by Alan Davies
The engine did run a little hot and I would have to make sure I didn’t touch my jeans against it as there was a clear fire risk. If I went through a puddle a cloud of steam would billlow around me as the water hit the engine. Eventually, blasting down the hill into Loughton after another flatout, full-throttle-the-whole-way journey back from Epping, I heard a ‘ping’ and the engine lost power. When I took the cylinder head off in the garage, there was a hole the size of a halfpenny in the top of the piston. Tiny shards of piston were everywhere down inside the cylinder. The whole engine would need to be cleaned out. As only a moron would, I took a wet cloth to the inside of the cylinder and tried to wipe away pieces of metal.
It was going to be too big a job for me. I’d have to take the whole crank case apart. I was too lazy to try, so took the coward’s way out and told my dad the bike had ‘broken down’. When it came back from Woodford Motorcycles fully operational at a cost of £200 (it cost £400 new) the mechanic there told my dad that the engine had completely rusted up. I feigned ignorance and felt the shame of my idleness and my ham-fisted introduction of water to the machinery.
Meanwhile, down at the Reindeer, a plan was afoot to ride up to the British Motorcycle Grand Prix at Silverstone.
Four of us went on three bikes with me on the back of an XL250. The numbness in my behind was absolute by the time we reached the circuit. My buttocks could have been gnawed off by badgers and I’d have felt nothing. We put the bikes into three sides of a square and hung a fly sheet over them to sleep under. Approximately two million inches of rain fell on Northamptonshire that night. No one could sleep so people amused themselves by sliding prodigious distances through the mud on their bellies. Water raced down the sides of the lanes knee deep. The flysheet reduced the rain to a fine mist which we slept in.
The next day was Sunday, 1 August, and one rider turned up with a new bike carrying the brand new Y plate. How he managed to pick up a new bike on a Sunday made for a fascinating discussion.
We looked for a spot near Stowe or Club corner and dried out in the sun, waiting for the main event, the 500 cc race. Everyone wanted to see Barry Sheene race against Kenny Roberts, the legendary American rider who had taken Sheene’s World Championship title in 1978 and won it again in ’79 and ’80. Sheene was adored by all the British fans but secretly we all felt Roberts, with his remarkably smooth, almost cruising, knee-down riding style, may have been the better rider. They were friends and rivals. Sheene had memorably flicked the Vs at Roberts while passing him in the British Grand Prix three years previously, though Roberts came back to win.
Unfortunately for us, but more for him, Sheene couldn’t race. He’d collided with a fallen bike at 175 mph in practice and the bones in his legs had been smashed to pieces. X-rays after surgery appeared to show a Meccano set holding him together.
We could hear the bikes on the other side of the track but the tannoy was hard to understand. There was a roar of engines as they set off. There would be a minute or so before they arrived. In the distance, as the first bikes appeared, we could see a tall column of smoke rising up. The bikes roared past us, the engines screaming as the riders changed down through the gears for the corner and then up again to blast away. There was no Kenny Roberts. The riders came round again on the second lap but there was still no Roberts. Perhaps he was the cause of that column of smoke? No one knew if he was injured or not. No one knew if he was dead or not. Barry Sheene was already lying in a hospital bed. A few weeks earlier, many riders had boycotted the French Grand Prix because the track was unsafe. The race was loud and exciting but I didn’t hear who’d won over the tannoy (it was Franco Uncini, who would take the title that year).
Later we heard that Roberts was injured but alive. He raced brilliantly again the next season, winning six races but losing the title to ‘Fast’ Freddie Spencer (always my favourite nickname that).
Riding home, we lost our way and ended up being buffeted by winds on a newly opened section of the M25 which was being built a few miles away from Loughton. One of my stepbrother’s friends, a nineteen-year-old lad called Adrian, who had lodged with my stepmum and stepbrother over the road from us until our families merged, lived in a caravan out near the construction site. One morning he was found dead next to his bike up there. He’d been riding on the construction site without a helmet, possibly chasing a thief away from the caravan site. Security patrols, which should have been hourly, did not find him and may have saved him had they done so. But they didn’t and he died.
By this time I was attending Loughton College and I went in that morning dressed all in black with the intention of heading up to Parndon Wood Crematorium and Cemetery for the funeral.
In the end I didn’t go. I couldn’t face it and didn’t want to turn up on a bike and upset anyone. He had been estranged from his parents but my stepmum went to see them and persuaded them to attend. There was a huge turnout. My memory of Adrian is of the two of us, sitting on our bikes outside the Chariot chip shop in Loughton, with me laughing and laughing while he picked the corner of his bag of chips away to let the pint of vinegar he liked to add drain out. He was always smiling and it was unbearably sad when he went.
I’d come to know Parndon Wood. Another friend and fellow fizzy rider lived near to it. Everyone called him Ernie because of a past resemblance to the Sesame Street character. We used to ride around together, often to see the pretty girls, both called Anna, we liked to chat to down at the stables in Buckhurst Hill.
Ernie sold me a Beeline race exhaust which made my bike satisfyingly loud. People could hear you coming from miles around. When leaving the Gardeners Arms in Loughton, having given ‘backies’ up and down York Hill to ra-ra-skirted fourteen-year-old beauties from school like Natalie Clarke, I would rev my noisy exhaust and ride away with a cigarette dangling from my lip. Fifty yards down the road, it would be necessary to stop and rub hot fag ash from my eye.
Ernie too had a noisy pipe on his bike. He pulled up outside my house one day and my dad appeared:
‘That’s far too noisy,’ he said.
‘No it isn’t,’ said Ernie.
‘Yes it is,’ said dad
‘No it isn’t,’ said Ernie.
I knew Ernie could go on like this because when he’d sold me the exhaust he’d asked for £10 and I’d said:
‘Nine.’
He then said:
‘Eleven.’
I said:
‘Nine.’
He said:
‘Twelve.’
I said:
‘You can’t say that.’
He said:
‘Yes I can.’
I gave him ten.
‘Far, far too noisy,’ said my dad, going indoors as if to end the argument.
‘No it isn’t,’ said Ernie, grinning at me.
Ernie asked me where my real mum was and I told him she had died of leukaemia. He asked me where she was buried and I said I thought she was in Harlow. I hadn’t attended the funeral. It was coming up to the tenth anniversary of her death. Ernie said there was a cemetery at the end of his road in Harlow and did I want to go up and look for her? I said I did so we went.
Parndon Wood has a modern crematorium with fields full of headstones sloping away from it. All around the back of the building is the wood itself.
We went down and began to look along all the graves, looking for my mum’s. There were dozens of headstones, row after row. We split up to look but there was no sign of her anywhere. We walked up the slope to see if there was anybody around to ask. There didn’t appear to be a funeral going on that day. Eventually a middle-aged man with a concerned expression came out to see what we wanted. I said I was looking for my mum’s grave. He said that, as it was a Sunday, there was no one about and everything was locked up. There was a moment’s silence. Then he asked me if I knew the date she had died.
‘August 22nd 1972,’ I said.
He opened up an odd little room that stood alone and housed the Book of Remembranc
e. I thumbed through it and came to 22 August. There was my mum’s name. It was a relief to know she was there. Assuming she’d been cremated, we were directed into the wood where an area had been divided into months of the year. We scoured August for a little plaque where an urn might be buried, or for a small flower holder, as some had names and dates on. There was still no sign of her. Nor was her name engraved on any of the commemorative benches. I wondered if her ashes had been scattered. After a while, we thanked the man who had shown us the Book of Remembrance, took our bikes and rode away as quietly as our exhaust pipes would allow.
Michael Foot
The heaviest thing in the cold store at Doug Smith’s greengrocer’s on Loughton High Road was a green net sack of eight white cabbages. Great heavy solid football-size things they were, much more difficult to carry than sacks of spuds because one or two could slip within the netting, shifting a good part of the weight suddenly, causing you to stagger as you emerged into the shop itself. Serial killers must have similar problems when disposing of bin liners full of heads in Epping Forest.
After my first week working for Doug, I received my first ever pay packet, £55. Unprecedented wealth! I went straight to the little clothes shop at the bottom of Church Hill to buy two shirts that didn’t suit me in any way.
Doug was my stepmum’s best friend’s husband. I’d been told that I would be allowed to leave school early only if had a job to go to. The greengrocer’s was it.
l preferred it to school: using the big old scales, twirling paper bags, doing arithmetic, saying, ‘Can I help you?’ to old ladies wth tartan shopping trolleys and a keen eye for an apricot.
On a Tuesday for some reason, no one came in and it was boring, but never as boring as school.
A regular customer was Len Murray’s wife. Len Murray was General Secretary of the TUC from 1973 to 1984. There were so many labour disputes during that time, particularly with the Winter of Discontent, that Mr Murray was often on the news and, along with Terry Venables, he was Loughton’s best-known resident (such people were not called celebrities then). Later in life Mr Murray became Baron Murray of Epping Forest.
Since I’d joined a new group calling itself Epping Forest Young Socialists, I could have passed a message to Len: ‘You’re not the only lefty in Loughton.’ He might have liked that, but I don’t remember him ever coming in the shop. Mrs Murray was in charge of veg while the Gen Sec was going toe to toe with Thatcher and the Tories.
In the sixth-form common room I had been a CND-supporting ‘Commie’ to some. Though actually, we spent all our time playing four-card brag, and I’d decided against communism. As a pathological hoarder, with no capacity to tolerate loss, no matter how insignificant, the concept of ‘all property is theft’ was anathema to me. My intolerance of loss also meant I took no pleasure in gambling. Even when I won I couldn’t enjoy it since people almost never paid up and that felt like a loss.
I decided to be a Socialist since this was a movement that accommodated my three principal concerns:
1 A passionate anti-public school stance with pyromaniac tendencies towards said schools.
2 Going to see The Jam at CND benefits.
3 Being Leader of the Opposition to my dad.
The first meeting of the Epping Forest Young Socialists was mentioned in the local newspaper, the Gazette. I showed it to my dad:
‘That’s where I went on Tuesday night,’ I challenged.
He sighed wearily and went to watch telly. I stuck the clipping to my wall.
When I decided to leave school I called round at the Gazette’s offices in Loughton to offer my services. Bafflingly, they declined.
I was adamant that I was going to leave school though, despite this knockback. A couple of my best friends were leaving and it was proving a waste of my time and my dad’s money.
Economics was suffocatingly tedious. It was taught in a Liverpudlian monotone, tinged with menace, by Mr Pearson, who wore brown and cream two-tone shoes, with a pale-blue three-piece suit, topped off with a thick blond moustache and permed hair, grown longish to distract from his bald patch. He droned at us, suppressing his murderous rage, and we took notes. He usually looked out of the window rather than at his pitiful pupils. The good thing about him was that he didn’t give a toss if you bunked off. It was your loss as far as he was concerned. He also liked Hill Street Blues, which he said was the only decent American TV show and the best thing on television. It was, I agreed, though my dad and brother hated it. I had perked up but he didn’t elaborate. Despite liking him after that, I still bunked off.
I did have a last hurrah as a public schoolboy in the shape of a geography field trip to the Isle of Arran. Twenty of us slept in a dormitory shared with six lads from a school in Keswick. One night me and one of the Keswick boys snuck in to the nearby girls’ dorm. I was keen to fumble around in the dark with a particular girl from a Bradford school with peroxide blonde hair and a mini-skirt. Once we were inside their pitch-black dorm, the door opened and one of their teachers appeared.
‘Ooh, Sir,’ squealed the Bradford lasses, ‘we’re not decent! Don’t put t’light on! We’re in t’nude! You’ll see us! Have you come in to see us in us knickers, Sir?’
Me and the lad from Cumbria stood unspied in the dark.
Hanging around with the Bradford girls was fun but it did mean missing a night in the pub. Our dorm was in the roof and, on their return, one of our drunken class leant out of the skylight to be sick. We held his ankles until one of our teachers came in when we instantly let go leaving him inches from tipping out. We distracted the teacher by swaying from side to side, as he was clearly the worse for wear himself, and we wanted him to think the room was moving.
Later that week that same kid, while sleepwalking, climbed into the bed of a boy who was covered in such coarse body hair we called him Trog. When Trog awoke he found the school’s biggest poser and wannabe ladies’ man in his bed.
I hadn’t laughed so much in a week since the previous year’s ski trip. Whenever we were let off our usually tight leash there was chaotic and gleeful misbehaviour. It had always been the same on school trips. Within the school the regime was petty-minded, patronizing and sadistic if you didn’t toe the line. Given the slightest slack few of us had a sense of social responsibility or self-restraint. We’d been treated the same way since we were eleven and our emotional development had stopped then. Institutionalized people struggle to function in the outside world and under no circumstances should they be in charge of anything until they can do so. Like camps holding prisoners of war in Iraq for example.
There was a feeling of a split in Britain and posh schools like mine were on the wrong side of the line for me. Margaret Thatcher was the most unpopular prime minister since polls began, but everyone I knew, rather than being enraged by Thatcher, instead regarded Michael Foot’s leadership of the Labour Party as a joke.
The previous year, Michael Foot had worn what was regarded as an inappropriate coat to a Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph. It was universally described as a donkey jacket (it wasn’t). The queen mother famously complimented him on his choice, as it was cold, but the Tory press savaged him as scruffy and disrespectful to those who had made the ultimate sacrifice.
During the war, Foot had trained as an assassin, as part of a group, known as ‘scallywags’, who were prepared to risk their lives to kill English collaborators in the event of a successful Nazi invasion.
Remembrance Sunday came only a couple of weeks after I’d stood amongst a quarter of a million people in Hyde Park to hear Michael Foot, a founder member of CND, speak passionately and eloquently on the subject of unilateral nuclear disarmament to cheering and applause. He seemed genuinely moved by the sheer numbers and I found his inherent grandfatherly decency endearing and worthy of respect. He was erudite, considered and inspiring but he faced a bullying barrage from the press.
With a desperately unpopular prime minister, and a hugely popular peace movement, it seemed, to my na�
�ve eyes, that Labour could win a general election. Michael Foot would become prime minister and Britain would lead the world in efforts to eradicate both nuclear weapons and poverty.
Unfortunately, such a scenario was unthinkable to the press, whose influence was enormous. Furthermore, the SDP breakaway gathered strength and terminally split the potential Labour vote. On top of that, Argentina invaded the Falklands and England (described as Britain by Mrs Thatcher) went into a patriotic fervour as a task force was dispatched, placing thousands of forces personnel at risk of death in the South Atlantic.
I found a postcard at one demo that contrasted the front page of the Morning Star and the front page of the Daily Mail, the day after HMS Antelope’s magazines had exploded, due to an Argentinian bomb landing on board, during the Falklands War. Both publications carried the same picture which showed the ship illuminated by a vast spray of flame and sparks.
The headline in the Morning Star read:
SENSELESS SACRIFICE
The Daily Mail read:
ANTELOPE DIES IN A BLAZE OF GLORY
Now the Tories were making a comeback. A victorious war led to some (Tories) comparing Thatcher to Winston Churchill. Foot was portrayed as a disorientated, unpatriotic pensioner, unfit to hold office. His sympathies lay with the victims of the Tories’ policies, in particular the hundreds of thousands who had lost their jobs as an economic recession culled the workforce.
Foot’s treatment by the press seemed heinously unjust and even anti-democratic. A principled, intellectual orator, author and political philosopher, with decades of knowledge and wisdom to draw on, was trampled underfoot, having already suffered the self-interested betrayal of the defecting Labour members who went on to waste their political careers in the SDP.
The following year there was no chance for Labour. Thatcher was re-elected by a landslide. Michael Foot resigned to be replaced by a younger man, fellow unilateralist Neil Kinnock, who had given many rousing speeches that Foot doubtless approved of.