by Guy Martin
I feel lucky to have gone to such a quirky school. The stuff we thought of as 100-per-cent normal sounds like I’ve made it up. It’s like we were on a desert island, after a plane crash or a shipwreck, and the only surviving adults took it upon themselves to teach the children whatever they could remember from their own childhoods, with some essential survival techniques thrown in for good measure.
Once a week, all the kids would tie rags around their feet and shuffle around to polish the school’s varnished wooden floor. I’m not making this up. I even have a scar on my hand from assembling the school Black & Decker Workmate at the age of six or seven.
We thought the school was haunted, by Mr Painter the School Ghost, and our headmaster wouldn’t say a word to make the junior and infant children believe anything different. In fact, he’d even tell stories about Mr Painter that would scare us rigid.
A supply teacher would visit the school for a week or two every year to get us prepared for the Christmas play. She was a 50-a-day smoker and would send a pupil to the shop to pick up her Benson & Hedges. Primary school kids! You’d get locked up for that now.
Much as we all loved Mr Acum, he wasn’t shy about serving out some corporal punishment. If you were naughty, but not naughty enough to deserve a spanking, you would be sent out to pick up a hundred stones off the grass so they didn’t go into the lawn-mower. Yes, the pupils cut the grass that surrounded the school, and Mr Acum’s personal putting green, too. If we were naughty enough to deserve a worse punishment, Mr Acum would give us the slipper, after warming it on the old, cast-iron radiator. I don’t know if he went through that part of the routine to make the ordeal last longer, so the children would have longer to think about what was coming and then remember the whole ritual more, or if he’d somehow worked out, or been told, that an old slipper hurt more when it was warm, but it definitely became a deterrent.
Every memory of the time is a good one, and school trips were a highlight. A memorable outing was when the whole school cycled five miles through the woods from Kirmington to Brocklesby, all of us on pushbikes. One of the kids’ granddads was the master of the local fox-hunt, so we went to visit the kennels where the hounds lived.
We would also have an annual school trip to Skegness, just before we broke up for the summer holidays. On the bus to the coast, Mr Acum would be throwing sweets out at us, like Willy Wonka.
For those of us who knew little more than the Kirmington bubble, Skegness would make us gasp. It was amazing. We’d play on the playground, then go on the donkeys, and finally visit the fairground. Mr Acum would take an old Silver Cross pram that he’d fill with a container, like a miniature water butt with a tap on the bottom, to keep the whole school watered. An essential for a Kirmington pupil going on any school trip was a spare pair of trousers. That was the rule. Mr Acum must have learnt the hard way.
After a round of funding cuts, or a when a hole appeared in the budget, the school’s minibus used to get taken off the road, and then my mum would volunteer to help. When it came time for swimming, all the juniors, probably a dozen kids, would pile in the back of the Martin family’s VW LT35. It was a large panel van, bigger than a Ford Transit, that Dad would proudly remind us had a Porsche engine, as it had a similar four-cylinder motor to the Porsche 924. Mum would drive, with the pupils rattling around the back. At this time, Sally and I were mad about the TV show called The A-Team. Dad would come home from work on a Saturday in time for us to all sit down and watch it together. We all loved it so much that Dad painted our van black with a red stripe on the side to make it look like the one driven by Mr T. That’s how it looked when we used it as school transport. Big Rita would go off to do the weekly shop in Immingham while we were swimming and collect us all afterwards.
Looking back, the children of Kirmington Church of England Primary School were an innocent and easily pleased bunch. One of the most exciting and memorable times ever, for both me and Sally, was when one school summer party coincided with the introduction of wheelie bins to the area. Seeing the first wheelie bin in Kirmington was an ‘Oooh’ moment. For this summer party the teachers filled the brand-new wheelie bins with water to make two-man plunge pools for the kids to jump in. Later in the day we had wheelie bin races.
School life was mega, up until I was 12 years old, when I left for senior school. The Vale of Ancholme School in Brigg had over 500 kids, so it was a contrast, like black and white. Because Kirmington Primary was such a practical and laidback place, when we went to senior school we were all a bit thick, but we knew how to lift heavy things.
My sister Sally left Kirmington Primary the year before me, along with Wayne Czartowski. Sally now says her first day, walking into the Vale of Ancholme School, felt like she’d arrived in New York City. We were clearly a bit backward.
The following year, Kirmington sent another two victims to the school in Brigg: it was the turn of me and fellow Kirmo resident Rebecca Andrews. I was so nervous going there, and I was right to be. We were under-prepared, like fish out of water. We were green. My dad was still cutting my hair, and I was happily wearing what I soon came to realise were cheap Hi-Tec trainers that few of the other kids would be seen dead in. I hadn’t been bothered about either of those things till I went to senior school. I had been happily living in the Kirmington bubble, insulated from the rest of the UK and all the stuff the country and its sons worried about. At home I lived in my welly boots, with the tops turned over, and blue one-piece overalls. In Kirmo, no one thought anything of it because it was all I’d ever done, but now at school I was different. And not in a good way. I’d get picked on a bit, because of my corduroy school trousers or whatever. I didn’t have any school friends until the last couple of years.
Not long after reaching senior school, peer pressure began to play a part in my life. For a while at least. I started trying to toe the line, by wearing the right trainers and clothes, listening to the same music as other people in class, and having my hair cut like the other lads. Two or three years later I realised fitting in wasn’t for me, so I stopped trying, and that’s how it’s been ever since.
Compared to my time at Kirmington Primary, secondary school is far less memorable. I got on with a few teachers, but there was one I had more of a connection with, Mr Frank. He taught a class called Resistant Materials. Metalwork, basically. He had a job on the side putting up marquees. Sometimes he’d wear a T-shirt to school, with the slogan ‘Frank’s Marquees – The Erection Specialists’. To us he was a legend. He raced 50-cc Kriedler motorbikes, too.
I liked Geography, but I failed the GCSE, which was a bit of a disappointment. Chemistry was all right. Mr Hutchinson, my form teacher through the whole of senior school, took us for it. I learnt some stuff, but most remember blowing down the gas feed to extinguish the flames of the rest of the class’s Bunsen burners. I didn’t get on particularly well with any other lessons, like English or Maths. I felt that for kids like me who couldn’t wait to get out of the door, there wasn’t any real direction. The school just had to keep us off the streets from 9am till 3.15pm.
I was a misfit at school. I don’t have any friends from my time at the Vale of Ancholme, except for one, Johnny Ellis, and that’s only because we became apprentices together after leaving. I would do enough to get by at school, but I was just waiting to get home and escape into the shed.
Back in Kirmington, things were like they’d always been. There was a gang of us and we’d meet up most nights. If I wasn’t working in the shed, I would sit with the rest of them on the corner near our house. This was the meeting spot from where we would go roaming around the area. At the other end of the village was the Kings’ House. The Kings were brothers who were older than our group, and they were rebels. There were three of them, Andrew, Nigel and Jason. They had motorbikes and cars we thought were cool, like Ford Fiesta XR2s. They were rum lads. Good people, not wrong ’uns. They were in their late teens when we were 11 or 12, so they obviously didn’t hang around with us.
Ru
m is a description I use a lot, so perhaps I should explain what I mean by it. If you’re a rum lad it doesn’t mean you’re going out robbing grannies. If you did that, you’d be a wrong ’un. A rum lad isn’t a wrong ’un, but he is always looking for an angle, a ‘better’ way of doing something, a way of earning a few extra bob without working too hard for it.
I wouldn’t be out on the street as often as Sally. My mates would come and hang around in my shed. Mark ‘Shorty’ Nichols’s family was chucking out an old comfy chair, so we salvaged it for the shed and friends would sit around while I worked on old lawn-mowers with their guts spread all over the work-bench.
Working in the shed would take up a lot of my childhood nights, but our gang would get up to other things. If it was a slow night and we’d seen a car’s lights drive up the local lover’s lane, Habrough Lane, we’d tip-toe through the woods, creep up on the car and knock on the windows to scare the life out of the humping couple inside.
Around that time we did a bit of experimenting with Ouija boards. Don’t ask me how a group of kids from the back end of rural Lincolnshire get hold of a Ouija board, but one turned up and we hid it in our shed. Somehow Mum found it and warned us off it, telling us we were messing with stuff we shouldn’t be messing with. We didn’t listen, though. In fact, it made us even more determined to try it. Sally Harris was the ring leader. We’d follow her to the football changing rooms on the local playing fields. At the far end of them was an old Portakabin and we’d sit on the bench outside. We did it half a dozen times. The gang would be me, both Sallys, Aaron Ash, Shorty …
By then Sally Harris and Aaron were smoking – it was the cool thing to do, though I never did. One of them blew smoke in the upturned glass, placed it on the board and we watched as the smoke disappeared. As we placed our fingers on the glass and started the ritual, that someone must have learnt from a horror film or from hearsay, the glass started skating around the board. We all had one finger on the glass, but it didn’t feel like anyone was pushing it. Then we tried contacting someone’s relation, and it started coming up with some strange answers – to this day I swear we weren’t moving the glass – and we panicked, starting screaming like girls and smashed the board to smithereens. We never did it again. I’m getting a shiver down my spine just thinking about it.
We didn’t have to make our own entertainment all the time, because for a while a double-decker bus, that had been converted into a youth club on wheels, would come to Kirmington once a week. The driver, Ian, wore a handknitted jumper and a tie. He was a geek, but a lovely bloke, and he volunteered his time to give kids in villages too small to have their own youth club something else to do.
The bus was kitted out with games, a TV, a Sega Megadrive and a shop that sold sweets. Aaron Ash, who was three years older than me and a rum lad at the time, would keep giving Ian cheek. Word of this got back to my dad, who marched down our drive, got Aaron by the neck and put some manners in him.
As I got older, the draw of the youth club was replaced by booze – but only for a short time. Where a lot of British people seem to live for the pub or weekend drinking, whether it be at a festival, a bike event, a back garden barbecue or whatever, I don’t share the enthusiasm. I used to think that one day I would wake up and all I’d want to do would be to go get drunk and shag, but I’ve never had the urge to go shagging anything that moved – I didn’t lose my virginity till I was 19 – and rarely had the desire to get smashed.
I did most of my binge-drinking in my mid-teens, at the tail end of the period of my life when I wanted to fit in and be cool. The place to be was the disco in Broughton – simply called Broughton Disco. It was a bit out of my Kirmington comfort zone. You risked getting in a fight by being a stranger, but there weren’t many alternatives in our area. In fact, there weren’t any. We would drink out the back of the disco, then go inside to rave all night and try, with little success, to get off with some bird. Even now I can’t hear 2 Unlimited’s song ‘No Limit’ and not be taken back to Broughton Disco.
For me serious boozing took place in a very small window of my youth, apart from a few exceptional occasions dotted through the rest of my life. It started at 15 and ended a year or so later. We couldn’t get served in Kirmington’s pub, The Marrowbone and Cleaver, except on very exceptional days, because we were all known, the landlord had seen us grow up, or knew some of our parents. Big Rita even worked there for a while, but my dad, being quite jealous, didn’t like the idea of that. So there’d be a weekly mass exodus from Kirmington to Brigg, where we could get served. Our mates Shorty and Si Thorpe could drive. They both had Nissan Micras. E436 TOH was Si Thorpe’s blue Micra. (I don’t have a memory any better or much worse than anyone else, except when it comes to vehicle registrations. Ones from decades ago still stick in my mind. In the haulage industry, the registration is how we refer to the trucks. Now I know that if CV57 EVE is in the diary to come in next week it’s not going to be fun, because I saw that the discs would need changing last time I worked on that truck, and they’re a right job on that model; but BD57 EBG will be all right because it was only in last month for an MoT and it’s mint. Because a haulage firm’s fleet are usually painted the same colour and have lots of trucks the same model, knowing their registrations is the only way to tell one from the other, so they all stick in my mind.)
Si was four years older than me. If we’d lived in a town, I reckon it would have been very unusual for someone as old as him to hang around with a lad of my age, but we were all Kirmington lads and because there were so few of us, it’s just what we did. We’d go to The White Hart or The Nelson in Brigg and get wankered. I had a spate of drinking cider, but it didn’t sit so well and I can’t drink it now.
I didn’t turn teetotal or anything that extreme, that’ll be clear as you read on. In fact, binge-drinking would help shape the rest of my life. It’s just that the small town treadmill of work, pay day, then stop at the pub and piss it all up the wall that a lot of British folk find themselves on was never for me. There would always be too many Snap-On tools that needed buying.
CHAPTER 3
THE BOY ON THE BENCH
‘The Martin children were bred to work.’
THE OUTBUILDING WHERE I spent so much of my childhood was an old chicken shed my dad had converted to be more of a workshop. The shed was in the garden when we moved to Kirmington, and it’s where Dad built and maintained his bikes. There were small panels in the corners, to allow the birds to walk to their outside run, which Dad boarded up. He also fitted an eight-track stereo that hung down from the roof. Next to it on a shelf was a stack of the massive plastic tape cartridges, from the 1960s, before the C90-style cassette was invented. There were tapes of Elvis, the Beatles, the Shadows, Roy Orbison …
Just by looking at my dad’s work-bench in the chicken shed you could see how much he’d used it. There was a vice bolted to it and a small shelf above, with jars of nuts and bolts on it, everything in order. His toolbox, a black Talco, was in the back corner, and a single neon strip light hung from the middle of the ceiling. The whole shed was about a motorbike-and-a-half long, perhaps 12 foot, and six foot wide. You could get one motorbike in there and no more.
Dad only built his current shed in 2003, long after he’d packed in racing, but when he was still riding motorcycles on the road, so I ended up getting much more use out of it than him. This one is massive, 20 foot by 16 foot. I’ve built, and rebuilt, plenty of my race bikes there, right up until I signed with TAS to race the Relentless Suzukis in 2011. It’s a great shed.
When I was a nipper, even before I was old enough to start school, I would sit on the end of the work-bench in the chicken shed and watch my dad work on his race bike engines. He’d normally work in overalls, but if there was anything particularly technical to tackle, like cam timing, he would put on what I’d call a smock – it was like a long blue storeman’s jacket, made of fabric. The wearing of the smock didn’t alter the way Dad worked, but it was a ritual. Dressing this
way signified he meant business. He could’ve worn his overalls, the same way a judge could deliver a verdict in a vest and jogging bottoms, but it wouldn’t be the same. Whenever he wore it I’d think, ‘Oh, we’re in business tonight.’ I was dead keen, and he knew that, so he was happy to have me in there, but I couldn’t bring any mates in.
I remember once, when I was seven years old, Dad’s race bike had its petrol tank and the top of the airbox removed. The mouths of the carbs were all open, to reveal the inside of the cylinder head. I was told, ‘Don’t put stones in there.’ But, for some reason that is still a mystery, I did, even after being told not to. As a result I was banned from the garage for a while.
My dad wouldn’t be in the shed every night, like I am. After work he’s always been happy to sit in front of the telly. Now he’s got the best shed in the world, and he never goes in it.
Being in the shed didn’t feel like it was about spending time with my dad. He’d point to stuff and ask me to tell him what it was called, components like a valve or a camshaft, but he wouldn’t explain much to me. For me, it was all about being around engines. I’ve always been fascinated by mechanical stuff. I want to know how it works and what makes it tick. I’m interested in the history, too. For example, it was the Romans who originally came up with the idea of a piston, con-rod and crank to turn linear motion into rotary movement (or vice versa). You think of Watt and the condensing steam engine, and Stephenson and Brunel and then the birth of the internal combustion engine, but the original idea was from Roman times. For cutting wood, they used waterwheels to spin a crank with a con-rod attached to a saw. And all that fascinates me.
I worked out how a four-stroke internal combustion engine worked when I was about 15 or 16. I’d stripped and reassembled dozens of engines by that time, knowing how they were supposed to go together. They would work when I finished with them, start right up and run properly, but I didn’t grasp the real concept of suck-squeeze-bang-blow till about the time I was leaving school.