by Alex Monroe
Sally’s white blouse was slightly translucent and damp in places. I could see the shape of her breasts, and her stomach rising as she breathed. The fine downy hair on her arms shone in the sun. She wore a silver bangle and a thong of dark leather casually tied around her wrist and as she moved her arms they slid softly along her pale skin. I wondered at how I could be so lucky as to be here. Our chatter faded.
I knew I ought to kiss her. If I was ever going to kiss a girl, a proper kiss, it was going to be now. If I didn’t, I might never get the chance again. But did she like me? Did she want me to kiss her? I lay on my back beside the loveliest-looking girl in the entire world and found that I couldn’t move. I was paralysed with indecision. A sickening panic grew in my stomach and soon I could hardly even speak. I have no idea how long we lay there. But then a cloud came over, and in the chill Sally sat up and hugged her knees. It was getting cold. Could we get on?
I said OK. And in the distance I heard that bloody sandpiper cry from the opposite shore and I shuddered.
We walked on in silence. I felt wretched and nauseous. I tried to blink away the sting of failure in my eyes. No matter what happened in the future, that one pivotal moment had passed. There had been a fork in the path and I had taken the wrong turning. That little fragment of the past would stay with me for ever. My feelings were all there but I was afraid to express them. Perhaps it was a fear of failure. Or was I simply afraid of my own feelings? Either way, fear had won.
We put our shoes on and continued along the shore. Out on the spit I watched the river birds running along the mud, dipping their beaks in search of food.
In the workshop I clear a bit of the bench and lay down my sketchbook. I stare down at the sketch of Connie’s bike. There is only one way to make a bicycle, no matter what size it is. Construct it bit by bit. Chas Roberts in miniature.
Bicycle making has a wonderful nomenclature, which I love. Each and every bit has its proper name. Let’s start with the frame: 0.8mm wire for the main frame triangle, top tube (crossbar), seat tube and down tube, slightly thicker piece of tubing (or chenier in jewellery-speak) for the head tube (where the front forks fit) and also for the bottom bracket (where the pedals turn).
I cut each piece carefully with my piercing saw and file to the correct angles. This is a step-through bike so the top tube isn’t exactly a crossbar; it runs lower and parallel with the down tube. I lay the pieces out on a charcoal block like thin grains of rice against the soft black. The angles are paramount. Even with fine tweezers, it’s tricky. I peg the pieces in place with dressmakers’ pins to stop them from moving about. Then a squeeze of syringe solder on each joint and a blast of heat, and it seems to be working.
The seat-stays and chain-stays are much more difficult. They run in pairs with a gap between, which has to be big enough to fit the rear wheel. And then to hold the wheel, I’ll need rear drop-outs – the curving lugs at the apex of the triangle where the wheel’s axle slots in. I choose much thinner wire for this, 0.6mm diameter. Days of optivisor-clad, eye-straining, back-aching, patience-trying work begin in earnest.
The wheels are so hard because on this scale the spokes ought to be microns thin. I experiment and discover it looks best fitting fewer spokes and making them out of 0.4mm wire. I build the front forks, stem and handlebars, which fit neatly into the head tube. Connie’s steering runs on two sets of bearings called the head race and the crown race. I can remember removing and refitting these on my old bike in the seventies and have just done the same on a classic Holdsworth that I’m fixing up at home. No need for bearings on this little bike though.
Next I fit the pedals, seat post and saddle.
We need lights of course, so I cut a short piece of chenier about 2mm in both diameter and length and solder one on the head tube and one onto a seat stay. Using my micro-motor I burr out enough metal to hold a 1.5mm stone and drop a little diamond in the front setting and gently rub over the sides to hold it in place. That’s my headlight. Then I set a little ruby in the back light.
I finish the wheels, texturing each tyre by rolling it along a rough old file. Prising the front forks and back stays apart, I ease the wheels into place. One of the pedals is near the bottom of its turn. It means I can stand the bike up, resting the pedal on a scrap of silver, rather as you would against the pavement outside a shop. I smile to myself. A bicycle is a beautiful thing.
Then I push the bike around on my bench, rather like a child with a new toy. All the moving parts work beautifully as I whoosh round a needle file and past the charcoal block. It practically steers itself . . .
Before bicycles, and before girls, it was go-carts. We took to building go-carts when our defence of The Old Parsonage became so successful that the Hall boys started staying away.
If they won’t come to us, we’ll take the fight to them. Armoured vehicles were what we needed, I decided. Go-carts, fully equipped, complete with harpoons, shotguns and hand-grenades.
The dustbin men were our best source of building supplies. They came on a Thursday and if we left them a note, they would do their best to leave whatever it was we wanted the following week. The main problem was that they needed paying. And they were grown-ups so ten Players No. 6 wouldn’t always cut it. Cash was king. But that was easy enough to come by, in those quantities at least. We had newspaper rounds, a nice little business cleaning windows in the village, and we also sold the cigarettes we got with our forged money, laundering our counterfeits with great success. If we left a few coins with our note for the binmen we were pretty much guaranteed what we wanted. Eventually.
Construction of the go-carts generally took place in the old garages. First I hacksawed the wheel-sets from their frame. A hacksaw works just like a piercing saw, with the flat blade strung taut in its frame, but because the teeth face forward, it cuts on the push stroke. Slop a bit of oil on the blade, and the cutting goes easier. And you also have the pleasure of the most delicious smell of hot steel and burning oil as you cut.
Me, working on a go-cart, in the early days.
Pram axles were great but never strong enough for our purposes, so I’d strengthen them with a length of timber fixed on with the biggest fencing staples I could find. I’d start with a good rummage through the old paint bucket in the garage, where a great mixture of rusty reclaimed nails and leftovers from previous jobs all got chucked in together – every workshop in the world has its equivalent. Nails are one of the hardest things to rummage. Not like nice smooth buttons or Lego or even nuts and bolts. Rusty nails stick together in clumps and scratch and stab you. The interesting little ones drop out of sight just as you try to grab them.
But I was lucky because if I couldn’t find what I was after there, I had another source. My father kept his fixings old-school-style: neat rows of jam jars and wooden trays divided up into little compartments just waiting for a pilfering child to explore. Such interesting shapes and sizes, every nail designed for its own particular purpose. Most were in steel (some shining, some rusted), but there were others made of brass or copper. There were still plenty of horseshoe nails, square in section and forged long ago by hand (some in our very own forge). Floorboard nails were cut from a flat sheet, and the Victorian ones had hand-forged heads. I had my favourites. I loved the copper riveting nails with their domed roves – perfect little washers – just for their colour and the way your fingers tasted after sifting through them. And fencing staples, those strong, galvanised U-shaped steel nails, the length of a boy’s little finger, designed to attach a wire to a post. I’d find the right size in the end. The nail store at The Old Parsonage was a joy for me and I miss it to this day.
My initial designs turned out to be based on a flawed concept. A heavily armoured go-cart proved both too slow and too cumbersome. As soon as we left the grounds of The Old Parsonage and entered Hall boy territory we became vulnerable. Up to this point our struggle had been territorial, our strength from stealth and camouflage. We were unseen warriors. Although I thoroughly enjoyed
the process of designing and building the armoured go-carts, they had no practical use at all.
There were plenty of hills nearby, so the objective quickly shifted. We’d build for speed instead. A fast, lightweight vehicle would be much more fun. The seasons passed and our go-carts slowly evolved from crude heavy boxy vehicles to beautiful sleek speed machines. We raced the boys from the village, but our stiffest competition came from the children of teachers at Woolverstone Hall. The Hudson boys. They were not technically The Enemy. They were friends, and they were extremely smart. They made fearsomely fast machines and they knew how to ride them. To beat the Hudson boys, I had to build something really special.
The secret of go-cart construction is in the wheels. The back wheels take most weight so they’re the critical ones. A big set of wheels from a posh Mary Poppins pram was as good as you could get. Smaller wheels from a more modern pram would do on the front, and they made it easy to steer, but if you could get really big on the back and medium big on the front, the thing went like a rocket. The only drawback was that the really big wheels were slightly weaker on sharp corners, liable to twist and collapse in extreme conditions. It took months and months of notes and payments for the binmen to leave exactly the right wheels. A beautiful old navy blue perambulator slung on a sprung steel frame with both sets of wheels intact. Each pair was fixed to an axle and welded to the frame. One set was much bigger than the other and on a longer axle. The spokes were taut and they had solid white tyres. Perfect.
The central plank had to be long and strong enough to support two (there was always a pusher and a steerer) but not so solid as to add unnecessary weight. The biggest wheels – ideally about 60cm across – were placed at the back on a supporting piece of wood. Between them, I’d usually make a little dickie seat for the pusher. The driver’s seat was about two-thirds of the way back, built of plywood with sides and a back. If I could lay my hands on the right fabric, I’d even upholster the driver’s seat. The front set of wheels were attached to a short length of wood, the steering plank, bolted at right angles to the big central plank. If you sat in the driver’s seat you could put your feet on it and steer with your legs. This was good on rough ground, or for sharp and sudden manoeuvres. Otherwise the driver sat back and steered with his hands, using a loop of rope tied to either end of the steering plank.
I remember sawing with long, slow strokes, using the whole blade. This was to be my fastest go-cart yet so out of respect I sanded every surface by hand, smoothing off corners and releasing the wood’s fresh piney scent. The next innovation was to add a few greased-up washers to the 4-inch coach-bolt I pushed through once I’d lined up the holes in the main plank and the steering plank. The idea was to make the steering more fluid.
There was no need for a dickie seat this time, so I moved the lightweight driving seat further back to make the steering lighter still. The seat had no sides or padding. This was a sports machine. Then I added a couple of foot rests, one with a pedal connected to a lever on the back wheel, to serve as a rough friction brake. Press down with your foot and a lever would be pulled against the rear wheel with enough force to stop you in an emergency (or at least to slow you down). I tied a loop of soft sash-window cord to either end of the front wheel axles. Hand-steering only. I sat down and tested it, making sure the length was just right. Lifted up the front and spun the wheels with satisfaction. Then I stood back to admire my work. It was certainly looking the part.
Eyes widen each morning when the post arrives. Waiting for the castings to come back can take three or four days, or well over a week. It all depends on how busy the casters are, and how tricky the moulds have proved to cut. Nobody ever says anything, but there’s an air of tentative anticipation in the workshop. You never know if a new piece will work, or whether it may come back slightly different, changed in some mysterious, undefinable way. We stay quiet about this, but we’re all thinking the same thing.
When they do arrive, I often sneak off to my bench and open the packets furtively, on my own, wanting to check the castings myself before anyone else gets a look. The different pieces each arrive in their own little resealable plastic bag. I quickly sift through them.
You can see immediately if the casting has been successful. No ugly undercuts, clear crisp lines and all the detail intact. They are white, a pearly silvery white, and they have the sprues still attached, the channels through which the molten silver flowed down into the mould during the casting. Each sprue has become a short piece of rod, round, about 3mm thick and 1cm long, which will need to be removed.
By now the secret is out and there’s a huddle gathering around me. I move everything onto the central table where we can all get a better look, and six or seven of us start opening the bags to look each piece over carefully, to see what needs to be done. There are sounds of delight and pleasure all around. Secretly, I’m hugely relieved. In this crisp white state, everything looks great, better than the originals in many ways.
Can we help clean them up?
They always ask.
No, I say firmly.
I need to get to know the castings and the only way to do that is to sit at the bench and hurt your fingers doing the job yourself. First the sprues have to be clipped off, and the marks they’ve left filed, then it’s time for emerying, or more likely the micro-motor version of this process, which we call rubber-wheeling. I check each casting under a loupe, looking for flashing – the tell-tale lines where perhaps the two halves of the mould haven’t fitted together quite perfectly, and silver has leaked out. Some pieces will need retexturing in places. Others will need hand polishing.
Before we get to that stage, I chuck the cleaned-up castings into the pin polisher – a huge spinning magnet in a box – into which I also put a cupful or so of tiny steel pins, and some soap compound. The magnet spins the pins, and they do the first polishing for you. It takes hours. I hate waiting, and I’m always tempted to pull them out too early, eager for the next stage of design. The more complex pieces, which involve more than one casting, still have to be constructed, though. In this collection, that means the bikes, of course, and a couple of tiny picnic baskets.
Ten little bicycles. All good. In fact, they look better than I could have hoped, even better than the original. Things look different in groups. Seeing ten of a new design turns it into a production. Craft becomes manufacture and that’s what I love. It’s like looking at cars on a factory floor, all lined up to be sprayed, or polished, or tested. It’s trade. It’s industry.
Our races took two main routes. The marina road, which I’d later cycle down with Sally by my side, had a good straight half-mile of steep sloping concrete road and some interesting side roads to negotiate. At the bottom was a nasty sharp blind bend at the bottom, just where it wrapped around the Cat House. The building on the river was said to be named after the china cat its first owner used to put in the window to signal the all-clear to smugglers.
Then there was the long circular drive of Woolverstone Hall, which snaked down and round in a great circle, rejoining itself by the cinder track to the church. It was beautifully tarmacked and had three steep hills. The whole circuit could be raced in two-man teams, the pusher hopping off and pushing on the straights or up a hill, and leaping onto the dickie seat for the downhill runs. For a solo rider the ultimate challenge was to attempt the two steepest hills on the Hall circuit and survive the hairpin bend that connected them. The steepest hill of all started just where an old disused avenue of trees met the tarmac drive. At the bottom, there was a crossroads, and it was the right-hand turning that you wanted. Right on the corner was an old Nissen hut called the Animal House, where schoolboys kept their pets. You couldn’t negotiate that bend without slowing right down, so we had to choose between cutting in front of the Animal House on smooth grass or ducking behind it where the ground was considerably rougher.
Word had got round about the first speed trials, so a few boys from the village were already hanging around by the Animal House w
hen Roddy and I arrived, pulling the go-cart behind us. Standing at the brow and looking down, I felt nervous. I wasn’t sure how effective my footbrake mechanism would prove. Could those great back wheels actually turn such a sharp corner without collapsing? Roddy claimed the driving seat. Part of me was hoping to try it out myself the first time, but my role was always chief mechanic and engineer. And if I was sitting in the go-cart, how could I judge how well it was working?
It was a long run-up, me pushing, Roddy steering. As we topped the brow of the hill, gravity quickly took over. My legs couldn’t keep up so, with a final shove, I let it fly. Down the hill he flew, leaning backwards, steering ropes taut. What a sight! It was superbly fast. This cart bettered anything we’d built yet. But at that speed there was no hope of making the corner.
Suddenly, to my horror, Roddy decided to pull right and cut round behind the Animal House. At break-neck speed the go-cart left the smooth tarmac and swerved onto the grass. Steering hard to the right, he was pulling on the ropes like Jesse James on his horse. I could see sods of earth and grass spraying off the wheels. He hit the first hummock, bounced into the air and landed, still turning hard to the right, still accelerating. A great mass of debris was thrown up as he thumped down. Flying down the hill, still gaining speed, he was now nearly halfway to reaching the safety of the tarmac of the second hill.
At this point he hit another slight hump, beyond which the ground dropped away. The go-cart went flying into the air as if in slow motion. My heart stopped. Go-cart and rider thumped down on the front left wheel. The wheel collapsed immediately. Its nose dug in to the soft grass with such force that the go-cart flipped and sent Roddy spinning into the air, along with broken wheels and torn-up turf. The go-cart flipped again and bounced several times before ending up wheel-less on the tarmac road. Roddy landed chin first, in a patch of stinging nettles and brambles, as heavy and lifeless as a sack of potatoes. I thought I couldn’t move, but then I heard my own scream break through.