Rough Ride

by Paul Kimmage

  There won't be any World Championship or any Nissan Classic. I know I'm not going to race again. My spirit has snapped and it's an unmendable break. My thoughts are not of the future, they are a prisoner of the past.

  2

  THE FIRST IRISH POPE

  Beasy McArdle, the portly staff nurse at the Rotunda maternity hospital in Dublin, loved babies. She used to walk up and down the wards of screaming new-born, pluck them from their cradles and hug and kiss them as if they were her own. Embracing them with tenderness, she caressed them with her soft west of Ireland accent: 'Oh I could love you.'

  On the evening of 7 May 1962 another brand-new baby joined the assembly line and took its place beside its mother. Beasy took a long, hard look at the child. She noticed his large head and decided it was the head of a leader – a Pope: 'I'm sure he will be the first Irish Pope,' she said.

  My mother smiled. It had been a difficult pregnancy, full of complications, but she was over the worst and was glad her child was healthy. I tipped the scales at nine pounds two ounces, a hefty lad with a huge head. My mother remembers the head – it nearly killed her. She already had a name for me, Paul. She thought about what Beasy had said: 'Pope Paul' had a nice ring to it. She would mention it to Christy when he came in later.

  My father worked on a more conventional assembly line. He welded car bodies at the Volkswagen plant on the Naas road in Dublin. It was monotonous, tiring work and he looked forward each night to clocking off and escaping into the countryside for two hours' training on his bicycle.

  My Da was born in Dublin, the youngest of the seven children of James and Mary Kimmage. It's an unusual name, from a suburb of Dublin on the south side, but we can't trace our family tree back very far. We don't know where we come from. Da had three brothers and three sisters and it was his elder brothers Jimmy and Kevin who introduced him to cycling. He liked it and joined the Dublin Wheelers' touring section in 1954.

  One day they went to see a race, the Circuit of Bray. Seamus Elliot, the best Irish rider in the country, broke clear of the field with two English riders, Harry Reynolds and Dick Bowes. He soon disposed of them both, to the delight of the huge crowd lining the seafront. My Da was touched by the atmosphere, the colour, by Shay Elliot. He wanted to race. The bug had bitten him.

  His first year of competition was in 1956. The new sport was tough, but he had a talent for it and it wasn't long before he was winning. In 1957 he returned to the Circuit of Bray – and won, the first of four wins in that once prestigious classic. In 1958 he was selected to represent Ireland at the World Championships in Rheims, France. On a searing hot day the field was whittled down to forty riders with just two laps left. Da was there, he wanted to finish, to be one of the top forty in the world.

  A friend of his, John Flanagan, was taking care of him from the pits area. With two laps to go he handed Christy a feeding bottle with brandy in it. In sheeting rain or arctic cold, a nip of brandy would perhaps have been beneficial, but not on a day when the temperature was in the nineties. Da, dying with the thirst, took a swallow from the bottle. It nearly killed him – he abandoned.

  Rheims was the end of a very successful season for him. Back in Ireland another season was just beginning. The 'be social' season. The Wheelers advertised their regular Sunday outings in the shop window of the Rutland bike shop in North Frederick Street. On the third weekend of September a notice read:

  Meal 'alfresco' at Roundwood. Tea at Butler's 6 o'clock.

  Butler's tearooms, at the Scalp in County Wicklow, was the traditional rendezvous for all Dublin's cycling clubs when they went south of the Liffey. The hungry pedallers would devour tea, home-made scones and cakes and then settle down to an evening of songs, dancing and plenty of fun. It usually ended about midnight, when the last thrill of the day was a mad descent into the city in the dark.

  On that Sunday in September, my Da spent the day touring the Wicklow hills and then headed to Butler's for tea. There, a pleasant young touriste caught his eye. Her name was Angela. He liked her.

  Angela Davis was the youngest daughter of Francis and Mary Davis of Kilfenora Road, Kimmage. They lived in a two-bedroomed corporation terraced house – not very big for a family with fourteen children. Granda worked nights in dispatch at the Irish Times. In the modern era his family would undoubtedly have been smaller, but as he says in his typical Dublin accent, 'In dem days der was no television.' My Ma, the twelfth arrival, left school at fourteen and started work as a trainee tailor at Weartex, near her home. She saved hard, bought her first bicycle on hire purchase and joined the Dublin Wheelers with her sister Pauline. It was on a run with the Wheelers that she met Christy at Butler's. They talked, danced and although Ma claims it was 'love at first sight', the relationship did not take off immediately. The first real date was months later – a visit to the Theatre Royal for a film and a show.

  The following year, 1958, my father enjoyed the best form of his career. He won anything worth winning. In June Billy Morton organised a prestigious track meeting to celebrate the opening of a new cycling and running track at Santry stadium in Dublin. Shay Elliot, now a professional (Ireland's first), was flown in from France along with French star Albert Bouvet and the Italian campionissimo, Fausto Coppi. In front of a huge crowd, Elliot beat the continental pros and my father won the amateur event.

  A day later he flew to the Isle of Man for the Viking Trophy race on a small plane with Coppi, Bouvet and Elliot. The flight gave him a nice opportunity to talk to Elliot about the possibility of racing in France. Shay suggested he try his luck in Paris with a club called ACBB. He had contacts there and would arrange it if my Da was interested. He was interested. Elliot won the pro race on the island, but my Da was denied victory on the line to finish a narrow second in the Viking race. Twenty-three years later my brother Raphael won that same race and brought the Viking Trophy back to our house. My Da wouldn't admit it, but I know it meant a lot to him.

  When he came back to Dublin, Da organised himself for Paris. He gathered his savings and remembers a friend, John Connon, giving him £25 (a lot of money in those days) and a bike bag. Paris was huge, mind-boggling compared with Dublin. When he arrived he got hopelessly lost in the underground, the Metro. He was hampered in the crowds by his bike and bag, but eventually found his way to his lodgings, a flat in Montparnasse. The club provided him with a new Helyett bike, but in the two weeks he stayed he never raced. Living out of a suitcase, unable to speak a word of the language, he felt desperately alone. The life of a professional cyclist was not for him. He didn't want it. He returned to Dublin and to this day does not regret his decision.

  Twenty-five years later Raphael and I arrived in the same city with the same objective, at the same club. Before we left Dublin we had never fully understood why he only stuck it out for two weeks. We soon did.

  When he returned home, he was selected to ride in another world championship, but the week before a bad crash at an evening race in Baldoyle sent him to hospital instead. He didn't race again for two years. The crash and the disappointment of Paris had turned him off the sport, but there was also another reason – marriage. Ma always claims he wasn't so much homesick as lovesick in Paris because as soon as he came home he popped the question and started saving for a house.

  The wedding was in August 1961 and they honeymooned in Edinburgh before returning to Dublin to begin married life in a run-down Georgian house in Eccles Street. It was divided into eight rooms on two floors and was home to eight families. There was just one toilet in the building and one cold-water tap provided all eight families with their only running water. My parents' flat was on the ground floor and had a window looking out on the street. It was old and run-down, but it was home and they didn't complain – housing in Dublin was hard to come by in the early 1960s.

  The flat was my first home in the world. When I was seven months old, Santa Claus brought me a three-wheeled bicycle and it wasn't long before I was racing around the room on it. Ma laughs about that littl
e bike. She remembers that when she was toilet-training me I would charge around the flat with nothing on. One day I got it wrong and deposited a huge stool on the brightly painted seat of the bike; she can still see it today.

  She has other, not so pleasant, memories of the street. Late at night Da and she would be awakened by the sound of a fist banging on the windowpane and a man's voice calling out, 'Joan!' This happened regularly. The voices changed, but the demand was always the same: 'Joan!' They made inquiries and found out that 'Joan' had been the previous occupant of the flat. She was a prostitute. The most frightening incident happened three months after they moved in. It was a typical Dublin evening, raining cats and dogs. My mother was pregnant with me and suffering from a kidney infection. At three in the morning, they were woken by a fierce banging on the door. Granda Kimmage was very ill at the time and my father feared it was one of his family with some bad news. He jumped up to answer the door, but it wasn't his brother or sister. There was a tall, uniformed Garda standing in the hall. He was soaked to the skin and reeked of alcohol. He demanded to see 'Joan'. My father explained that Joan had moved out months ago, but the policeman insisted on entering the flat. He walked into the room, looked at my sick mother, apologised and left.

  Da started to race again at the start of 1962. My arrival half-way through the year did not upset his form for, two months after my birth, he became the Irish champion at Markethill in County Armagh. He had come second in 1958 and 1959, so the elusive tide victory brought him great pleasure. I was taken regularly to watch my Da racing and I'm told my first words were not so much 'Da Da' as 'Come on Da Da'. My brother Raphael was born two years after me in 1964. Da called him after the famous French professional Raphael Geminiani, much to the disgust of Granny Kimmage, who said Raphael was no name to give a child. Kevin, the third son, was born three years later and Eccles Street started to get crowded. We moved to a new complex of flats in Ballymun five miles north of the Liffey.

  The flat was bright and clean, had toilets and running water and a unique central heating system – the floors heated. But my parents didn't like it. On the day we moved in the lifts broke down and Da had to carry a washing machine up eight flights of stairs on his back. Soon after he caught Raphael hanging over the balcony and got a terrible fright. Raphael was given the standard punishment: his bum was reddened. I suppose it's what I remember most about my youth – my father's war cry when we misbehaved or were 'bold', as we say in Ireland. It was always: 'I'll redden your arse for you.' He rarely did, the threat was enough to put the fear of God into us.

  We stayed in Ballymun for a year and then moved to a new three-bedroomed semi-detached house in Coolock, two miles to the east. My fourth brother, Christopher, eleven years my junior, was brought up here. The family was complete and Kilmore Avenue remains the family home today. My Da stopped racing in 1972: he was thirty-four years old, and raising sons was very time-consuming. He tried to get me interested in every kind of sport, but I was only ever interested in doing one thing. When I was ten years old he bought me a racing bike.

  3

  PACKET SOUP AND

  FRUIT CAKE

  Delving into one's past can be discouraging, even disturbing. Questioning my mother about how she met my father was awkward. Questioning my father about my childhood was as bad. It's as if they have something very precious which they don't want to share with anyone. It's strange. Maybe I'll feel the same if I have children of my own one day.

  Ma (Dublin kids always call their mother 'Ma' and their father 'Da') says I was a dependable child. To illustrate this she tells the pound of sugar story. She would often come in from the shops having forgotten to buy a pound of sugar. This was a major headache because it meant putting my clothes on to go out again. Sometimes she just left me in the middle of the floor, surrounded by kitchen chairs, and sprinted to Geraghty's in Dorset Street for the sugar. When she came back I would always be there, not having moved an inch. A dependable child.

  My St David's Primary School teacher Michael O'Braoinain tells me that at school I fought injustice. I would never let him get away with anything unjust even if I risked a clip on the ear for my insubordination. My father says that as a child I was a nightmare – but he's lying, for I know I was good. This is not to say I didn't get my arse tanned on several occasions. But generally I was good. And this is what disturbs me. It's almost a disappointment to discover that I wasn't a tyrant child, unsuccessful at school and on my way to a life in prison only to be saved by athletic prowess. No, I was good, boringly good.

  I have a few vague memories of Eccles Street: of the old and very mad woman we frequently met on the road, who terrified me; of my father leaving me to go to the hospital late one night; of Mrs Geraghty's sweet shop in Dorset Street, and one or two other trivial things.

  My memory banks started to function when I was six and we moved to Ballymun. I loved it there. Much of that concrete jungle was still being built and I found the building sites fascinating. Ma would leave me in charge of Raphael (I was dependable, remember) and I would drag him around the sites, where we would play. Lipton's Supermarket was another favourite haunt. We would hang out at the incinerator, eating the half-burned rotten vegetables that we found lying around. It was all pretty harmless but Ballymun did have its dangers. My father made the flats' underground basement a strict 'no go' area after a paedophile was reported to have interfered with a neighbour's daughter.

  Scuttin' was also taboo. This involved swinging out of the back of the delivery lorries to Lipton's, hanging on till the truck slowed down at a set of traffic lights and then jumping off. Scuttin' was very popular and I found it hard to obey my father. It took at least two or three arse-reddenings to convince me that it wasn't worth it.

  It was in Ballymun that I rode my first two-wheeler. Da bought it and immediately removed the two stabilisers. He sat me on the saddle in the small car park in front of the flats and then pushed me off. I wobbled once or twice, but basically had no trouble and was delighted with myself. I loved cycling; from the time I was born it had always been part of my life. Whenever possible, Da would take us to the races to watch him. I loved the races. I loved it when Da gave me a crossbar from the finish to the car after the race was over. I felt so proud. I was fascinated by his legs, the way the bulging muscles shone from the oils he spread on them. But most of all I loved it when he won.

  We have a photo at home of him winning a race at Ballyboghil in the north of County Dublin. Raphael and I are both standing on the small school fence overlooking the finishing line. Raphael has his two hands raised and it is clear to see the joy on our faces. Needless to say he lost quite a few as well. I could never understand him losing and when I questioned him his reply was always, 'Sure I have to give the other fellows a chance sometimes.' This infuriated me. I honestly believed him.

  I often asked him if he was the best. Here he never lied. No, he was not the best. He was good but not the best. Peter Doyle was the best. He used to point out Peter Doyle to me, and on occasions when the great man came to our house he would ask, 'Paul, do you know who this is?' And, finger in my mouth, I would reply shyly, 'Peter Doyle'. To me, my Da was God, but Peter Doyle was also God.

  Being at the races wasn't always a pleasure. I remember an evening race in the Phoenix Park. I stood with my mother as she chatted with the other cycling widows waiting impatiently for the finishing sprint. There was a gasp from the crowd as a rider hit a parked car, flew over the top and landed on the grass verge. I remember leaving my mother's side and running to the crowd that surrounded the motionless groaning body. I was too small to see over them, but I bent down on my knees and, looking through the legs, spotted the rider's number. Number 22. I wasn't sure but expected that it was Da. Then I saw the crash hat. The blue leather crash hat that he always wore: 'It's him, that's my Da.' And then sprinting back to Ma, shouting, 'It's him, it's Da!' And for some crazy reason being glad that my Da was the centre of all the attention. The thought that he might be injur
ed never crossed my mind. He was taken to hospital but got off lightly. His crash hat, split up the middle, had saved him from injury. When I rode my first race I had the same blue crash hat on my head. There were other, classier, hats, but I wanted this one. This was my Da's. Da was God.

  I rode my first official race at ten, but the unofficial ones started much earlier. When we moved to Coolock I used to race the neighbours' kids round the block. I always won or nearly always. Davy Casey my next-door neighbour sometimes beat me. This cracked me up. I was a desperately bad loser and would burst into tears of rage when I did. School gave me other opportunities to race. I entered Michael O'Braoinain's class when I was nine. Michael took a great shine to me and instilled in me a new confidence in my academic ability. He made me write poetry and regularly praised my offerings. He also instilled in us an appreciation of Gaelic culture, and he was a great man for playing a jig and a reel on the tin whistle. We laugh about that now. I've played squash with him regularly in the past six months – he claims he always knew I'd end up writing for a living.