Round Ireland in Low Gear

‘Not for these bikes, I haven’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve never had any. Nor for Ireland in winter. If I come it will only be to make sure you don’t get into trobble.’

‘What sort of trouble?’

‘In Ireland all sorts of trobble,’ she said, darkly.

We went to London to make the rounds of shops selling mountain bicycles, and if possible purchase some. Under the arches off the Strand, in the substructure which was all that remained of the Adelphi, the Adam brothers’ great riverside composition, we saw and rode our first mountain bikes. Wanda tried something called a Muddy Fox Seeker Mixte, which had an open frame constructed from Japanese fully lugged chrome molybdenum tubing with Mangaloy manganese alloy forks; I tried a Muddy Fox Pathfinder which had a lugless frame of the same material, put together by the TIG (Tungsten Inert Gas) welding process. Wanda quite liked her Mixte which reminded her a bit of the old Bianchi open-framed bike on which she had ridden out to bring me and my friends food and clothing in the autumn of 1943.

What the staff of most of the bicycle shops we visited had in common, we discovered, was almost complete indifference as to whether we bought one of their bikes or not. This was surprising, considering how much money was involved and the fact that the industry was going through one of its periodic slumps. In mountain bikes there was nothing worth buying under £200. From £200 to £300 the choice was very limited and it was only in the £300 to £500 range that one started to find high quality bikes. From £500 to around £1000 or more, one was in a world of prototypes and purely competitive machines in which everything, as the Buyer’s Bible put it in a way that I was beginning to find insidiously corrupting, was ‘silly money’. One thing we had learned was that whatever make we bought, our bikes should come from a firm that actually built, or at least assembled them, on the premises. But time was now running out and if we did not leave for Ireland within ten days we would have to wait until after Christmas. One of the firms we had not yet visited was called Overbury’s, in Bristol, who designed and built their own racing, touring and mountain bikes. And Bristol had the added attraction that our daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren lived there.

Overbury’s premises, in Ashley Road, can scarcely be described as being at ‘the better end’ of Bristol; in fact Bristol has no better end. The more enviable parts are perched high above the city at the top of impossibly steep hills or on huge cliffs above the Avon Gorge, from both of which eyries the inhabitants look down with Olympian detachment on those less fortunate mortals below. Overbury’s, which is run by Andy Powell and his mother, Enid, is about the size of an average newsagent’s and is crammed with bikes that are either beautiful or sophisticated, or both, and all the complex bits and pieces that go to make them up. What space remains is taken up by machines in various states of malfunction or collapse awaiting attention. In fact on the Monday morning we visited, it was rather like being in a National Health doctor’s waiting room during surgery hours. One of the more spectacular accidents had befallen an ATB-riding log-hopper who had failed to clear a huge pile of them in a Forestry Commission conifer wood. The resulting smash had destroyed the special welded guard bar, fitted under the bottom bracket to protect the triple chain rings from just such a mishap, doing a wealth of damage.

‘You’re looking at more than a hundred nicker,’ the owner said with gloomy pride, when I showed an interest in it. ‘That’s the end of guards for me.’

We were lent a couple of test bikes on deposit and we set off with them in the back of our van for an attractive open expanse called Ashton Court Park, to try them out. Wanda’s was the most expensive and the most unconventional in appearance. It was called the Wild Cat and was going to take a bit of living up to.

Mine was a Crossfell, at that time the most expensive of Overbury’s diamond frame mountain bikes.

By the end of this outing Wanda was very depressed. It was not surprising: the last bicycle she had ridden had been a borrowed ladies’ Marston Golden Sunbeam which she had used while house-hunting in South London in the 1970s, perhaps the finest conventional bicycle ever made. This was the bicycle on male versions of which deceptively fragile-looking curates used to zoom past me, as I frantically pedalled my Selbach back in the 1930s. She liked the semi-open frame of the Wild Cat, but found it difficult to live up to the image conjured up by its name. She couldn’t cope with the complexity of the twin-change shift mechanisms on the handlebars which controlled the eighteen gears: the right-hand one which shifted the chain from any one of the six sprockets to another on the Shimano Extra Duty Freewheel Block; the left-hand one which shifted the chain on the costly oval Shimano Biopace triple ring chainset. ‘Biopace delivers power when you need it most,’ the blurb said. ‘Computer analysis shows round rings force unnatural leg dynamics that interfere with smooth cadence and can lead to knee strain.’

In comparison with a traditional lightweight bicycle fitted with narrow, high-pressure tyres I found the knobbly mountain tyres sluggish uphill, but very good downhill at speed on a track full of pot-holes. The saddles, amalgams of leather and plastic, we both agreed were hell. By the time our trial run through the wilds of the Ashton Court Park was over I had resigned myself to giving up the idea of mountain biking, or any other sort of biking, in Ireland; but when we got back to the shop and redeemed our deposits Wanda, to my surprise, told me to go ahead and order. ‘If I have it I will have to use it,’ she said.

There was no problem in producing my Crossfell in time, as there was a frame in stock of the right size that only needed stove enamelling. Wanda’s Wild Cat, as its name suggested, was more difficult. It would have to be built from scratch in seven days. But first her inside leg had to be measured for the frame – a feat difficult to accomplish in a crowded bike shop when the subject is wearing a skirt – and all work ceased while I performed it.

In a state of shock at the realization of the enormity of what I was doing I allowed Andy Powell to persuade me that I should also have eighteen gears. I forget the reason he gave. Perhaps he had run out of five-sprocket freewheel blocks, the last shipment from Osaka having gone down with all hands in the South China Sea to become a source of wonder to marine archaeologists around 3000 AD, who would eventually identify them as amulets against the evil eye.

In the course of the next hour or so I spent vast amounts of money – we paid for everything ourselves – on what bicycle builders laughingly refer to as ‘optional extras’: pumps, front and rear reflectors, guards to protect the derailleur mechanisms, frame pads to make it easier to lift my diamond-framed Crossfell over gates and fences, over-sized mud guards for the over-sized tyres, two sets of front and rear panniers, front and rear pannier frames to hook them on, ‘stuff sacs’, rudely named bags to keep our waterproof clothing in, front and rear lights, drinking bottles, Sam Browne belts and trouser clips made of reflective material that might improve our chance of not being knocked down and squashed flat at night. Foolishly, having donned them and then looked at one another, we decided against crash helmets – ‘head protection for the thinking cyclist’, as one catalogue put it.

We also needed a whole lot of tools and spares: a three-way spanner, a ten-in-one dumbell spanner, two brake spanners, a pair of cone spanners, a Shimano crank bolt spanner and freewheel remover, a 4″ adjustable wrench, three Allen keys, a spoke key, a cable cutter, a pair of pointed pliers, a tyre pressure gauge, an adaptor so that a garage air-line or a car foot pump could be used with Presta bicycle valves, a set of tyre levers, spare spokes, two spare inner tubes, spare gear change and brake cables, spare brake blocks (at a colossal £3.90 a pair), and valve caps.

My next purchase was something called a Citadel Lock which had a half-inch metal shackle said to be proof against a pair of 42″ bolt cutters and big enough to lock both bikes to a parking meter or a set of railings at the same time. However it was so heavy that we left it at home and took with us instead a couple of pre-coiled 5ft steel cable locks which would last about ten seconds against bolt cutters.

By this time I began to feel myself in a state of euphoria, like a character in a Fitzgerald novel going shopping – Gatsby stocking up on shirts, or Nicole Diver buying an army of toy soldiers in Paris in 1925: ‘It was fun spending money in the sunlight of the foreign city, with healthy bodies … that sent streams of colour up to their faces; with arms and hands, legs and ankles that stretched out confidently, reaching or stepping with the confidence of women lovely to men.’ Although it was a bit different in Bristol in deep December for a senior citizen with all the confidence of a man unlovely to women – well, most women.

Then we shopped for clothes. The most difficult to find on the spur of the moment, because they were very expensive, were the long zip jackets with baggy trousers to match made from Gore-Tex, a wind and waterproof material which allows perspiration to evaporate. Shoes were another problem. Cycling shoes designed for riding lightweight bikes on the road would be hopeless anywhere off it in waterlogged old Ireland. In the end we both took climbing boots and short, wool-lined wellingtons which were warm and could be accommodated on the big mountain bike pedals but soon lost their linings. And we bought long wool and nylon stockings with elasticated tops that came up over the knee and waterproof over-mitts with warm inner linings.

We also spent a gruesome hour in company with other senior citizens stocking up for the winter, buying thermal underwear, which everyone said we must have: long johns to sleep in and underwear to ride in. Some of it looked terrible, especially a particular brand of men’s underpants which came down to the knees and gave the wearer, in this case myself, an air of geriatric instability. It also, when it warmed up, gave off an awful pong. ‘I wonder,’ Wanda said, emerging from the fitting room in which she had given the thumbs-down to the underpants, and surveying the milling throng, ‘if they are all going to Ireland, too, on bicycles. If they are we shall look pretty silly.’

As I had promised myself, I took with me a huge cap that had belonged to my father – almost a dead ringer of that worn by the now dead and gone Jackie Coogan, which Wanda from now on referred to as my ‘Jackie Hooghly’.

The bikes were delivered to us by van from Bristol the following Tuesday at what was literally the eleventh hour. Together with the optional and non-optional extras, all done up in protective wadding, they made an impressive pair of packages, and the bikes themselves, which had been wrapped like Egyptian mummies in the equivalent of cerements, were so scintillating when finally exposed to the light of day that it seemed a pity to foul them up by riding them. If there really was such a concept as state-of-the-art, this was it.

‘We can put it all down to expenses,’ I said to Wanda.

‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ she said. ‘I can just see the expression on the Inspector of Taxes’ face. He’ll laugh all the way to your funeral.’

‘Well, why did you let me buy all this stuff if that’s what you think?’ I asked.

‘I was going to stop you,’ she said, ‘but when I saw how much you were enjoying yourself, somehow I couldn’t. You looked like a small boy in a sweet shop.’

We set off to negotiate some of the network of lanes in the Isle of Purbeck, the majority of which involve ascents of unnatural steepness. The first part included a fairly hard climb along the flanks of Smedmore Hill. This time I rode behind Wanda in order to be able to tell her when to operate the front and rear gear shift mechanisms. This worked all right until she suddenly pulled the left-hand lever back and at the same time pushed the right-hand one forward, while still riding on the flat, which transferred her instantly to the lowest gear available to her, 23.6″, leaving her with her legs whirring round until she fell off.

In spite of this setback, she did succeed in climbing the hill, from the top of which we roared downhill towards the hamlet of Steeple, which consists of a manor, a vicarage, a very old church which houses a giant eighteenth-century version of a pianola and a plaque displaying the stars and stripes of the Lawrences, a family who were collateral ancestors of George Washington. From here a hill climbs to the summit of West Creech Hill, a rise of about 295 feet in 1000 yards, which may not seem much, and certainly doesn’t look much, but is in fact excruciating. If any of the Alpine passes I rode over on my way to Italy in 1971 had been as difficult as parts of this hill, I would never have ridden a bike over the Alps at all.

‘You go on,’ said Wanda, when the time came to tackle it. ‘Don’t watch me.’

From the top, completely breathless, I watched the little figure gallantly toiling up, very slowly, very wobbly at times, but she made it.

‘I did it,’ she said. ‘Not bad for a grandmother, am I?’

I felt so proud of her I wanted to cry; but privately I prayed that there wouldn’t be many similar hills in Ireland.

When we got back to the house Wanda allowed me a fleeting glimpse of what her hand-finished, calf leather, high-density, memory-retentive foam Desmoplan base saddle had done to her in the course of about six miles and I knew that unless a better alternative could be found she would be a non-starter in the Irish Cycling Stakes, 1985. So I got on the telephone to Enid in Bristol and the following morning a large carton full of saddles arrived by special delivery.

I had solved the saddle problem on my mountain bike by ordering a Brooks B66 leather saddle which had big springs at the back. Most mountain bike saddles seem to have been designed by men who don’t realize that on a mountain bike the rider sits more or less upright, as on a roadster, so that the whole weight of the body, divided on a bicycle with dropped handlebars between the saddle and the bars, falls on the saddle. It is even worse for women. Women have wider hips and, as the Buyer’s Bible delicately put it, having presumably taken female advice, ‘the pubic arch between the legs is shallower, making the genital area very vulnerable to pressure’.

The saddles we now received were mostly similar in construction to the one that had originally come with Wanda’s bike. Some had been injected with silicon fluid, to make them more bouncy beneath the layer of ‘high-density memory-retentive foam’ already referred to. With all these lying around in the hall, it resembled a saddle fetishist’s den. Eventually, Wanda chose a Brooks B72 leather touring saddle, ‘specially designed for women cyclists and those wanting a broader support’.

I now spent the time, when not engaged in packing my pannier bags (we were leaving the next day), in bashing her saddle with a lump of wood, and rubbing it with Brooks Proofhide and something called Neatsfoot Oil in order to take some of the sting out of it for Wanda’s inaugural Irish ride, which I was planning with my customary inefficiency.

CHAPTER 2 To the Emerald Isle

There lay the green shore of Ireland, like some coast of plenty. We could see towns, towers, churches, harvests; but the curse of eight hundred years we could not discern.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON. English Traits, 1856

Ireland is not Paradise.

JONATHAN SWIFT, in a letter to Alexander Pope,

30 August 1716

I spent our last evening in England in the basement bedroom of our daughter and son-in-law’s house up on the highest heights of Bristol, where those who are chronic worriers wear oxygen masks, making final adjustments to the Crossfell and the Wild Cat.

There were no other contenders for this utterly boring task. Somewhere upstairs, above ground, my eleven-year-old grandson, using his father’s computer, was extracting information in a matter of seconds from what appeared to be thin air. Elsewhere in the building my granddaughter was dancing the sort of dances that little girls of six habitually execute, dreaming of being Flossie Footlights or Fonteyn. In the kitchen my daughter was about to start roasting a duck, happy, one hoped, at the thought of going back to work in the outside world from which bringing up her children had largely excluded her. Half a mile up the road, immured somewhere in a wing of the University, her husband, a mathematician turned biologist, was locked in what looked like becoming a lifelong struggle to extract the secret of what makes eyes and ears function.

And somewhere in the house was Wanda. She was about as interested in the finer points of her Wild Cat as I imagine Queen Boadicea would have been in the alignment of scythes on the axles of her chariot wheels. Both assumed, rightly, that some member of the lumpenproletariat would be keeping their equipment up to scratch. For Shimano Deore XT hubs, Biopace computer-designed drive system chainwheels, 600 EX headsets with O ring seals, and such – all items I had been forced to take an interest in, simply to know what to try and do if they went wrong – she cared not a hoot.

One of the best reasons for owning an ordinary bicycle with no expensive trimmings is that everything about it, apart from mending punctures, which is a bore whatever sort of bike you have, is comparatively simple. With expensive, thoroughbred bicycles it is another matter altogether.

If I had ever forgotten this I re-discovered it when I tried to fit Wanda’s final selection, the Brooks B72 leather saddle, the one ‘for those wanting a broader support’, to a highly sophisticated, space age Sr Laprade XL forged alloy fluted seatpin with micro-adjustment and a replacement value of around £20. A lot of money, you may say. But worth every penny of it since, according to those who know, anything nameless in the field of seatpins may snap off with rough off-the-road usage, leaving the rider either impaled on what is left of it or, at the very least, pedalling away without any visible means of support, rather like a fakir using a bicycle to perform a variation of the Indian rope trick. I had asked Overbury’s for a seatpin which gave the maximum amount of adjustment and this was it.

By now it was seven o’clock. ‘It won’t take long,’ I said, talking to myself in the absence of an audience.

The saddle was mounted on a frame which consisted of two sets of parallel wire tracks and each of these tracks had to be attached to the Laprade pin by means of a clamp with two parallel grooves on it. The principal difficulty I experienced in performing this ostensibly easy task was that the track wires were not only too far apart to fit into the grooves but were extraordinarily resistant to being drawn together. However I finally succeeded in doing this making use of a form of Spanish windlass made with a lace from a climbing boot and a skewer.

I was so pleased with myself at having accomplished this feat that I failed to notice that when I inserted the tracks into the grooves I did so with the saddle the wrong way up.

This was the moment when my daughter, fearing for her dinner and my sanity, set off in the rain and darkness to enlist the help of Charlie Quinn, who lived a few doors away. Apparently Charlie Quinn was a schoolboy who was completely dotty about bikes and when not engaged in doing his homework spent most of his spare time either riding them or working on them in a part-time capacity at Clifton Cycles, a rival bike shop to Overbury’s.

Charlie arrived with a comprehensive tool kit which included a pair of clamps, with the help of which he drew the wire tracks together with shameful ease, and inserted them in the grooves. It was therefore not without a certain despicable satisfaction that I noted that when he tightened the bolt the tracks were still loose in the grooves and the saddle wobbled.

By this time I would have been in despair, but not Charlie. ‘That’s all right,’ he said, ‘I’ll get some scrim. That’ll hold it.’ It did indeed hold it. By now the duck was nearly ready.

‘Is there anything else?’ he asked.

‘Well, if you wouldn’t mind terribly I’ve got to fit some pannier adaptor plates. It’s quite a simple job. But what about your dinner?’

‘I’ve already eaten it,’ he said. ‘I call it supper.’

All those bored by the horrendous complexities of bicycle mechanics should skip the rest of this section and resurface on page 30. For those who are not, I should explain that pannier adaptor plates are flat pieces of alloy with holes cut in them and drilled to take a single nut and bolt. These plates had to be fitted because the hooks on the elastic cords supplied with the Karrimor rear panniers to keep them in place were not a proper fit on the American-designed Blackburn alloy carriers. Although they will work at a pinch the hooks cannot be guaranteed to remain hooked on, especially when the bicycle is being used on rough ground.

It was soon obvious that we were in trouble. In order to fit the plates, the bolts used to attach them to the carriers had to be inserted through the brazed-on carrier eyes at the lower end of the chain stays, and then through eyes in the triangulated struts at the bottom of the carriers. The devilish thing was that it was not possible to insert one of these bolts from the outside in, and secure it with a nut on the inside of the carrier eye, because any nut on the inside would become enmeshed with the teeth of the outermost low-gear sprocket on the freewheel block.

This meant that both rear wheels had to be taken out so that the bolts could be inserted from the inside. At the same time the rear axles had to be packed with sufficient washers between the cone locking nuts on the hub axles and the wheel drop-outs to spread the chain stays sufficiently to give the necessary clearance to keep the bolt heads out of range of the teeth of the outermost sprocket.

But this was not the end of it. The addition of these washers had the effect of throwing the rear derailleur shift mechanism out of its pre-set alignment and this in turn affected the alignment of the front derailleur which shifted the chain on the triple chainwheels. And it was not only the shift mechanisms that went on the bum. The springing of the seat stays with the washers on the axles caused subtle alterations to the settings of the Aztec brake blocks fitted to the XT cantilever brakes operating on the rear rims and also to the amount of travel on the brake levers.

Almost literally enmeshed in all this Charlie was in his element, rushing backwards and forwards between our house and his in pouring rain, for nuts, bolts, washers, more tools and so forth. Meanwhile, I wondered if it would be all right to desert him and go off and eat the duck. When I did, feeling a pig for doing so, I don’t think he even noticed I’d gone.

It was not until we got back to England that I discovered that there had not been any need to fit these plates at all, as Blackburn marketed special shock cords to attach Karrimor panniers to Blackburn carriers.

The morning after Quinn the bicycle wizard had performed his magic and we had eaten the duck and gone to bed, we set off in torrential rain that turned day into night to drive our van with the bikes in it to Fishguard.

Here, on the coast of Dyfed, otherwise Pembroke, in what is known as England beyond Wales, in windswept, watery Fishguard with rainbows overhead, with its brightly painted houses glittering in the sunlight and its harbour built in the 1900s, itself a period piece, there was already a feeling of Ireland. Perhaps the French thought they were in Ireland when they undertook the last invasion of Britain here in 1797, commanded by an American, Colonel William Tate, and laid down their arms before a bevy of Welsh ladies dressed in traditional cloaks, under the impression, it is said, that they were soldiers.