My Brother's Bicycle

1976

Used Cars

I’d moved back to London after a brief spell in Manchester where I had ended up when a friend and I had decided we needed to leave the stultifying surroundings of our small town in Kent. Everyone from our area with any ambition of a more exciting life went to London so, just to be different we made the, in retrospect, for me at least, unwise decision to head further from home and settle in Manchester. There I’d lived in the suburb of Eccles for a while in a six-pounds-a-week, depressing bedsit with my old school friend John. Fairly soon after our arrival and, despite his close resemblance to a frog, John managed to find a girlfriend and spent most of his time with her, leaving me dejected and alone in our sad little room. I survived for a few months listening to the radio, writing long letters and bad poetry, but one chill December morn I'd had enough. I packed my few belongings and took a bus to Victoria bus station in London (the train was too expensive). There I hooked up with another friend from my schooldays, Ray. He was working in central London and shared a house with a group of schoolteacher acquaintances in an outer suburb of the sprawling capital. The house was already pretty full but they found room for me in a corner of one of the bedrooms. I laid out my sleeping bag, hung my few clothes in an already overfull wardrobe and called it home for a while. My presence decreased their rent and everybody, except the landlord, seemed happy with the arrangement. For a while at least.

I found a job in a car dealership in north London. Stoke Newington at the time was an interesting cultural melting pot. It consisted mainly of people who followed the Jewish faith and many descendants of immigrants from the Caribbean. This mix did not meet with my white supremacist boss’ approval at all. The blatantly racist manager, who hailed from South Africa, took a shine to me for some reason. It may have been something to do with my borrowed suit, the trousers of which finished a good three inches above my shoes. In fact there were plans for me to accompany him on a tour of the North West. A return to the scene of the crime or as Henry would have put it, the street of early sorrows. None of this happened, as I only lasted three weeks in the job. No-one had told me I would have to work long hours including weekends and that I would only earn any real money if I actually sold a car. The short period I spent in London’s multi-cultural northern suburb proved that selling anything was not my forté.

The East Ender

Apart from the unlikely existence of a burning desire to ride an ancient tandem across Europe with a stranger, one of the many reasons I embarked on my adventure was the fact that I did not feel, as has happened many times in my life, that my present employment was really what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, or indeed even close. Sometimes I did not even want to do it for the rest of the day.

Before signing up with Alan as second pedaller and assistant navigator on his exploration of Europe, I had spent six months employed by a ‘finance’ company which had its office in Oxford Street. One of the reasons I took the job was the location of the office, very close to the renowned and still extant 100 Club, the music venue where many famous bands had appeared even though it was only slightly bigger than most of its patrons' bed-sits. The Rolling Stones did a gig or two there when they were well into their fame and it’s said that if you were there, you’re lying. I had visions of bumping into Mick or Keef, fresh from rehearsal, as I left for home after another dull day of pen pushing and phone dialling. Needless to say it never happened.

Full details of how I had ended up as a trainee manager for what was, despite its lofty title, nothing more than a loan company, would not make interesting reading. Despite my scraggly beard and still being under the company's minimum employment age of twenty-one, a ruling doubtless laid down by some lackey in Human Resources (more accurately called Personnel in those days) to be considered for the job, after a short interview I was hired. The office manager was a gentle soul. Somehow, he saw past my badly matched, ill-fitting jacket and trousers, my never-fashionable yellow knitted tie, to the caring, conscientious, mature-beyond-my-years spirit that lay beneath.

I shaved off the beard and bought a new tie. Graham, my new boss and mentor, signed some sort of indemnity for the pen pushers in HR. And I was in. Glamorous as it may sound the job wasn't quite as impressive as I had led my parents to believe. I spent most of my time dialling the last known phone numbers of debtors. Having invariably failed to make contact with the penurious ones – He’s out. He’s moved out and left the kids here; why don’t you take them? Died. – I would place a tick in the relevant box and move on to some other struggling soul. The most exciting period of my traineeship was the three months I spent on the road. ‘On the Road’ conjures up images of exciting adventures like those of Sven Hedin or Livingstone and, my namesake, Henry Morton Stanley.

Not exactly. I was not the first European to enter Tibet. Nor did I discover the source of the Nile, but I did once, almost inadvertently, successfully navigate the Hanger Lane gyratory system. On another occasion I circumnavigated London via both the North and South Circular roads in a single diurnal course. A record I like to think I hold to this day. The Royal Geographical Society never called.

In reality however, this was no Jack Kerouac-inspired, discovering the inner seeker type experience. No Neal, Dean or Sal to relate to and banter with at day’s end for me. 

It was hot, potentially dangerous and ultimately boring. I did get to listen to some great music on the car radio though.

England experienced two consecutive long hot summers in the seventies, 75 and 76. I spent the second of these driving around London in a Cortina Mark 3. As any Top Gear enthusiast will tell you this was the worst model. There was a reason Ford quickly rolled the Mark 4 off the production line.

Mostly my job consisted of attempting to physically locate, and, more importantly, extract money from, the same people who had refused to take my calls a couple of months earlier. Some, if not most of these characters were just sad individuals, not dissimilar to myself in many ways, who had incautiously borrowed money in an attempt to improve their mundane lives.

Stretched beyond their means, or made redundant, they had resorted to a quick cash fix for solace. A new TV or freezer, maybe nothing more exotic than buying their kids new bikes.

Others, and it was a small minority, were one step down from hardened criminals. Some days, as I sweated in the Cortina’s vinyl seat and headed into the East End of London, I could almost smell the fear. Either that or I needed a better deodorant.

Long Hot Summer

Ishould explain how I first met Alan, moreover how I ended up riding with him on our ill-fated trip. As I said, 76 had been a long hot summer and, perhaps perversely I wanted it to continue. Despite the life-threatening East End visits and clashes with acquaintances of the Krays I had enjoyed cruising the London streets in my Mark 3, windows down, stopping at friendly local stores for thirst quenching beverages and ice-cream. So when I saw an ad in Time-Out ‘Seat available on tandem to warmer clime’ I decided to investigate further.

I contacted the advertiser and we arranged to meet one balmy evening at Liverpool Street station. I suppose I was expecting some outward bound type: all blond hair and taut muscles with a healthy tan; he’d probably arrive in some crazy way, by helicopter perhaps or abseiling down the side of a building. So the wiry little guy with spectacles and an overly jutting chin who alighted from the 17:48 from Southend via Enfield that fateful Thursday evening came as something of a shock. We manfully shook hands and repaired to the station bar. Over pints of foaming ale plans were discussed. ‘Plans’ sounds much grander than the reality. This was no compass-based, poring-over-maps, take-the-wind-direction-and-elevation-into-account type conversation. ‘I figure we cross The Channel and, basically, head south,’ said Alan in his Essex accent. Who was I to argue with such faultless logic? So that’s pretty much what we did.

Down to Kent

After a few practice runs around the streets of Alan’s neighbourhood we were ready to go. Alan turned out to be ahead of his time as a marketing guru and had arranged for the local paper, The Enfield Gazette , to interview us and take some pictures of us in our finery.

The first day of riding, which of course we didn’t realize at the time, was one of the longest days of the whole trip. We rode from Alan’s mother's house in Enfield, North London, to my parents’ place in Herne Bay, Kent. Propelled by the enthusiasm of the new and with the bike in tip-top condition, relatively speaking, we whizzed along. Nearly a hundred miles in one day, we'd be in Athens in no time.

Route planning was never very detailed. One of the many O levels I had failed a few years previously, during my futile years at the Geoffrey Chaucer, was geography. But even I knew that travelling between Enfield and anywhere in Kent involved crossing the River Thames. The Dartford Bridge or Crossing, as it is officially known, had yet to be built and in 1976 the Dartford Tunnel was the only practical option. We couldn’t just ride through the tunnel, much to our disappointment. We had to pay the princely sum of sixpence to have the beast put on a trailer and towed through. Alan had some hare-brained scheme of us both sitting in style on the tandem, wind blowing through our hair, as it was towed, with no little ceremony, perhaps some kind of fanfare playing through the vehicle’s radio, as we raced through the tunnel. But of course, this was not allowed. Even in 1976 when smoking was still common, seatbelts were an option and we'd never heard of skimmed milk, there was still some concept of safety. So we sat in style in the van, with attached trailer, onto which was strapped our shiny two-wheeled, three-geared machine. Looking back it was probably my favourite part of the whole trip. Certainly it was the most comfortable.

Once through the tunnel we pedalled on via the historic Medway towns. I’d travelled many times between my Kent coastal hometown and the grand metropolis of London but always either by train or, if by car, using the M2 motorway. So it was quite a novelty to pass through towns like Rochester, Chatham and Sittingbourne instead of just seeing their names on station platforms or road signs. My impressions of these towns were that passing through them was the best thing to do.

What’s a Hovercraft?

There are many technologies which have come and, if not completely gone, their use has declined almost to the point of non-existence. These include such marvels as cassette tapes, public phone boxes and pocket calculators. The hovercraft should surely be included in this list. They do exist still but these days are mainly used for military purposes; their convenience as an option for public transport seems to have all but disappeared. There is a service from Southsea, in Hampshire, to Ryde, on the Isle of Wight but that is about the only one still operating, in Europe at least.

As a young traveller who lived in Kent, a stone’s throw from ‘the Continent’ as many people erroneously called mainland Europe back then, the quicker I could get across The Channel the better. Nowadays