Gironimo! Page 3

  My passion for bicycles, rather than learning how they worked and what to do if they didn’t, was their fantasised embellishment. A hefty chunk of my Ealing childhood was spent at the window of B & L Accessories on St Mary’s Road, gazing wistfully at rubber-bulb horns and checkerboard go-faster decals, and with humbled unworthiness at the showpiece Huret speedometers. It was my dearest wish to grace my handlebars with one of these chromed French beauties. What a thrill to imagine that red needle wobbling past those art deco digits, clocking it right off its 40mph scale down Hanger Hill with the wind behind me. Then with a thwarted sigh I’d look again at the price tag – some forgotten but exorbitant sum – and accept I was stuck with my little fork-mounted mileometer, the one that reckoned Gunnersbury Park was the size of Belgium.

  Over the years that followed, giant strides in reliability meant that ten-thumbed, half-witted incompetence became less and less of a handicap to bicycle ownership. As the twentieth century wound down, I was commuting across southwest London on a crap-arse Chinese-built mountain bike that thrived on neglect. Nothing wore out or broke off, and any other issues that arose seemed within my mechanical remit, unless they involved taking the back wheel off, a brother-grade skill. The brand-new, fairly flash bike I did my 2000 Tour de France on took even better care of itself. In a ride of over 3,000km, I suffered a single puncture. Occasionally one of the twenty-seven gears would slip vaguely out of alignment, but whenever the resultant drrrrr-thwick grew sufficiently irksome to make me wonder what on earth I might do to stop it, it stopped. I took enough tools and spare parts to, I dunno, make a robot scarecrow or something, and never once used any of them. Some bloke even sorted that flat tyre for me.

  That was now, this is then: my La Française-Diamant scrapyard challenge represented a rude and rusty return to the era of needy tinkering. It was a week since I’d come back from Max’s, and I squatted down on the patio with a slow puncture of enthusiasm. The pile of things I knew I definitely wouldn’t need – principally that 1940s bike and three shattered wooden wheels – was dwarfed by those I definitely would and possibly might. I’d bundled the first of these piles into the shed, and heaped the last under a huge blue-plastic tarpaulin that was to prove an irresistible piss-magnet for the local cat fraternity. It had taken me four hours to bodge and bully the remainder into something you might see painted on a bike lane, and to suspend this assemblage from my newly purchased workshop stand.

  From the shed-end of the garden it hadn’t looked too bad at all: saddle, two wheels, handlebars, away you go. A few paces towards the house and things began to unravel. The wooden rims, resistant to my untutored fumblings with wrench and nipple, were semi-attached to their hubs with three spokes each and a cable tie. The handlebars, so becomingly profiled, were deeply and dangerously pitted with the rust that would be staining my palms burnt ochre for the next few months. The only saddle I could fit onto the seat post might recently have been dug up in the Somme.

  Everything else was conspicuous by its absence. I’d failed to make any sense of Max’s cats’ cradle of brake stuff – perhaps two dozen sets, rust-fused together in a wooden beer crate. I similarly hadn’t troubled myself with the cups, rods, washers and dusted, oily confiture jars full of ball bearings, some or all of them relevant to the bottom bracket, the bike’s engine room, the stuff that goes in that round hole in the frame between the pedals. Hence no affixed pedals (from a choice of eight), cranks (six), chainring (three) or chain (eek – just the one).

  I looked at the thing with my eyes half closed, then very widely open. It was true that bicycles hadn’t changed much in one hundred years. It was even truer that this particular one would have to change enormously, and soon, if I entertained any hope of riding it up the Alps before it started snowing. To the optimist, that bike-alike crucifixion on the workshop stand was a start. To the pessimist – let’s call him Tim – it had the ominous look of an end, some over-ambitious ‘abandoned project’ put up on eBay by a clueless tit belatedly trying to cut his losses.

  Clearly I needed help, and those estimable tontons were able to supply at least some of it at the grubby-fingered click of a mouse. Many of their restoration tips proved encouragingly straightforward. Corrosion, it transpired, could be magically lifted away by a long bath in a purgative solution of citric acid. I came to love everything about this technique: the faintly illicit purchase and delivery of bulk chemicals, the goggles-on dilution and immersion process in a dozen roasting tins on the patio, the mutant dandelions that still grow up through the paving-slab gaps where I spilt a load. And how wondrous to behold the slow-mo rebirth of heavy metal, from corroded thing to smoothly machined, functional component, the chamfered edges and serial numbers that would ghost forth in the acid bath, then take hard and exciting form in the frenzied, patio-ravaging wire-brush assault that followed. My chosen pair of cranks were a particular source of post-citric pleasure, carbon steel re-endowed with the dour lustre of durable purpose, like something from a Victorian steam locomotive.

  I couldn’t decide what was more extraordinary: the time-rewinding effect of the acid, or the fact that these century-old bits could be so simply returned to foundry-fresh, full working order. The wear and corrosion on the pedals spoke of several decades of intensive use, followed by several more of damp abandonment. After nothing but a citric bath they were good to go. We just don’t make things that last like that any more. Why bother when machinery must now interact with flimsy electronics that are expected to fail in a few years, and in ways that no one is expected to fix? Who repairs a DVD player or a hard drive, when replacement is always cheaper? Nothing is built for the long haul. Once a modern car is ten years old, any breakdown more serious than a flat battery is likely to see it packed off to the scrapyard. Everything is under-engineered. Even spoons don’t last more than a decade these days. Especially if you keep stirring citric acid with them.

  It turned out I had quite a talent for soaking or smearing things in stuff, then rinsing or rubbing it off. I degreased axles, hubs and ball bearings in white spirit. The crusted saddle was laboriously revived with the entire contents of a very expensive jar of horse-tackle renovator acquired many years previously (at Cruft’s, while hungover – you know how it is). I picked the best of the bells (its gilded dome advertised F. Pellen Cycles de Saint Renan – just up the road from Max’s Breton gaff – in florid, belle époque splendour) and the most presentable old pump, and went at them hard with a toothbrush and Brasso. Then noticed I had scrubbed half the plating off, and went at them a little softer. These were happy days, filled with unchallenging, moderately purposeful pottering that seemed like excellent preparation, if not for this trip then for senile dementia. I think I could have strung out this gently satisfying phase indefinitely. Indeed, I did so for the best part of a month, until one sunny evening I found myself polishing up a second-reserve bell, and accepted it was time to move on.

  Doing so meant requesting the input of my friend Matthew, who had helped set up my Tour de France bike all those years before. In addition to establishing himself as the headmaster of a petrifyingly vast school in Wembley, Matthew has devoted the time since elapsed to acquiring, maintaining and upgrading increasingly impressive bicycles, and riding each of them for several thousand miles. Leading him out onto my patio I expected gasps or even howls of dismay and disbelief, but Matthew appraised the rusty skeleton, warped wood and roasting tins full of fizzing scrap with measured insouciance. He squatted down to pick through Max’s jars and boxes, and watching him nod and squint and tinker I recalled turning up on his doorstep the week before my Tour ride. I particularly recalled the uncertain laughter – you’re joking, right? – that was his stock response to my last-minute technical enquiries.

  Matthew had quite logically presumed, back then, that as a well-educated father of three I would have responsibly pre-equipped myself with at least the basic principles of maintenance before setting off on a 3,630km bicycle ride. Being twelve years older, I should, by traditiona
l extension, be twelve years wiser. The procedures Matthew now ran through, tipping out jars of threaded rings and slotted washers into my stupid hands, were evidently second nature to any sensible middle-aged cyclist: he wouldn’t insult me by detailing the tools required to strip down a headset, or appropriate headset lubricants, or what in fact a headset precisely was. For me to demand such answers at this stage would be like Neil Armstrong interrupting the Houston countdown to ask what all these buttons did.

  Every spring I’d been round to Matthew’s house to watch a stage or two of the Giro, and a stage or two of the Tour every summer. My passion for both events remained uninformed by technicalities; all the same, whenever Matthew took exception to some Eurosport pundit’s critique of gear ratios or riding positions, I shamelessly echoed his tuts and snorts. When, during those endless ad breaks, he led me to the shed to show off his latest bike or its most recent titanium enhancement, I felt obliged to disguise my ignorance with some cringingly generic blokeism: ‘That’s a beauty’ or ‘Heard those cost a few quid’. It was much the same when the conversation branched out into vehicle maintenance, guttering or the best ways to avoid Hanger Lane in the rush hour. I had disgracefully passed myself off, to a friend I had known for thirty years, as a competent grown-up man.

  Matthew left me with several useful-looking tools, a slow-burning sense of panicked inadequacy and the number of Jim Kent, a former teaching colleague. Jim was very much the right man – kind, knowledgeable, breezily can-do – in the right place: a bike shop. Three days later I drove over to There Cycling in Hanwell with a boot full of extremely clean but still largely mysterious bike parts, and spent the first of many afternoons in Jim’s little back-room workshop, drinking tea, bitching about Lance Armstrong, and toiling painfully away at his wheel-trueing jig like some village idiot trying to spin flax in oven gloves. ‘Well, a bike’s a bike,’ he breezed when I’d rather forlornly emptied Max’s beercrates and shoeboxes onto the workshop floor for his perusal. ‘Anything’s doable, everything’s fixable.’

  Jim didn’t even dismiss my best set of original wooden rims, which after a good scrub had offered up the stirring legend ‘SUPER CHAMPION’ and the neat perforations left by several dozen Breton woodworms. ‘Might be all right once you’ve got some more spokes in them,’ he said, eyeing the lonely, cock-eyed trio inserted in each by my efforts to date. ‘Have you fixed up old bikes before?’

  ‘Not many,’ I said drily, in tribute to a Scotsman I’d once overheard being asked how often his nation had won the World Cup. ‘But I’m learning fast. You could say I’m bike-curious!’

  Leaving Jim with a smile of encouragement frozen to his face, I backed smartly out of the workshop and took a while to appreciate his front-of-house showroom. There Cycling specialised in retro-look machines, all wicker baskets and polished chrome. I found myself drawn to one that paid strident homage to the age of Maurice Garin: glossy black frame, tan-leather handlebar grips, bulbous buff-coloured tyres. Being called a Pashley Guv’nor, it was targeted squarely at the ‘hipster bell-end’ market, but running my eyes and fingers over its magnificent, funereal coachwork I felt a galvanising surge of hope and want. Whatever I had to do, or whoever I had to get to do it for me, my La Française-Diamant was going to look like that. I wouldn’t just get the LFD on the road, I’d get it on the Corso Sempione in Milan on 24 May 1914, gleaming in the gaslight, Giro-ready, thronged on the start line by top-hatted sponsors and flat-capped fans.

  This ambition – by rights a moment of delusional madness – matured into expectation with the infectious input of Lance McCormack, a friend of Jim who kindly dropped by to assess my project on my second afternoon in There Cycling’s back room. Lance was immediately impressive, a silver-quiffed medley of mechanical omniscience, expensive tailoring and twinkly-eyed profanity. Our introductions revealed a stirring bond: we’d both been brought up in Ealing in the Seventies, and had both idled away large chunks of that decade with our faces pressed longingly to the window of B & L Accessories. ‘Could have been there together,’ said Lance, ‘nose by fucking nose.’

  Lance had, not quite like me, parlayed this youthful enthusiasm into a career in bespoke engineering. When he wasn’t restoring vintage cars to the very highest standard for loaded enthusiasts, he did the same to vintage bicycles for himself. This was a man who had named his son Merlin not after the beardy, made-up wizard, but in honour of a trailblazing manufacturer of titanium bike frames.

  ‘That’s a fancy fucker,’ he said, stooping to retrieve a chainring from one of my boxes. It was: a delicate encirclement of steel hearts that I hoped to marry to the LFD’s bottom bracket.

  ‘Forty-eight, right?’

  ‘Not for another three weeks,’ I replied, before Lance’s expression – and then voice – advised me to be less stupid. He was referring to the number of teeth on the ring, and a count affirmed his estimate.

  ‘Oh dear. You know the Eroica?’

  I did now: it was an annual vintage-bike race on Chianti’s strade bianche, rare survivors of the white gravel roads that formed the national network back in 1914. ‘I did that with a forty-eight a couple of years back. Old chap came up to me on the start line: “Quarant’otto? Crazy English!”’ Lance reprised the agonised thigh-rubbing that had accompanied this verdict. ‘He was bang on. I suffered like a fucking dog. Mind you, two other blokes died.’ Lance left this seductive precedent hanging in the air, and continued blithely rooting through Max’s stuff.

  ‘Looks like you’ve pretty much got everything,’ he announced when he was done. ‘Just depends how far you want to go. I like to get a bike looking just like it did when its first owner wheeled it out the shop.’ He paused to show me a phone picture of the current pride of his fleet, a 1947 Hetchins, in precisely such a state. ‘If that’s what you want to do, I can help you do it.’

  I found that I very much did, and a few days later drove up to an ancient light-industrial estate by the Grand Union Canal in Uxbridge, with Max’s scabby white frame in the boot (that’ll teach him to rip me off). The estate may well have been the most male place on earth, a ramshackle warren of gloomy corrugated sheds, each exuding its own furious mechanical din and bespoke waft of solvents. The dimmest and most distant was home to Lance’s recommended shotblasters: in slightly deflating reality, my first serious step forward with this project was a step back, the removal of Max’s horrid undercoat. I checked the unit number on the bit of paper Lance had given me, and refreshed myself with the instruction scribbled alongside: ‘MUST NOT GO IN TOO HEAVY!’

  Inside the shed, three men were gathered around a shuddering blast cabinet, inside which something metal was being viciously relieved of paint and rust. ‘IF IN DOUBT, DON’T’ read a notice beside this infernal machine, and while waiting for one of its operators to notice my presence I wondered how often I would fail to heed this prudent warning in the months ahead. At length, a man with an unlit roll-up wedged in his yellowing beard noticed me, and gestured that we converse outside.

  Someone called Elliot Percival should by rights have been out spying on Napoleon or deflowering milkmaids, but this example had turned to shotblasting after several decades as a software engineer. ‘I just wanted to get dirty,’ he said, scratching a cheek that bore witness to this objective’s very successful realisation. ‘These days I don’t even know how to turn a computer on.’ My frame, and the detached front forks, were assessed with brisk efficiency. ‘Looks old. Lance’s stuff always is.’

  I essayed an understated shrug. ‘Hundred years, give or take.’ A manly sniff; a pause for effect. ‘Don’t go in too heavy.’

  I didn’t really know what I was talking about, but how good it felt to say it, standing out there in the dusty, turps-scented sunlight, shooting the shit with smoking blokes in overalls. Places like this were now my realm; men like Elliot were now my people.

  Newly enthused, I barely took my boiler suit off for the next fortnight. It wasn’t always a focused operation. Having steeped almost everythi
ng Max had sold me in citric acid, I went around looking for yuck-encrusted household objects to submit to its savage rejuvenating powers: can openers, secateurs, the base of our electric toothbrush. I took my first tentative steps into proper stuff-fixing with the pump, which looked lovely in a piebald brass/chrome manner, but didn’t work. There was a small eureka thrill when I found that the little hose I’d kept from some long-lost pump threaded neatly into the airhole at the end, and another when a leather disc in my drawer of old washers proved a perfect replacement for the perished scrap inside. Never has a loud hiss been so celebrated.

  This was the stuff. I felt myself tapping into an indigenous tradition of DIY engineering that had run from the industrial revolution to my early adulthood, when taking broken things to pieces and fixing them with bits salvaged from other broken things was a core skill of the British male. My father had excelled at this, being particularly strong on the last part of the equation. Large zones of my parents’ house are still set aside for the storage of old crap that Might Be Useful One Day. My mother’s sisters used to swap stories about my father’s adventures in hardware retrieval: he once pitched an aunt face-first into the Zephyr dashboard after an emergency stop, throwing the door open and rushing back down the road to retrieve a single screw he’d spotted in the gutter. (‘Come on,’ he told me thirty years after the event, ‘it was a three-inch Phillips.’)