefield. They made an addition to English nature poetry simply by writing so much about roads. Many of their sentiments were transferred to verses by cyclists. The same official writers often give us descriptions of gypsies. And, sure enough, a preoccupation with the wandering people of the countryside also has a place in the literature of cycling. For what is a cyclist, if he is not a postman who dreams of becoming a gypsy?

The Romany is weather-beaten, misunderstood, ungovernable and free. So he entered the lore of cycling as soon as the sport became truly popular and became an alternative way of life for the low paid. Many of the clubs founded in those days – plenty of them still in existence – have the words ‘nomads’, ‘wanderers’ or ‘vagabonds’ in their names. It had been easy for the young spirits who founded such clubs to make an association with the gypsy. Cyclists went their own way through the lanes or across the heath, as the wind or fancy took them. They carried few possessions, wore bright clothing, were refused entry to the more genteel pubs, tinkered with their mounts at the side of the road, took their meals behind hedges and slept in haystacks.

I am old enough to remember the haystacks and still think it was a good way to spend Saturday night. Today, veteran cyclists bore their sons and teenage clubmates with tales of rough nights when they burrowed into barns and ricks, fearful of the farmer even after the pint or two they had probably drunk. How scratchy the haystacks were, how rural they smelt, how a lad longed for a lass to be with him in his hayhole!

Haystacks were useful to us for quite practical reasons. They provided cost-free lodgings close to the start of time-trial courses. You could spend Saturday night in a haystack and be there and ready to race on Sunday morning. Many time triallists camped before an event, but there was more than a touch of respectability about their Bukta or Blacks-of-Greenock tents, their shaven faces and wifely wives. A racing man from a haystack was a more dangerous sort of cyclist.

Haystack nights disappeared in the 1960s, when people had more money and looked for a different style. The old prestige accorded to haystackers came from their vagabond or wild-man demeanour. Cycling lore contains many stories about strangers who appear in the night or who join the road from a woodland path. A lone cyclist enters a remote country pub. He asks for a pint and an empty smaller glass, then produces half a dozen duck eggs from a brown paper bag. The mysterious wheelman pours a little beer from his pint into the smaller glass, cracks an egg into it and drinks the mixture. He does this five more times. Then he finishes his beer and leaves the hostelry, away on his bike to who knows where.

All stories signify something beyond themselves. What does this story mean? Perhaps the cyclist is really a fox. Are there parallels in the folk legends of, for instance, Belgium, a country of beer, cycling, early dark nights and short distances between country and town?

Another cycling legend – one that does have equivalents in British folklore – concerns the old-timer. In song and story he is not awheel but is encountered at the side of a road. He wears unfashionable clothes, carefully washed and stitched where necessary. He is not the sort of person who takes his rest in a haystack. He might be a ghost. The old-timer’s bike is ancient. Some of its accessories, in this story usually the mudguards, are held to the frame by twisted pieces of wire. But the transmission – chainset, chain and back sprocket, the heart of a bicycle – is expertly and beautifully maintained. The old-timer has climbed off to eat his sandwiches or to smoke a pipe. Other cyclists riding the same road instinctively brake and stop to say a word in fellowship or homage. He replies only with the words ‘It’s a grand life’. Just as no one has seen him ride, nobody knows where he comes from. But some versions of this myth give the old-timer a Black Country accent.

Is it merely coincidence that the photographs of Reg Harris, advertising his Raleigh bicycle, used to put the world champion in this old-timer pose, on a grassy verge by an English hedge, with pipe in hand, smiling in kindly fashion?

One final country legend. Almost as memorable as the old-timer is the icon of the peripatetic poet. He is on his bike in the countryside, sometimes glimpsed by other cyclists, shepherds and thoughtful rural folk. On occasion he is lying on the verge of the road, apparently asleep. What does this mean?

The cycling figure is surely formed from two more familiar icons. The first is the scholar-gypsy, who, as we know, flits from river to inn to hilly path. The second is the wandering minstrel. Why do minstrels wander? Any bright young Birmingham Marxist of the 1950s will immediately put his hand up with the answer. It is because they have been expelled, by capitalism, from their true home in the feudal hall, and so must endlessly travel, with no warm place to lay their heads and few people to hear their melancholy song. Sir Walter Scott will tell you the same story. And, as the cycling poet recounts,

His head on his battered musette, a dreamy look in his eye, The cyclist lay by the roadside, watching the world go by.

And his mind went off on a journey, to the land of make-believe,

Where the laws no longer run that bind the sons of Adam and Eve.

Etymologically, the French musette means, originally, a sheep’s bladder; then, a bag; then, a primitive form of bagpipes, made from the bladder; and so we have the more familiar notion of the bal-musette, a rustic dance or jolly occasion in some quartier where country met city, and in which the ceremonies were led by traditional and informal music.

For the modern cyclist, a musette is a small fabric bag slung over the back for carrying provisions such as maps, Mars bars, ‘speed mixture’ (which is a cake of prunes and rice that wards off the bonk), amphetamines, inner tubes. British cyclists often call them ‘bonk bags’^*. Leaguers made them from that striped material used in deck chairs. In long races musettes containing food are handed up to riders by someone at the roadside. The professionals then throw them away, while the rest of us fold musettes and keep them in the pocket of a road jersey. I always carry one, just in case; and in autumn days I use a musette to ride home with shaggy woodland parasol mushrooms, or perhaps a pheasant that has been struck dead by some murdering bourgeois in a big black car. A freshly killed pheasant in a musette gives a little warm nudge to the lower vertebrae, a strange feeling that I suppose is known only to cyclists – and poachers, now I come to think of it.

* ‘The bonk’ is a cycling term for a sudden loss of power and energy. It is accompanied by depression and sometimes tears. The condition is unknown to other sports and therefore to anyone who is not a cyclist. It can hit you very suddenly, when a cyclist will say ‘I’ve blown’. There are many other demotic terms. We speak of ‘The knock’, ‘hunger knock’, ‘the sags’, and fear the time when ‘Old Mr Saggy comes knocking at the door’. The rather official French word is défaillance. Bonk is caused by a lowering of the blood sugar level. The remedy is in food and drink. Hardriders always carry bonk bars, in former days prepared to gruesome recipes. Try oats slowly baked with syrup, lard, margarine and cocoa powder, together with chopped mixed fruits previously soaked in Guinness. But never eat anything that will make your handlebars sticky. Always have a bonk bar after two hours, even if you’re not hungry. The first time my son had the bonk (aged 12) I got him home, my arm around his shoulders. Then he had four giant helpings of Coco-Pops and milk before falling asleep, still wearing track mitts. No bonk is worse than the bonk you suffered as a teenager.