by Guy Martin
When I was young we’d go to Butlin’s in Skegness for holidays, and then when I was 13 or 14 we all went to Tenerife – our first foreign holiday. Eventually, when Sally was 16 and getting to the age where she wasn’t keen to go on the big family holiday any more, the six of us all went for one last big blow-out together, to Florida. It is remembered, by all of us, as the best holiday ever. By that time, Dad’s business was well established and he was earning a decent living thanks to his hard graft.
Rita is from Hull, but her dad was Latvian. After his homeland had been invaded by the Nazis, in 1941, Voldemars Kidals was conscripted to fight for the Germans in the war. He was one of 200,000 Latvians that were given the choice: fight or be shot. Voldemars fitted Hitler’s bill perfectly. He was blond and six-foot-two, but because he wasn’t German, he and all his fellow countrymen were treated as cannon-fodder. It’s reckoned that half those Latvian conscripts died on the battlefield. Voldemars was sent straight to the Russian front, where he had to deal with the horrific winters that demolished Hitler’s badly prepared and demoralised troops. Walter and his mate were manning a machine-gun post and realised that if, or when, the Russian army reached them they wouldn’t be shown any mercy, so the pair of them deserted, escaping by clinging on to the bottom of a train for two days as it crossed Poland and into Germany. They were eventually captured by the Americans and put in a prisoner-of-war camp in Belgium. After that he was given the option of going to England or Canada, and he chose England. When the war ended a lot of Latvians were still housed at a camp near Leicester. After that Voldemars moved to another camp in Bransburton, just north of Hull. He learnt to speak a bit of English, but, even years later, when I was born, it was still only a bit. Everyone called him Walter.
Back in the years just after the war, Walter worked on the local farms and felt really well looked after. Lil lived in the same village, and they met at Hull Fair.
After they were married, the pair moved to Marmaduke Street in Hull. Then, in the late 1940s, they spotted a little place in a village called Nettleton advertised for sale in an estate agent’s window. Walter cycled 18 miles from New Holland, after getting the ferry over from Hull, to look at the house. He and Lil moved to the village, near Caistor, and Walter ended up working in the Nettleton iron-mines. The iron ore mined there was some of the finest in the world, I’ve been told, and it was taken straight to the steelworks in Scunthorpe on a purpose-built railway line. Walter worked there for years, below ground, as a face-worker at a time when mules were pulling the rock to the surface. Later in his life he became a builder.
He was, like my mum and dad, a proper grafter. And Walter could make anything. He would re-sole shoes and make his own sweeping brushes. He had a map of Latvia made from iron, that he cast in sections to show the different regions. About the size and height of a large coffee table, it was a decorative feature of his back garden. He came from a time and place where people didn’t automatically go to the shop and buy what they needed. Not if they could make it. When she was living at home, one of my mum’s jobs was to rip up the newspaper and thread the pieces on to a string to use instead of toilet roll. That was a night’s entertainment.
It was a long time before the Kidals bought a TV, but my dad’s family were the first in the town of Caistor to have a television set, and proud that the mayor’s son had to come to their house to watch it.
As kids we would love visiting Granddad and Granny Kidals because Walter had a smallholding with his own animals: mainly sheep, I remember one called Nancy, and rabbits, nothing too big. Walter wouldn’t say much, but he’d show us things. Every now and then, when my mum was a little girl, a rabbit that she had become attached to would go missing. As they sat around the table that night little Rita would remember to ask, ‘Where’s my rabbit?’ her mum, Lil, would reply, ‘You’re eating it.’
Walter had a load of sayings, but the most memorable for me was this, delivered in a broad Latvian accent: ‘When you dead, you dead.’ Perhaps it was memories of what he saw in the war that made him say stuff like that to his young grandkids. It was clear he didn’t believe in heaven or hell. And thinking about it now, that attitude probably rubbed off on me.
Mum is one of five Kidals children, Rita and four brothers, and a lot of this make-do attitude of Voldemars and Lil obviously passed down to my mum. We had a cooked dinner every night, with a pudding to follow, but some of the meals were best described as concoctions. Very little went to waste. We’d have bubble and squeak on a Monday night, made from the left-over vegetables from Sunday dinner. I’d eat anything, but Sally was always more picky and dreaded Monday nights. I know most of my friends and schoolmates would turn their noses up at some of our meals: mashed swede and beans in gravy and stuff like that; anything really, because that’s how my mum was brought up, just to get by. There was nothing wrong with it and it didn’t do her any harm, or my mum’s mum, Double-Decker Lil. She is 90 and going strong.
Why Double-Decker? It seems she was a big lass when she was younger. She had a stroke when Rita was 18, and Rita looked after her bed-bound mother. You wouldn’t know now that she’d had a stroke, though. Lil has outlasted all my other grandparents. She’s double hard. Around the time of the 2013 North West 200 race meeting, in the middle of May, my mum told me Lil was in hospital with cancer. When I got back from racing in Northern Ireland I spent quite a bit of time with Lil before I went away again to race at the TT. I wasn’t sure what the future was going to bring for her, and being so busy at the time I hadn’t been visiting her enough.
Lil had visited the doctors, and knew something was up, because she had some trouble with her plumbing or something. She was taken into hospital, where they told her she was pretty much riddled with cancer. She was 89 and still had all her marbles. When I visited her in hospital, she was telling me that she knew the doctors had got the diagnosis wrong because she felt fine. At the time, I didn’t know if she was trying to convince me or herself, but she sounded pretty sure and she looked much the same as usual. Then, a few days later, a doctor came to see her and said, ‘Sorry, Lil, we made a mistake.’ It wasn’t cancer, it was something else. So they let her out. She was right all along. She knew there was nothing up. You don’t mess with Double-Decker Lil.
The Second World War has had other influences on me. My dad was a baby boomer, born after all the surviving soldiers returned home and got back on the nest. And I was named after Guy Gibson, the Wing Commander of 617 Squadron, the Dambusters, who were based in Lincolnshire, not far down the road from Kirmington at RAF Scampton. When I was first told that, I didn’t think much of it, but now I realise he’s quite a man to be named after. It was my dad’s decision, not Mum’s. My dad has a lot of interest in the history of World War II. His dad was a Royal Marine; while Dad’s father-in-law, Voldemars, was reluctantly fighting against the Allies. The only thing that was ever mentioned about this, was one time when both sets of grandparents were invited to Kirmington and, after a few drinks, Walter, in his broken English, said to my other granddad, Jack, ‘Me and you on opposite sides.’ When he said that, everyone burst out laughing.
Dad talked about the war so often – the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk etc. – that when I was little I once asked Mum, ‘When is the war going to end?’ Rita wrote it on a postcard and sent it to a ‘Kids Say the Funniest Things’ type competition in one of the weekly gossip magazines she read – and won!
My dad’s father Jack was involved in the Normandy landings, one of the waves of servicemen who arrived on the beaches a day or so after D-Day. He drove a six-wheel GMC truck off the landing craft. On the trailer he was towing was the most advanced radar in the world at the time, one of only two in existence, my dad would tell us.
After VE Day, Jack came back to England and married May, my grandmother, but was then sent to South Africa to prepare for the invasion of Japan. The sea and ground attack on Japan never happened, though, because the two atomic bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, ending the war once an
d for all.
Jack grew up in South Kelsey, less than a mile from where I bought my first house. The Martins never fall very far from the tree.
After leaving the Marines, Jack was the transport manager at T H Brown’s, a haulage firm a stone’s throw from the Moody International truck yard I now work at. They became the first Scania truck dealer in the country, and it was where my dad first started his training – working for his dad, like I later would. So Granddad Jack was in road transport, my dad is in road transport, and so am I. In fact, Jack’s dad, my great-grandfather, was the road foreman for Lincolnshire County Council. He was involved in the building of the Caistor bypass. He had his then 14-year-old son Jack involved too, changing the points on the railway line that transported the rock to Nettleton to build the 20-per-cent incline to Caistor Top. Well, he had Jack involved until the boy forgot to change the points one time and the train, full of rock, crashed through the engine shed.
Four generations. It’s in the breeding. My Granddad Martin was very much like my dad, because I remember he was all work, work, work, trucks, trucks, trucks. He was another stubborn one. He and my dad were close to scrapping no end of times, I’m told.
Grandma May Martin was always Nanny, while Lil was Granny. Nanny smoked like a damp bonfire. It was Nanny who first got me into tea. She would make it strong and always in a cup and saucer. I also remember her lifting the back of her skirt up to warm her bum by the fire.
Nanny was the first of my grandparents to die, but by then I was in my late teens. I was lucky to have had both sets of grandparents all through my growing up.
All my family lived close by when I was a child. Walter and Lil were in Nettleton, Jack and May in Caistor, us in Kirmington. With holidays in Skegness, it was rare for us ever to leave Lincolnshire, the county I’ve lived in all my life.
CHAPTER 2
THE KIRMINGTON BUBBLE
‘We were all a bit thick, but we knew how to lift heavy things.’
KIRMINGTON. KIRMO. A one-pub village over the A18 from Humberside Airport. A couple of miles from Immingham, one of the busiest docks in Europe, and a bit further from Grimsby. Kirmington, a former World War II prisoner-of-war camp. Oh, and the centre of the universe.
I moved there when I was one, in 1983, and eventually left Kirmington, to move to Caistor, seven miles away, in 2010. For the last few of those 26 years I had lived with my girlfriend, Kate, on her parents’ farm in the village.
The house on Gravel Pit Lane, where the four Martin kids did most, or all, of their growing up, is a three-bedroom bungalow. My mum and dad always talked about having a loft conversion, but never got around to it. I suppose they never had the money, and then when they did, there was no need, because we’d all left home.
There is 13-month age difference between Sally and me. My brother Stuart is four years younger than me, and then there’s a two-year gap between him and Kate. So that made Sally six when Kate arrived.
I had my own room until Stu was born, then we shared, but we rarely got in each other’s way. Given the choice to do it all again, he probably wouldn’t choose the bottom bunk, but he got away lightly compared to how some big brothers treat their younger siblings. I honked on him one New Year’s Eve, after a skinful at the local pub. That night, after sorting me out, my mum, Big Rita, went to see the landlord and gave him a mouthful for selling beer to her under-age son.
There was a time, during those bunk-bed years, when I brought a girlfriend back to our room. When I look back now, I wonder if she only wanted me for my GSX-R600. We ended up shagging in the top bunk, with Stu in the bunk below. What was I doing? He never mentioned it. Character-building, I reckon. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
There was very little friction between Stu and me when we were young. Most of the time I’d be in the shed, taking something to bits or reassembling it, while he was more into football, something I’ve never been bothered about. We didn’t have the same friends, and because our hobbies were so different we never did what most brothers do: squabble because we wanted the same thing at the same time. Only years later, when we were both working together for Dad – all the male side of the Martin family working in the same truck yard – did we stop seeing eye to eye for a while. We were all living together and working together and it was too much. Back when we were little, though, as soon as we got the Transformers wallpaper we wanted so badly, we were happy.
One of my earliest memories is when Sal and I were given an old but tidy Yamaha TY80 kids dirt bike one Christmas.
After we went to bed on Christmas Eve, Dad would always take the handle off the front room door so we couldn’t get in early to see the presents. The year we were given the little TY80 it was literally like every Christmas had come at once. The first time I ever rode it, that Christmas morning, I went straight through the rose bushes in our garden and cut myself to rags on the thorns. My mum was telling anyone who’d listen that I was never going on that motorbike again.
Clearly, I wasn’t a natural on the motorcycle. I hear of some racers who got on their first bike, before they could walk, and knew exactly what to do, instinctively; they won their first race and then never lost another until they joined the world championship ranks. Well, that wasn’t me. I’m not blessed in the natural talent department when it comes to bikes, but I’ve loved them since I first sat on that miniature Yamaha and I don’t give up.
Sally and I were supposed to share the TY80, but I didn’t like the idea of that. I get on a treat with my older sister now, but we didn’t then, because of the bike problem: one seat, two backsides wanting to be on it.
Though we were only nippers we had the run of Kirmington. We’d rush home from school to go straight out on the motorbike. We would take it over to Mr Lancaster’s farm (where I’d end up living with his daughter, years later) and tear up the fields. He’d chase us in his Land Rover, not happy. It must have driven him mad.
The little Yamaha would do 40 mph or more and we’d never wear helmets. We’d slide off it, but never hurt ourselves too badly. While other Kirmington kids would lose fingers in go-kart chains or slice the backs off their feet in BMX sprockets, we survived countless motorcycle accidents.
For a while, Dad had an old Yamaha trail bike just to muck about on, a field bike really and a full-size thing, three times the size of our TY. He would take me and Sally for rides around the village and surrounding areas on it. One of us would sit in front of him on the petrol tank, the other behind him on the seat. None of us would wear a helmet, obviously. He was a skilful racer, so it was surprising the scrapes he would get in when he was just pootling about, three-up with his two little kids on board. Once, on a pre-Sunday lunch ride-out, we crashed and Sally burned her leg on the red-hot exhaust. Needless to say, Mum wasn’t happy and it’s hard to blame her. By now you should be getting the picture that the Martins weren’t a family that rated the health and safety side of things very highly.
The family is all Lincolnshire born and bred. My dad’s a proud Lincolnshire man and I am too. Though I’ve travelled to Asia, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East and America, I still think Kirmington is the centre of the universe.
The village has hardly grown since I first moved there in 1984. There can’t be many places in the whole of England that have developed less. Only about six houses have been built in Kirmo in all the time I can remember. We let a few in. We don’t want to weaken the breed by bringing any outsiders in.
Kirmington is a village of 400 people, and I get the feeling I’ll end up living back there. I think we all feel that way. Me, my sister Sally and our friends Sally Harris, Mark Nichols, Simon Thorpe, Andrew Thorpe, Aaron Ash, Kate Lancaster, Craig Nichols – there are only a handful of us born within a few years of each other, but ask any of us and we’d all say Kirmington was the centre of the universe, and I think that’s down to one bloke: Mr Acum.
Bert Acum was Kirmington Church of England Primary School’s head teacher in the late 1980s and early nineties. He was the ma
n. The younger generation, including my younger brother and sister, aren’t as Kirmo-biased as me, because they had a different headmaster. I was the last of the pure Mr Acum breed. His wife, Norma, was also a teacher at the school. Back then, the pair lived in Kirmington too, with their son, and we’d sometimes go to his house to play golf on his own personal putting green. In school time, of course.
When I was attending Kirmington Primary, just a quarter of a mile from home, I could not get to school fast enough. There were only 18 kids in the whole junior school and we all did the same lessons at the same time, but obviously at different levels. Thinking back, we used to have maths and spelling tests on Friday, but that was about it, as far as I can remember, when it came to traditional school-type lessons. The school gave a very different type of education to the one had by most people I know these days.
It was a very hands-on environment. We made loads of stuff, papier mâché Toby jugs being a favourite. Before a sports day we, the pupils, would mark the pitches out with the push-roller. Most schools would rely on a caretaker for jobs like this, and any general maintenance, but at Kirmington there was no need for one. The kids did it all.
In autumn we’d have the thrill of getting the leaf machine out. It was like a lawn-mower, but with spikes instead of blades, that would flick the fallen leaves into a bin on the back. That was another job for the pupils.
I have vivid memories of those early school years. The school building dated from the end of the nineteenth century, but Kirmington was a bomber base in World War II, home to 166 Squadron, and the air raid shelters were still standing. We’d have bonfires in one of them. In school-time!