Love on a Bicycle

Love on a Bicycle
by Eileen Palmer

The bicycle has always been with me, its two-wheel theme running through a long and misspent life as smoothly as a well-oiled chain.

It was not at first an abiding passion, merely the magic carpet of a carless age, transporting me to... boys.My first love was a layabout at our local grammar school. A wastrel, my mother called him, but he owned a bike -- the glistening reward of passing the eleven-plus.

For his dear sake, I forged my father's signature and laid down a deposit of 10 bob (50p now, a fortnight's lunch money in 1939) for a bright blue, fixed-gear Carlton and swore to pay two shillings a week for as long as we both shall live. Or so it seemed. And so, from dawn to dewy eve, in the holidays and weekends, out of sight of censorious Mum, we lay about, tucked in moorland hollows, our bikes thrown carelessly on the sheep-nibble turf.

But my next boyfriend, all spots and no money, was an earnest college type named Morgan. In Welsh, Morgan means 'the great and bright'. And he was. He did botany and specialised in fungi (mushrooms, to my ignorant soul). His cycle was as shabby as himself. All rusty frame, twisted forks and a horrible saddle. It was as seamed and lined as a witch from Macbeth.

So now I chased around the wartime lanes of Gloucestershire on an equally neglected machine, leaning it against the elms and beeches of the Forest of Dean, my saddlebag crammed with samples of Spotted Flycatchers. I never achieved long distances with Morgan, but I soon acquired balance and road sense.

We quarrelled in my second year at college, after I'd run over some fascinating and rare Clavaria vermicularis. When it came to having to choose between us, the Little White Candle fungus won, gills down.

So I transferred my affection to Keith, a geographer and fanatical brassrubber who had a beautifully tended black Humber with drop handlebars and a Chossy saddlebag that was a careful nest of soft chamois leather, tissue paper and corned beef sandwhiches.

Naturally, I became a devout monument seeker, rubbing the noses of meekfaced Crusader wives till I had almost scoured them away. My Carlton, as adaptable as its owner, leaned happily against the moss-encrusted tombstones of Early English churchyards, and now I learned to oil and polish it with a brassrubber's loving elbow grease.

It was from Keith that I found out how to mount from one side of the bike without falling off the other. Neither did I wobble as fiercely now, and I had also learned how to take corners at the correct angle to avoid ending up nosedeep in gravel.

At times I covered 60 or 70 miles almost unawares. I was slowly becoming a cyclist, not a girl with a bike.

Then suddenly the war was over. There were degrees and diplomas, and a life to begin. I landed a job at my old school. I had loads of money by the standards of the 1940s, and I got a new bicycle, a hand-built job from Watford. It was a rich poly-chromatic burgundy, and had chrome allow tubing and a Brooks B17 saddle that was burnished like a conker. What would be a worthy mate for the likes of that?

I ran an appraising eye over the staff bike shed and glimpsed a Ridgefinder Gold Bowl Special, coruscating like a jeweller's window display, and hung about with locks and chains like the front door of Fort Knox.

With fatalistic acquiescence I accepted a date from the head of my department, the owner of the RGBS. He was a potholer. Need I say more? Carbide lamp, tin helmet and filthy plimsolls were stuffed in my pannier. I was bruised, soaked to the vest, and stiff from hours of wading, standing and kneeling in icy water. Fifty miles of hard-bitten widswept uplands to Yordas Cave or Jingle Pot... plus the compensating downhill exchilaration, riding back to civilisation.

All that was 100 years ago, or so it seems. My layabout went to lie about in Kathmandu, and my botany boy brought a black beetle of a car and rose to senior lecturer. The brass rubber insists on writing learned historical treatises and, as for the potholer, he got a headmasterhsip and went to live at Cheddar Gorge, I think.

And what about me? Well, I married a cyclist and put away all those childish hobbies. With a tandem and four lightweights installed in the garage I have finally got down to the serious love of my life. Cycling.

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