Free Country: A Penniless Adventure the Length of Britain

by George Mahood

  Nice. I liked Ben’s approach. He was basically telling this guy that by lending us a speedboat, he would be doing his bit for good ol’ Blighty.

  ‘Sounds fun,’ said the man, a little bemused and still unsure of what Ben wanted.

  ‘Would it be possible,’ continued Ben, ‘for us to rent a speedboat, for free, so that we can fully experience St Ives?’

  ‘Errr, ok,’ said the man, not really knowing what else to say.

  ‘I can’t find the accelerator,’ I said to St Ives’ version of CJ from Baywatch who had helped us into the boat. Unfortunately, though, she was a he and he had considerably more chest hair, though with similar sized boobs.

  ‘There is no accelerator,’ he said. ‘It has a fixed speed and you pull this cord to stop it.’

  ‘Shit,’ whispered Ben, ‘this thing might get out of control.’ In reality, he need not have worried. I could have swum faster than that boat. Its slowness was excruciating. Still, we were cruising around the bay in a ‘speedboat’ we had borrowed for free. We couldn’t complain.

  It was in these very waters that a great white shark was supposedly spotted in August 2007. Experts were quick to point out that it was more likely to be a harmless porbeagle shark or a basking shark. At around the same time, there were similar sightings of a great white shark in Newquay. 52-year-old security guard Kevin Keeble came forward with a picture depicting a great white with bloodied teeth, fresh from a kill. He claimed to have taken the picture in the waters off Newquay and the local paper ran the photo on its front page. The story was soon featured in The Sun and various other national media. Kevin Keeble later admitted that the photo had been taken during a fishing trip in South Africa and he had only meant it as a joke.

  The most exciting thing we saw on our boat trip was a dead seagull. Well, we assumed it was dead. Either that or it was swimming on its back, with its head underwater, and a hole in its body.

  We spoke to CJ for a while after returning the boat, and asked him if he had any suggestions of where we might find some bikes.

  ‘There’s a farm a few miles out of St Ives where a guy does up old bikes to sell,’ he said. ‘His name is Badcock. Roger Badcock.’ Ben sniggered at the name. ‘Be warned, though, he’s quite a strange bloke and if he invites you in for a cup of tea, I would definitely refuse.’

  ‘How come?’ asked Ben, still grinning at the name Roger Badcock.

  ‘Put it this way. It’s the kind of house where you have to wipe your feet on the way out.’

  We had clothes and shoes, but there were a few other supplies that we thought we would need along the way. First up was an ice cream. Yes, I know an ice cream is hardly a necessity, but we were at the seaside and everyone was eating them. As the old adage goes: ‘When in St Ives, do as the St Ivans do’. With a bit of sweet-talking we got two delicious Cornish ice creams from a very puzzled lady in the ice cream shop.

  We prepared ourselves a mental shopping list.

  2 x toothbrushes

  1 x toothpaste

  Towel

  Soap

  Plasters for our blisters

  It seemed like a fairly modest selection of provisions. Acquiring such supplies in a busy seaside town was going to prove difficult, so we decided to ask at different shops for each item.

  First up was Boots, the ‘popular high street chemist’. We spoke to the manager - a young, pretty, smiley lady, which is always a bonus. She seemed mildly amused when we told her what we were up to and explained why we were dressed so ridiculously. We asked first of all for a couple of their cheapest toothbrushes, and without hesitation she walked off and returned with a pack of Boots value toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste.

  ‘I assume you’ll need this toothpaste, too. Anything else?’ she asked. We were shocked. We had expected a cold response from the recognised high street chains. We imagined that a strict policy structure would be in place that would prevent people like us walking in off the street and getting things for free.

  ‘That’s brilliant. Thanks,’ I said. ‘Could you spare a small packet of plasters?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said and asked one of the other members of staff to pass her a packet of plasters from behind the counter. She probably would have given us everything on our list, but we decided to leave it at that and try elsewhere for the rest of our things.

  There was another local chemist just up the road and we went in and asked for some soap. The man behind the counter disappeared down into the basement and emerged a few moments later holding a bottle of rather expensive looking shower gel, two gigantic beach towels and two t-shirts.

  ‘Here you go, lads,’ he said. ‘Do you have towels already? If not then I’m sure these will be useful.’

  ‘We don’t have towels, but they were on our list. Thank you so much,’ said Ben, open-mouthed. I mean open-mouthed as in ‘surprised’. He obviously talks with his mouth open. If he had been a ventriloquist I would have mentioned that earlier.

  ‘You’re welcome. We get them free from companies when they’re trying to promote a new product. You can have the t-shirts, too.’ The t-shirts were huge white ones with a sun cream logo on the front and the words ‘Surf’s up’ on the back. We had only been on the road for a day and a half, but the sight of a clean white t-shirt that didn’t have any traces of mould was unbelievably appealing.

  We decided to go and have a swim in the sea, give ourselves a bit of a wash and then change into our ‘Sunday best’. It was Sunday after all, and it was only right that we dressed for the occasion. We wheeled our bikes and an armload of new belongings back down to the harbour.

  There were already a few kids swimming in the sea and we sat on the harbour wall to try and repack our bags. Two young boys, aged about seven and nine, were taking it in turns to ride their scooter down the long boat ramp and into the water. It was a pink Barbie scooter and they soon noticed our superior WWF scooter leaning against the wall, and they eyed it with envy. They realised that their scooter was totally uncool, and that ours was the daddy.

  ‘How about we show these mini Evil Knievels a thing or two about scootering,’ suggested Ben.

  ‘I’m not even sure that ‘scootering’ is a word, but yeah, I reckon we could definitely teach them how to do it properly,’ I said.

  Ben took the scooter and I took the BMX and we readied ourselves at the top of the ramp. The boys stood back and looked on in awe. Ben and I looked at the boys, nodded at each other, and then set off down the ramp.

  We crashed into the water in spectacular fashion. The water was absolutely freezing, but we pretended it wasn’t. We swam around for a few minutes and did our best to clean ourselves as much as possible. Ben swam out a little further and I started to follow him.

  ‘Don’t come any closer,’ he said. ‘I’m doing a piss.’

  We fished our bikes out of the sea, and then dried off with our matching towels, hung our matching boxer shorts out in the sun to dry and put on our crispy clean matching t-shirts. We made a lovely couple.

  Realistically, we should have cut one of the gigantic towels in half there and then and taken half each, but they were so nice and lavish that we decided to try and keep them both.

  The two boys, who must have been brothers, approached us and started pointing erratically at our bike and scooter.

  ‘You want to borrow ours?’ I asked.

  They nodded eagerly and started pointing frantically at the sea.

  ‘You want to ride our bikes into the sea?’ asked Ben.

  They nodded even more excitedly.

  ‘I think they’re deaf,’ said Ben.

  They started signing to each other and it became apparent that they were not only deaf, but also mute. They picked up our bike and scooter and spent the next ten minutes riding down the ramp into the sea. At one point, one of the boys wheeled the BMX over to me and started stamping his feet, pointing at the bike’s chain and then waving his finger at me. The chain had fallen off and it was clearly my fault. I reattached the ch
ain and they carried on. They may have been a little rude, but Ben and I felt a sense of well-being that we had been generous to two disadvantaged children. This proved to be a huge mistake.

  ‘Where have our bikes gone?’ I asked Ben after a while.

  ‘They’re around somewhere. One of the boys is still there.’

  ‘But the other boy isn’t there and neither are our bikes.’

  ‘I’ll go and speak to him,’ said Ben, who got up and walked over to the younger of the two boys.

  ‘Where did you put our bike and scooter?’ he asked, using gestures to ensure that he would understand.

  The boy shrugged his shoulders and started to walk off.

  ‘Then where is your brother?’

  The boy shrugged again and continued walking. His brother soon appeared and gave the same expressions when we asked him what had happened to our scooter and BMX.

  ‘We’re not leaving them, Ben,’ I said, getting up off the harbour wall to join him. ‘Let’s follow them until they show us where the bikes are.’

  The older brother began to make gestures to show that they were going home and then they started to run.

  We ran after them.

  I noticed that the younger of the two brothers had to collect his shoes from the wall on the way past, and I got there before him and grabbed them. Now, this may seem cruel to steal a poor little deaf-mute boy’s shoes, but you have to trust me, those boys were evil.

  I held his shoes in the air and he jumped to try and retrieve them.

  ‘You’ll get them back when we get our bikes back,’ I said like a primary school teacher.

  We followed the boys for a few minutes along the waterfront and we soon saw the BMX propped against a wall on a nearby street.

  ‘I thought you didn’t know where the bikes were, you little shits?’ Ben shouted angrily.

  The boys smirked.

  ‘Tell us where the other one is,’ I demanded.

  The older boy started pointing in the direction of Land’s End, back down the coast.

  ‘OK, then show us where,’ I said.

  He shook his head and started pointing the other way, as if to say they lived in the other direction.

  ‘Well we’re going wherever you go,’ I said.

  He stamped his feet again.

  They lead us out of the harbour and round into the next bay. Sure enough, after about five minutes he pointed out the scooter, which was propped up behind a dustbin. The older boy held up his hands as if to say: ‘I have no idea how that got there.’

  It was absolutely astonishing. We had nearly been robbed by two little kids. There we were, on a ‘niceness tour’ of Great Britain, and the two most innocent and vulnerable people we had met had taken full advantage of our generosity and tried to steal our BMX and scooter. They needed to face the consequences.

  We reported them to the police and after a lengthy and expensive court case they were ordered to serve eight years in a juvenile correctional facility.

  ‘Now clear off, both of you,’ is what I actually said, before handing the younger brother his shoes back. They gave us both a sarcastic smirk then turned and walked off to find their next victims.

  ‘You really showed them,’ Ben said with a chuckle.

  It was strange how attached to the bike and scooter we had become in less than a day. They were possibly the most rubbish form of transport that ever existed, but to us they were priceless. They were more than just bikes, they were our method of getting from A to B quicker than on foot, and without them we would have been back where we started. I mean that metaphorically, of course. We weren’t playing some role-playing game that would have meant going back to Land’s End if our bikes were stolen.

  Another group of older boys had been hanging around the harbour and had witnessed our pursuit of the boys. One of them approached us and asked what we were up to.

  ‘I know where there’s a bike you can have,’ he said excitedly. ‘There’s one up by Co-op. It’s been there for weeks and we just use it for messing around on. I’ll go and get it for you.’

  Before we even had a chance to ask whose it was, or where it had come from, he had turned and ran up one of the narrow streets into town, still wearing his dripping wetsuit. He had restored our faith in humanity. One minute ‘the youth of today’ were robbing us of our beloved bikes, and the next they were sprinting barefoot across town to help us out.

  He returned about five minutes later wheeling what looked from a distance to be a decent looking mountain bike. On closer inspection, it was an unbelievable pile of shit.

  ‘It’ll need a bit of work,’ he said, ‘but you’re welcome to take it if you want it. I don’t think it belongs to anyone.’

  There were no pedals, no chain, no brake cables or brake pads. The back wheel was severely buckled, neither tyre had an inner tube and the saddle was missing. It did have a functioning bell, though. We felt really bad turning down a bike, but the amount of work that this one required to make it useable meant that we would have taken a huge step backwards.

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said, ‘but it looks like it needs too much work. We can’t spend any money and it would take too much time and effort for someone to fix this up for us.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks mate,’ said Ben. ‘We really appreciate the offer, but I think we’ll stick with what we’ve got, for now, and hold up for something better. Apparently there’s a bloke who lives just out of St Ives who has a lot of bikes at his farm.’

  ‘Yeah, his name’s Roger Badcock,’ said the boy. Ben sniggered again at the mention of his name. ‘And no worries about the bike. I don’t think it’s worth you guys keeping it. I just thought I’d show it to you. Good luck with the rest of your trip.’

  We gathered our stuff together and tied our boxer shorts to our rucksacks so they could finish drying. Yes, we were both going commando. In a pair of thick woollen suit trousers, it felt incredibly liberating.

  The road out of St Ives climbed steeply away from the sea. We walked for about a mile as there was simply no point trying to ride the scooter up hills. It was slower, and far more exhausting than walking.

  The road then reached a plateau before descending gradually into the village of Lelant. We found Roger Badcock’s house fairly easily after piecing together a variety of directions from different people.

  His house was a sort of permanent mobile home, if such a paradox is possible. It was on the edge of a patch of wasteland and the door was protected with a mesh fly screen. The whole place was straight out of a 1970s horror film.

  We knocked on the door. There was no answer.

  I had held out great hope for Mr Badcock, and despite Ben suggesting we try a few places in the built up metropolis that was St Ives, I was adamant that Roger was our man.

  We turned to leave and hung our heads in defeat. It was already 5pm and it was unlikely we would find bikes anywhere else that day.

  ‘I guess we’ll just have to head into the next village and look for…’ I started, before being interrupted with a voice behind us.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Roger Badcock was standing in his doorway. He was over six feet tall and his bulk filled every inch of the doorframe. He was wearing a green polo shirt that was covered in various stains. His hair receded almost to the back of his scalp; he had a huge shock of black hair spraying out from behind in all directions and a wonderful handlebar moustache.

  ‘Hi there, we’re really sorry to disturb you,’ I said. ‘Are you Mr Badcock?’

  Ben sniggered to himself.

  ‘Aye,’ said Mr Badcock. ‘That’s me.’

  ‘We’ve been told by several people that you might be able to help us out,’ said Ben. ‘We’re cycling to John O’Groats without spending any money and we were wondering if there was any chance that we could swap these bikes for something a bit more suitable for long distance cycling.’

  There was a pause while his tried to clean his smeared glasses on his t-shirt which only mad
e them worse.

  ‘Well I don’t know if I have got anything suitable at the moment,’ he said, ‘but we can have a look.’ Roger stepped down from his house with a mammoth struggle. He swaggered across the driveway and unlocked the door to the adjacent barn.

  The building was packed full of bike parts. There were whole bikes, half bikes, bike wheels, chains, inner tubes, saddles of all shapes and sizes; they hung from the ceiling, they were piled against the wall and they were strewn across the floor. We followed Roger into the barn and Ben turned to me, clenched his fist and mouthed the words: ‘Oh. My. God.’ We were in bike heaven.

  ‘How come you’ve got so many bikes?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s just a hobby of mine really. I can’t work because of illness, so I repair bikes. I don’t really make any money from them but it keeps me busy.’

  ‘So what sort of bike are you after?’ he panted, clearly worn out by the 20-metre walk from his house.

  ‘Whatever you can spare,’ said Ben. ‘We’re looking for anything that’s better than the scooter and BMX that we have.’

  He patrolled the barn like a General, grabbing hold of the occasional bike and weighing up in his mind whether he could part with it, and whether it was suitable for our needs.

  On his second lap of the barn he paused at a small, lurid pink girls’ mountain bike.

  ‘You can have this,’ he said, ‘but it’s probably not the kind of thing you’re... ’

  ‘It’s perfect,’ I said, before he had finished his sentence.

  Despite its appearance, it seemed like a decent bike. All the various bits looked to be in place and it appeared to have several gears. It was slightly on the small size, but it was a huge upgrade from either of our other bikes.

  ‘That’s probably all I can offer you,’ said Roger. ‘All the other ones are either unfinished or I don’t want to part with them.’

  ‘You’ve been extremely generous to give us this one,’ I said.