French Revolutions Read online

  The wind and gradient were one thing, which is to say two things, but in the light of Tom’s Saharan demise I hadn’t been prepared at all for this abrupt and appalling cold. Those great heaps of rock blocked off the setting sun, a sun whose rays I had been so desperate to shelter from before but now missed terribly, and with the chilled gale suddenly freeze-drying my sweaty limbs I was soon shivering uncontrollably. I hadn’t seen a soul since le Chalet-Reynard, and when a sturdy-looking bloke wheeled waywardly down towards me, eyes slitted, teeth gritted, hands off the bars and wedged for warmth into their opposing armpits, I understood why. This last stretch was inconceivably merciless, so much so that only the most brutally determined managed it.

  Wincing along between the barber-striped snow-depth poles, I forced myself on, each turn of the pedals like a one-armed push-up. The Womble breathing was back, ragged and panicked, supercharged painfully down my throat by the deafening wind. Then, with all remaining physical and mental resolve galeforced out of me and final surrender imminent, I stole an upwards squint to my right and there it was, a modest gold-lettered slab of pale granite just above the road. The Simpson memorial. Tommy’s stele.

  With a final, draining wrench I yanked my right foot out of its pedal cleat, eased it to the tarmac and for maybe thirty seconds leant there, head on the bar-bag. Then I uncleated the left, dropped ZR where Tom’s bike had been lain, and juddered coldly up to the stone. At its foot was a messy memorial mound of sun-bleached, weather-worn cycling detritus: old tyres; caps; a saddle; bidons weighted down with chalky lunar rubble; a PVC rain top, one sleeve knotted around a white stone, the other whiplashing furiously in the wind. On the slab itself was a bas-relief of a hunched cyclist, speeding gleefully down a mountain rather than languishing palely up, and the words:

  A LA MÉMOIRE DE TOM SIMPSON

  MÉDAILLÉ OLYMPIQUE, CHAMPION DU MONDE,

  AMBASSADEUR SPORTIF BRITTANIQUE,

  DÉCEDÉ LE 13 JUILLET TOUR DE FRANCE 1967

  SES AMIS ET CYCLISTES DE GRANDE BRETAGNE

  Nothing but hard, loud wind and silent, bare rock above and below and all around: a wretched, lonely place to die, a godless, extraterrestrial wasteland. Tom’s story was one of umpteen hindsight sadnesses, and one of them occurred to me now. ‘It’s a good rider who can ride himself into the ground.’ That was Tom himself. And then I thought about Harry the mechanic’s last words on the video: ‘He destroyed himself – he had the ability to do that.’

  I stumbled back down to ZR, cackhandedly slapped some heat back into my legs and remounted. But there was nothing left, not a single unburned calorie, not one watt of willpower. Nothing. My legs buckled at joints I never knew existed and I folded myself creakily off my bike and on to my back. For a moment ZR and I lay there side by side, my dead eyes trying to focus on the masts and aerials at the summit, a kilometre and a half up. Then, jarringly, a cheery volley of horn parps, juvenile shrieks and squeaks and the support vehicle/broom wagon had arrived. I had failed, and I had failed in front of my family. I had taken that penalty at Wembley and toe-poked it wanly at the keeper; the Centre Court ballboys were still sniggering as yet another serve ballooned towards the Royal Box. Such was the drug cheat’s comeuppance.

  Seeing their taunting smirks wither into frowns of concern offered some succour. Lain across the front seats I gazed glassily up at the vanity mirror: raw and crevassed lips crowned by a nose the colour and consistency of an overripe fig; bridging both temples a Zorro mask of tears and dust. Unprotected by the helmet my sticky hair had been blasted by the elements into a viciously backcombed Strewelpeter. As Louison Bobet, first over the top in the 1955 Tour, said: ‘A son at the summit of Mont Ventoux is not a sight to show his mother.’

  Wedged obliquely between infants I was gently chauffeured to the top, but didn’t feel I deserved to admire the sunset backlighting the vineyards down to Avignon. Birna went out for a quick, lopsided walk and could hardly heave open the door when she got back. ‘What’s … there,’ I muttered, sounding like Tom Waits on a Domestos bender.

  ‘Wind. A couple of Fifties-ish barrack things and some police cars. Oh, and an advertising poster saying “Tampons pour cyclistes”.’

  On the wordless descent all I could think was how benign the gradient seemed from behind a windscreen, how feebly undemanding. ‘No mountain too high,’ read one of the rain-smeared epitaphs beneath Tom’s memorial, a phrase which in the circumstances didn’t seem entirely appropriate for him but was abysmally inapt for me. Whatever strings had been attached to my conquest of the col de Saraillé, I’d just tripped over the lot.

  Approaching le Chalet-Reynard I spied Marty round the next bend, bike in the gutter, hands on hips, remonstrating with his colleague, but – judging by the latter’s doubled-over stance and slowly shaking head – wasting his time. My first foggy impulse was to ask Birna to pull over so I could sneak the bike out of the boot and freewheel breezily down past him, but brittle fatigue and a humbled sense of unworthiness prevented me. Or anyway should have.

  Eleven

  ‘Did you read any of this?’

  Birna was studying the extensive ‘patient information’ leaflet supplied with my packet of Haymine; I was building up pain tolerance and mental resilience by showing the children how long I could hold my magma-hot mug of breakfast chocolate in both hands.

  ‘That? No. I didn’t think it was relevant for my … ow.’

  I blew my ruby palms while she recited.

  ‘ “Take one tablet every twelve hours.” How many did you have?’

  ‘Two in six hours.’ This sounded better than four in two. Birna read on.

  ‘ “Ephedrine Hydrochloride will reduce nasal congestion while counteracting some of the possible drowsiness that the antihistamine Chlorpheniramine may cause … you may also experience slight giddiness, rapid heartbeats and some weakness in the muscles.” ’

  I looked down at the backs of my hands, idly picking at the stigmata-like hemispheres of scabby red flesh that had formed in the gloves’ exposed ventilation area.

  ‘ “Alcohol will make any drowsiness worse; avoid alcohol when taking Haymine” ’

  Muscle weakness, giddiness, a half-litre of rosé. The drugs don’t work, they just make it worse. It was looking as if I might have made a fearful ass of myself.

  ‘Well … I feel all right now.’

  And somehow I did. The flaccid, doped-up invalid absently hoisting an unsteady thumbs-up out of the rear passenger window at Avignon’s late-night tarts bore no relation to the following morning’s chirpy athlete looking forward to a long day in the saddle. I’d always been astonished at how Tour riders creaked up to death’s door in the late afternoon, yet just a few hours later freewheeled gaily out of the starting gate. But here I was, a child on each knee, folding up the map with eager impatience.

  It was a splendid day. Still marvelling at my new-found powers of recuperation, I agreed the usual late-afternoon rendezvous with my support crew and swished out of Avignon’s hot claustrophobia, away from the Japanese tour groups and the pee-stained alleys, away from a juvenile populace who for two nights had competed with such diligent distinction at moped polo, played in the traditional Provençal fashion with beer bottles instead of mallets.

  A warm wind whipped the café awnings as I emerged with a discreet whoop of liberation through the city walls at Porte Thiers, and – bless my frothing bidons – it was behind me. Mixing it cavalierly with every caravan and coach and camion blanc homme I pedalled slickly out of town at 40 k.p.h., muttering my own respectful commentary on Moore’s smooth, effortless style as he pulls away from the peloton on this flat but sunburned thirteenth stage to the military town of Draguignan.

  Fresh new tarmac shaded by poplars; garish cherry orchards edged by rustling, house-high bamboo groves; luminous vineyards with tiny, newborn grapes like bunches of broccoli. At Robion I even took the uphill, downwind sprint, standing up in the saddle along the dead-straight, tree-lined boulevard to pip a farmer dawdling
along in his foolish microcar.

  Like a thousand partisan spectators the wind pushed me up a fourth-category climb to the crest of the long, low Montagne du Luberon, from where tight, tall Italianate hill villages looked at each other across the plain. Nearly all were cute, Bonnieux the most painfully so just as long as you didn’t mind the bijou art galleries and estate agents and Austrian number plates, and most particularly paying three quid for a can of Coke. A huge, lorry-licking descent into a granite canyon, all dead snakes and air brakes, then a ham baguette of reckless proportions by a fountain in Lourmarin, a knot of narrow streets that opened on to a sort of oversized village green backed by one of the haughtiest châteaux I’d yet seen.

  The wind was getting slightly out of hand now, spinning rotary signs outside petrol stations into a deafening turbine frenzy, sending waiters across pétanque squares in pursuit of airborne parasols. But so what? It was behind me. A mistral in full howl plays havoc with the Tour: in 1969 it blasted straight into the riders at 70 k.p.h., persuading the organisers to let everyone hide behind their team cars, and two years later blew Eddy Merckx and 200 hangers-on into Marseilles so far ahead of schedule – 250 kilometres at an average speed of over 45 k.p.h. – that no one was there to greet them. By the time mayor Gaston Deferre turned up two hours later to present the prizes, Eddy and co. were in the shower back at their hotels; Deferre could have taken this humiliation badly, but being French he merely vowed that the Tour would return to Marseilles only over his dead body. (After twenty-seven consecutive visits up to 1971 the race next visited Marseilles in 1989, three years after Gaston’s last gasp.)

  More screaming fighter jets buzzing the barns, a bollock-bullying stretch of cobbles, three kids riding waywardly home from school on a moped – I flashed through villages, in and out of slow lives at glorious speed. At Pertuis, which I had only previously been aware of in an onomatopoeic context as the noise Snoopy makes when orally expelling an unloved foodstuff, I even managed to intimidate a trucker who drove me off the road. When I jumped up on to his footplate at the next set of lights, battered his window and described in detail some of the more surprising aspects of his lifestyle, he just did what I always do: stared straight ahead and clicked down the central-locking button with a discreet elbow.

  I crossed the gaping river Durance at Mirabeau, the monstrous fluvial power that once sliced out the gorge around me now castrated by hydroelectric schemes and canals. At Saint-Paul-lez-Durance the Tour route veered away, perhaps to avoid doing what I now did – namely, cycling right through the middle of a nuclear-research complex the size of Berkshire. The French really are a bit funny about this sort of stuff. I still cannot quite believe that over 70 per cent of the nation’s electricity is produced by nuclear power, nor that there is almost no opposition to this state of affairs. When their secret service blows up Greenpeace boats so that France can test its nuclear bombs in the Pacific, Parisians just snigger like Muttley. Mind you, it never pays to delve too deeply into French politics – flicking through the Rough Guide I discovered that two-thirds of the adult population are in favour of deporting legal immigrants who commit any crime or are unemployed for over a year.

  I’d arranged to meet Birna at Vinon-sur-Verdon, and in homage to Eddy’s break to Marseille I got there long before my reception committee. Four o’clock is always a good time to arrive in a small French town in summer: one minute everything’s all scabby and dead and shuttered, then the shop-fronts all swing down or clank up and suddenly the streets are full of garish fruit and noisy housewives. It’s like watching a chrysalis open.

  Vinon wasn’t exceptional, but sitting there in the tree-dappled shadows of the huge main square, Coke in one hand, Mars Bar in the other, I was happy. One hundred and twenty-two kilometres: Moore was back. I didn’t even mind when the family turned up and Birna immediately announced that Vinon was a dump and that she’d found a nice place 10 kilometres up the road.

  ‘Come on, Daddy,’ said my 4-year-old, ‘you can put your bicycle in the car and go asleep on my feet like yesterday.’ But I wouldn’t hear of it. Yesterday the bicycle had been a monstrous invention, an absurdly impractical device that I’d looked at with the same amused scorn normally reserved for Reliant Robins and the wearers of platform trainers. But not now. Now it was a superlative machine, the ultimate synthesis of form and function, a part of my body. I winked at my children, cleated up, put the hammer down and got to the Hôtel le Grand Jardin in Gréoux-les-Bains ten minutes before them.

  Gréoux was the sort of slightly-past-sell-by spa town that could have done with a direct hit from the Tour rather than this year’s near miss. Poodles and pearls, solitary Scrabble, Mills et Boon, a coach party of Lancastrians with noses like W. C. Fields – the arrival of our family halved the average age and doubled the decibels. When we volunteered to eat outside and so minimise the scope for Generation X scaring the frail diners into Generation-Ex, the uniformed waitress politely insisted on laying out the full silver service on our plastic pool table: thirty-five pronged and bladed instruments for the five of us, or seventy after Valdis knocked my Bloody Mary over the lot as the waitress aligned the final fish knife.

  Alimentary malaise is the unacceptable face of cycling infirmity. Crossing the line with dried blood caked on your face or a winged arm pressed to the chest of a shredded jersey is heroic in a way that soiling your Savlon can never hope to be. Yet unsurprisingly, effective digestion is way down the body’s priorities during a Tour, and many a cycling swan has crossed the line as an ugly duckling, his feathers all stuffy and brown in the most unfortunately literal fashion.

  If I could pin down the exact moment when I realised I might not have made it as a professional cyclist it wasn’t when I fell over at the Kew Bridge bus stop or cracked on the col de Marie-Blanque, it was when I read Paul Kimmage’s account of the 184-kilometre tenth stage of the 1986 Tour. ‘LeMond was in trouble today. He had a bout of diarrhoea. He rode by me with thirty kilometres to go … God, the smell was terrible. It was rolling down his legs.’ Oh, no, no, no. Having the physical reserves to ride by people in that state, and the mental strength to deal with a scenario from the worst public-shame nightmare … it was beyond contemplation. And Greg LeMond went on to win the Tour that year.

  Such were my thoughts as I’d lain awake in our restless dormitory, wondering if that noise was my stomach or two fat women mudwrestling on slowly deflating Spacehoppers. A certain reluctance at the breakfast buffet was inevitable, and by the time I’d pedalled into a Saharan headwind to rejoin the route at Ginasservis, I was in no position to speculate on the origins of its pleasingly odd name.

  It was certainly the hottest day yet. My guts were percolating horribly and, though I knew I should be eating, the mere thought of the Dried Fruits of Ventoux was enough to spark off a parched retch. My warm-grape bidons were quickly but unenthusiastically drained, and all I thought about was their refrigerated replacements: beers, carbonated beverages, anything glistening with condensation.

  Crossing the river at Aups (I did it again) I found myself recalling that the title sequences of both The Goodies and The Monkees featured cyclists pedalling at speed into extensive bodies of water. I couldn’t get the thought out of mind, the delicious immersion, the baptismal sense of salvation from the hot highway to hell, the distant acceptance that having forgotten to twist out of the cleats I would quickly drown, but not caring because I would drown happy, hopefully before Mickey Dolenz tried to give me the kiss of life.

  It’s always a bad sign when I can’t remember where I had lunch. No such problems, however, in recalling its constituents: beer, Badoit, Coke, Badoit, beer, and a 300-degree segment of uneaten pizza. Sitting vacantly in the restaurant garden with cold sweat dripping from my temples to dough-up the pizza flour on my shorts, I was gently approached by the concerned patron and his wife: ‘Ça va, monsieur?’ No. Not really. ‘La Tour passe … passe …’ I began automatically, but I didn’t finish. A teenager was cycling at some speed up the c
onsiderable hill next to us, a compelling sight made more notable by his below-average limb quota. Spotting my Peugeot jersey he raised his one arm from the bars as he passed, accompanying it with a defiant yell: ‘Vive le vélo!’

  Having rushed away to do terrible things to le patron’s vitreous enamel, I was clambering pallidly back on to ZR when he trotted over. ‘Voilà,’ he said, pressing a postcard of his establishment into my clammy hand. ‘Pour vos amis.’ I don’t know why I did this – possibly it was a slightly delirious obsession with saving weight, more probably because the composition was dominated by a huge platter of glistening innards – but as he turned back I wearily flicked the card away.

  I could never whistle with my thumb and forefinger, or catch a pile of coins dropped off a crooked elbow, or get the Pritt-Stick to adhere temporarily to the laboratory ceiling directly above the teacher’s chair just before Mr Burrows came in, but the one juvenile pastime I mastered – though, thinking about it, I can also skim stones and blow up a telephone box – was the ability to propel a playing card at high speed over some distance by means of a wristy backhand flick. In defiance of my debilitated condition the postcard left my sweaty fingers already spinning fast, curving slightly up and around in a curtailed death-star arc before striking the retreating patron sharply between the shoulder blades. He yowled in distress and messily threw his hands in the air like a stuntman picked off by a sniper; then, pressing a hand to the point of contact, turned to survey me with confused horror. His lips were starting to jabber; soon sounds would come out of them, then questions, and because I didn’t want to answer these I held up a traffic-policeman palm, saddled up and fled. It was the rudest thing I had ever done.

  By announcing itself as ‘home of the artillery’ Draguignan hardly coos beguilingly at passing tourists, and though I only saw its ring-road hinterland, the usual bland, beige boxes stalked by Ronald McDonald and Monsieur Bricolage, the word ‘unprepossessing’ loomed large. In fairness, I was distracted. Despite the heavy traffic barging along my alimentary canal, I had once again allowed myself to be lured into competition, this time with a knees-out, boiler-suited mechanic on what I could only assume was his grandmother’s bicycle.