Gironimo! Page 6

  I swallowed in sympathy, excited but a little frightened, and above all terribly confused. I’d come here to get the final bits for my – hawk, spit – Brillant, and had already got most of them. I’d rebuilt that bike from rusty scratch, stripped it down, painted it up, marinated the sodding thing in my own sweat and man-tears . . . but, but, but, but it almost certainly wasn’t built in 1914, and it definitely wasn’t a proper road bike, and this here Hirondelle was demonstrably both. I restrained a screech of flustered frustration, or tried to: the vendor recoiled slightly at the high-pitched gargle that forced its way through my pursed lips.

  ‘C’est combien?’ asked Jim, carelessly. Quite a large part of me wanted a lofty four-figured answer, one that would neatly seal off this unsettling new avenue.

  The vendor once again savoured the feel of grubby fingers on threadbare skull. ‘Quatre cents.’

  Four hundred euros – bum-nuts on a rope, right in the sweet spot.

  ‘Trois cents,’ I blurted. At this he cranked up the Frenchometer with a terrific huff of offended exasperation, followed by many fast words.

  ‘He says the handlebars alone are worth that,’ Jim translated. ‘How about we tell him to take them off and offer a hundred for the rest of it?’ It was a brilliantly tempting suggestion, but ten seconds later, in the time-honoured fashion, we’d split the difference and shaken on it. In a daze I shuffled off to find a cashpoint.

  Ten minutes later I was counting seven fifty-euro notes into a blackened palm and feeling markedly more at ease. Yes, I was back to square one, and yes I had paid through the arse for the privilege, coughing up €350 for a knackered and incomplete bicycle to replace a €400 predecessor to whose restoration I had devoted (read: wasted) most of the previous two months. Yes, now that I inspected this new acquisition in detail I could see that the chainring and pedals were all wrong, that the rear sprocket and both hubs were rusted to a buggery beyond citric redemption, that the bottom bracket – yes, really – was a non-original bloody Thompson.

  But, as I shouldered the filthy thing and set off with Jim through the funny-hatted throng, all this stuff began to seem less and less important. On a humdrum practical level, Max’s tins and boxes contained most of the period bits this Hirondelle lacked or would need to have replaced – brakes, bell, pump, hubs, axles, pedals, sprockets. All those patio hours had not been in vain: many, in fact most, of the components I had so painstakingly revived would find a home on my No 7 Course sur Route.

  Above and beyond such mundanities, though, this bike was the tits. It just looked right and felt right. So very right that the events of the past hour were already beginning to resemble some out-take from that pre-festival Aladdin’s Cave dream. With my fingers round its crusted crossbar and its Calzolari-era catalogue-double folded tenderly in my back pocket like a billet-doux I already felt a connection I’d never felt with its ill-fated forerunner. Serendipity had brought us together, here in this sun-dappled riverside avenue full of twits in trilbies and shonky old tat. My Hirondelle was The One; this was meant to be. I’d gone on holiday to France and fallen in love with the ropey old village bike.

  The balance of the weekend passed in a haze, thickened with new passion and lunchtime drinking. We spent that evening in a neat square full of bars, watching on a tiny outside screen as France went out of Euro 2012; celebration evolved seamlessly to wake, and along we went for the boozy ride. I’d leaned the Hirondelle next to my chair, and as we stumbled to our feet and made to leave, a suave young festival-goer walking by with a shiny 1950s racer stooped down for a look. ‘Ah, une Hirondelle!’ Assessing our general unsteadiness he continued in English. ‘Zees bicycle were super-populaire wiss ze police in, uh, old times.’ I nodded glassily. ‘It’s, in fact, ze old familiar name for police en France – les Hirondelles.’

  It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear – shades of the windmill-watching customs’ officer in that Brillant poster – but I smiled broadly all the same. I was still smiling, though more palely, when we coerced the Hirondelle into the back of Matthew’s car the next morning, along with a colossal Anjou Vélo Vintage placard I’d seen fit to liberate from a fence on the way back to the hotel. I think I must have been showing off to my new girlfriend.

  The festival’s finale was a thousand-strong retro-ride around the Pays de Loire, and before setting off home we drove up to watch them head out. It was a blowy morning: all those vintage floral skirts were now pleasing liabilities, and to great cheers one of the cardinals on a three-seat tandem lost his red cap. As the fancy-dress peloton wobbled gingerly by, dinging bells and parping horns, it occurred to me that this 30-mile ride round the country lanes was as tough as it ever got for these well-loved but wonky velocipedes. As tough as it ever got for their twat-hatted riders. I tried very hard to imagine that in two months’ time, both me and the crusty antique making a terrible mess of Matthew’s upholstery and the back of Jim’s neck would be ready for a rather sterner challenge. That we’d be breaking through that 30-mile finish line and pedalling on, away towards the horizon, for another 2,000 miles. Forrest Gump on a daft old bike.

  Inspired to the point of terror, I came home and revived my training regime, branching out into attic ‘biathlons’ in which I performed one sport (exercise-biking) while watching another (football). When the Tour de France began I pedalled along in earnest, head down, watching sweat drip from my chin onto my distorted reflection in the exercise bike’s shiny black frame. To bolster motivation I competed against the future Sir Wiggo and friends with what seemed a fair handicap, trying to keep my speed – as indicated on the exercise bike’s little digital screen – at half theirs. I don’t mean to boast, but under this weighted system I actually finished third in the stage-nine time trial.

  Momentum was building, and necessarily: my departure deadline could now be most sensibly measured in weeks rather than months. I contacted Ghisallo, the Italian wheelbuilders who were the solitary manufacturer of wooden rims, and ordered a pair of six-layer, lap-jointed beech-wood wheels with the correct period profile. Cerchi Ghisallo seemed like a splendid concern. It was named after, and located next to, the famous Madonna del Ghisallo ‘cyclists’ chapel’ above Lake Como, and had been run since 1946 by a family of grumpy craftsmen. Their avowed aim: never to produce fewer than five hundred rims a year, or more than one thousand. I found an interview with the elderly boss in which an enthusiastic questioner was repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to portray the fabrication of a Ghisallo rim as a painstaking labour of love.

  ‘Could you describe the technical variations between the nine different rim designs you offer?’

  ‘There aren’t any.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘But how about your special reinforced model, the Rinforzato?’

  ‘Hah! That’s just a name.’

  With a heavy sigh I got to work stripping all the many bits off my old-old bike that I’d need for my new-old bike. And with an even heavier one, I bowed my head and grimly embarked upon the most dreadful task of all. To pay meaningful homage to the 1914 Giro competitors meant doing everything as authentically as possible. To suffer as they suffered I must go where they went, ride what they rode and wear what they wore. So it was that I now set about kitting myself out like a giant cock.

  The Internet’s ability to unearth definitive, hyper-detailed answers to even the obscurest question is a double-edged sword. Its shinier, stabbier edge had proved very useful in pinpointing the precise design of wooden wheels preferred by pre-war professional bicycle riders, and contact details for the only firm who still made them. My quest to find out how these riders dressed caused the other edge, all rusted and jaggedy, to slash me right across the buttocks.

  A tonton named Emile nurtured a particular fixation with the minutiae of vintage peloton fashion, and hosted a website that displayed his enormous collection of replica kit. Emile’s 1910–20 outfits made for especially difficult viewing. Jerseys of this period were long-sleeved
, roll-over cowl-necks fashioned from heavy wool, like something you might have worn to catch deep-sea fish in the Whisky Galore! era. What fun that promised to be when I was toiling round Italy in the dog days of late August.

  A price tag of €175 for my pair of wheels didn’t seem outrageous for something hand-crafted by Italians, certainly in comparison to the slightly larger sum I now paid a Parma resident called Fausto to knit me a woolly jumper. Like Ghisallo, Fausto was the only show in town: Emile had assured me that nobody else offered bespoke replica jerseys from this epoch. Along with my PayPal dosh, I’d sent Fausto a convoluted series of requested measurements, and an instruction that the jersey should be of plain white merino wool. He offered to embroider an age-appropriate team logo across the front at no extra cost – Calzolari’s cursive, copperplate ‘Stucchi’ would have made a majestic chest-spanner – but I was hamstrung by my slavish-ish pursuit of authenticity. ‘Participants in the 1914 Giro were divided into three categories,’ wrote Paolo Fachinetti. ‘Accasati, affiliated to professional teams; the privateer-professional isolati; and aspiranti: amateur adventurers, little more than cyclo-tourists, almost all of whom failed to finish the first stage.’ Reluctant as I might be to align myself with these doomed no-hopers, doing so was the only honest option. I was an aspiranto, and as such could only wear the simple white jersey that the Paolo-transcribed rules dictated.

  I’d have to wing it with the woollen shorts and socks, which no one bothered replicating but seemed pretty unremarkable. Shoes – mincing little black lace-ups – didn’t seem to have evolved much from the dawn of cycling time until the 1970s; leboncoin and French eBay turned up several antique options. The real horrors kicked in from the neck up. Emile’s site and the photos in Paolo’s book on the 1914 Giro brooked no argument: my Internet history was soon besmirched with searches for ‘vintage blue lens goggles’ and an ‘eight-panel white linen baker-boy hat’. I could have saved time by typing in ‘terrifying Seventies pervert’.

  The bulk of my waking hours, though, was still spent out on the patio, making what could kindly be described as steady progress on the bike clamped in the stand. For three years I’d been promising to redecorate the house, and when my wife now subcontracted the task to a Polish bloke, I felt in no position to argue (though obviously did anyway). This fellow seemed tremendously interested in what I was up to out there. At the end of his first day he came into the garden to clean his brushes, walking curiously around me as I prodded ineffectually at the bottom bracket.

  ‘Is old,’ he declared at length.

  I agreed that it was.

  ‘Why you not put in rubbish?’

  Lying in bed the morning after my return from Anjou, I’d experienced a sort of epiphany. ‘Dans son jus’ was a phrase familiar to me from the tonton site, and one I’d heard severally around the AVV stalls. ‘In its juice’ meant unrestored, original, as-is. A relation of the eBay catchphrase ‘shabby chic’, it was generally wheeled out to cast an alluringly romantic gloss on some woeful rustbucket that had spent thirty years rotting under a cat-piss tarp. The dans-son-jus ethos was the antithesis of Lance’s showroom-fresh ideal, but I suddenly realised that what I’d wanted all along was a warts-and-all bike, one that had been around the block a few times, a bike that was old and looked it.

  My Hirondelle was by no means a race-bred professional machine: having tracked down the firm’s complete 1914 catalogue, I’d established that the ‘No 7’ was their entry-level road racer, pitched at ‘young people and any cyclist who loves speed’. At the list price of 160 francs, even brakes were an optional extra. But Number 7 made an endearing underdog, and it seemed instinctively right to leave its edges roughened. No more shotblasting, no more resprays, and certainly no re-nickeling (how close I’d come to spunking £70 on having the handlebars re-plated). I opened my eyes and told my wife: ‘I’m going to have her as she is. I want her in her juice.’

  This new intention was fast-tracked by another ill-fated dalliance with la méthode Piotr. After a brisk dabble exposed the original frame number – 87277, gold stamped on the black seat post – I got carried away, erasing a great swathe of the green backgammon-dart decoration from the down tube. That was that. Instead, I simply rubbed the whole thing down with a damp rag and painted it with that stinking rust-proof varnish. Every acid-scoured component – handlebars, cranks, brake levers, pedals, bell – received the same simple, smelly treatment. When it was done I looked happily around the patio, now bestrewn with sticky old metal embalmed in its own decay. The Polish painter had been monitoring me from an upstairs window; I smiled at him, and he burst out laughing.

  The Tour ended; the Olympics began. Up in the attic I was cranking out a big gear for the men’s road race, and a slightly smaller one for the beach volleyball. Every couple of hours the doorbell heralded a mad dash downstairs to receive a new delivery. Cotter pins, white grease, another tub of that ruinously dear horse-tackle renovator to revive the Hirondelle’s original Brooks racing saddle – svelte and extremely comfortable, but as deeply crevassed as the hide of a dying elephant.

  In a state of excited dread I tore open a Jiffy bag plastered in transatlantic stamps to reveal the ‘vintage chemist goggles with leather side shields’ I’d bought off a Canadian eBayer. My word, they were mad: John Lennon specs for a steampunk welder. I put them on and felt all kinds of wrong. The leather – hefty lateral blinkers plus a protective pad across the bridge of the nose – hemmed the world ahead into a claustrophobic corridor that reeked of musty laboratories. The extraordinary weight of the old clear-glass safety lenses, thick as £2 coins, swiftly caused my head to loll downwards – just as well, with a mirror in front of me. The glazed-millstone aspect was very much improved a week later, when a slightly unnerved optician replaced the lenses with much thinner blue-tinted ones. The view in the mirror very much wasn’t.

  There was no let-up for our postman. A pair of plain merino-wool socks. Two metal bidons – retro-style, but for health considerations not in any way old (after booting them around on the patio for ten minutes to scrub in a bit of age, I looked up to meet the painter’s inevitable steady gaze). Four light-grey, wide-profile Vittoria tubular tyres designed for cyclo-cross use: as I’d learned at Anjou, the closest available approximation to Calzolari’s bulbous, cloth-backed ‘palmers’. That baggy white linen cap, a true abomination, even more Gilbert O’Sullivan than I’d feared. A vintage-pattern leather-and-canvas saddlebag from a specialist South Korean firm, which looked terrific but also tiny, an improbable home for everything I hoped to take. A pair of old woollen cycling shorts from French eBay, embroidered on each leg with the still-mysterious legend ‘DALISTEL’. The elastic was going and the fraying chamois gusset had seen better days – days I really didn’t want to think about in any detail. They were high-cut mini-shorts, perhaps from the early Merckx era. I put them on; they fell down.

  One day brought two sizeable packages from across the Channel. The first was a box containing the shoes of Gerard Lagrost. I’d found them on leboncoin, and ended up enjoying a chirpy email correspondence with the aforementioned owner/vendor. His winning opener: ‘Hello, English cycleman friend! I have 67 years.’

  Gerard’s shoes, supplied with bespoke wooden trees, were hand-hewn from stout leather – black laced uppers, liberally perforated for ventilation, with soles held in place and reinforced with rusted nails and rivets. Prolonged contact with ridged pedals had left two neat rows of indentations across the front part of each sole, a tribute to my fellow size 42-er’s long career in the saddle. Deep into his fifties, Gerard decided to tell me, these shoes had been pressing the pedals on an annual 900km trip from Paris to Perpignan. He sent me photos of the bike on which he’d completed these rides – a yellow tourer inherited from his father – and the 1910 swan-neck Peugeot town bike he still pottered around on.

  Gerard Lagrost was from that generation of European males who undertook a transnational bike ride not as some wanky challenge of self-examination – that was m
y job – but just as a cheap and hearty way of getting from A to a very distant B. His touching need to reminisce was, I sensed, a recognition that this generation was coming to a close.

  To reciprocate I emailed him a snap of my Hirondelle up on the bike stand. ‘Next month I shall ride this bicycle 3,162km around Italy wearing your faithful shoes,’ I typed, my keyboard quite literally aglow with dramatic significance.

  His reply arrived within the hour. ‘I am happy you enjoy my shoes.’

  The second package was rather larger, and contained a shiny, bamboo-coloured pair of Ghisallo wooden rims. Again I felt that double thrill, entranced both by the timeless aesthetic of these varnished birch circles and by the very fact that I should feel this way about them. More familiar emotions rose to the surface when I attempted to marry wheels to bike. Removing the spokes and hubs from the discarded Super Champions was the sweary work of a painter-pleasing morning, with the balance of the day devoted to nearly fitting half of them into the Ghisallos. (‘Is wheels from wood?’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘But . . . is new!’)

  In the morning I inflicted myself once more on Jim, and submitted to another compromise. The old spokes were, we conceded, both the wrong length and dangerously shit; I abandoned them in favour of seventy-two new ones from Jim’s stock room. Four hours later I came home with an almost functional bicycle in the boot.

  Impatience had been knocking on the door for a long time, and now finally burst inside along with its handmaiden, clumsy haste. With the help of a club hammer, a son and a big length of wood I separated the handlebar stem from the head-tube in a manner that left the patio scattered with bearing cups, locknuts and tiny steel balls. Reassembly was inspired by a technique I had beta-tested while putting the axles and hubs together: fill thin gaps with washers, cram thicker ones with ball bearings, then slather the lot in grease and quickly tighten it all up before too much stuff fell out.