Guilt or innocence was only one part of the lasting issue, however. Before the Allies appeared Gaston Merckx’s three brothers, Maurice, Marcel and Albert, had escaped, most probably to Germany, and no one knew where they were: they were never seen again. There was no immediate closure. There were two waves of reprisals in Meensel-Kiezegem, one following liberation in September 1944, and a second when the few survivors of the round-ups returned to the villages from May 1945.
As in other communities across Europe, there was harassment and violence and destruction of property. Armed men searched houses at dead of night for collaborators who had escaped. In August 1945, one of the handful of men who had survived the concentration camps returned to the village and heard rumours that one of the Merckx brothers might be hiding on a farm owned by a member of the Pittomvils family, Louis. A group of former resistance men gathered by night and burned the place. Louis Pittomvils was shot dead, although he was innocent of any misdeed. The perpetrators were never brought to justice.
Jules, Jenny and young Edouard moved to the Brussels suburbs a year after the war ended. The events of 1944 and 1945 in Meensel-Kiezegem may or may not have played a part in the decision, but they are there in the background nonetheless. The community had been ripped to pieces by the atrocities, and the family had suffered. Two of Jenny’s brothers, Petrus and Josef, had been deported to Germany. Josef died in Bergen-Belsen on 14 March 1945. Petrus was a 110-kilo colossus when he left but returned a wraith of just thirty-eight kilos, his legs deeply scarred from beatings by the Gestapo. His doctors said it was better that he did not discuss his experiences. Two other members of the wider Pittomvils family had died in Neuengamme.
In those difficult post-war years, the opportunity to lease the grocer’s shop must have been too good to pass up on. Jules had left his family farm to work as a carpenter in the nearby town of Leuven but did not get on with his boss and was unhappy. Jenny’s sister had a shop in the Brussels suburb of Anderlecht and Jenny went there regularly to help her so she knew what was involved. It was Jenny who heard about the grocer’s shop being up for lease; speaking to the writer Stéphane Thirion, she said, ‘I wanted something else, for us and our son.’ The chance for her son to learn French also mattered. Jules was less enthusiastic, she said, and ‘accepted out of love’.
Jenny Merckx was also the driving force behind the running of the shop. It was not far from her sister, and also within reach of Jenny’s parents, who remained in Kiezegem: the family returned to visit the farm at weekends. Eddy Merckx himself makes the point that they were warmly welcomed. He raced there at least twice in his early years; once in an event that has never been recorded when he was about twelve, the second a race in his first season, 1961, which he did not finish.
The grocer’s shop opened by Jules and Jenny in September 1946 in Place des Bouvreuils, Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, was in a tiny square, barely fifty metres across, well away from the bustle of Woluwe’s commercial centre. It lay on the south side of the square, which still boasts a newsagent’s in another of the buildings: a small plaque in the traffic island in the middle of the street denotes the fact that Eddy Merckx was brought up here. They had moved a mere fifty kilometres – nowadays a rapid run down the motorway that passes the university town of Leuven – but the Merckx family did more than merely move house: they crossed the language divide, from a Flemish-speaking area, Brabant, to one where French was spoken, leaving the grandparents behind.
Belgium is a linguistic and cultural patchwork, divided between the largely Flemish-speaking north, Flanders, and the French-speaking south, Wallonia, with French-speaking enclaves to the west, Hainaut Occidental, and in the centre, the region around Brussels. It would be inaccurate to say that Walloons and Flandrians are completely separate: during research for this book, I kept meeting couples who were bilingual. The distinction between the various areas is clear, however. Like most Flandrians, Jules spoke only Flemish, although Jenny was fluent in French, having been taught the language by her grandmother. As well as crossing the language divide, they were also crossing a social divide: they were country people in a relatively rich suburb.
The move from Meensel-Kiezegem to Brussels had an important effect on young Edouard’s future career, his identity, and the impact he would make on his divided nation. Most fundamentally, the name that is now synonymous with world domination in cycling would probably not have been Eddy. Merckx, with its consonants, is a Dutch name. The contraction of Edouard to Eddy is a customary French nickname. Had he been a pure Flandrian, it would probably have been shortened to Ward.
Had Edouard become Ward rather than Eddy, he would probably still have been a racing cyclist, given that Meensel-Kiezegem had its own champion, the double Paris–Roubaix winner, Georges Claes, who ran a local bike shop and took groups of youngsters from the area out riding on Sundays. That alternative trajectory would have made Merckx another member of a generation of cyclists from Belgium’s Flemish-speaking regions that was arguably the most talented produced by a single nation at any time in cycling history. Merckx’s contemporaries included stars such as Walter Godefroot, Herman Van Springel, Eric Leman, Roger De Vlaeminck and Freddy Maertens. Ward Merckx might still have turned out to be the strongest of the lot, but he might not have ended up a cycling demi-god.
Young Eddy was a hyperactive child who wanted to be outdoors, something his mother struggled with, especially when the twins Michel and Micheline were born in May 1948. He spent hours in the little hills and woods of the south-east Brussels suburbs and loved to spend time on his grandmother’s farm at Meensel-Kiezegem helping to look after the animals. Woluwe must have been a child’s paradise with lakes and deep forests just a couple of blocks away. It was no wonder that Eddy sometimes stayed out longer than he should and returned covered in scratches from his adventures. ‘It was permanent anguish,’ Jenny said. On one occasion he went fishing, and was out so long that the police were called and he got into trouble – the worst of it being, from Eddy’s point of view, that he was grounded. He was kept in for a day after climbing a crane when his parents were having gutters installed and, on another occasion, he began playing in a building site with his friends as night fell: they had a climbing race up another crane, and he was twenty metres higher than the next youth by the time they were stopped.
That set the pattern for a conflicted childhood and adolescence. Eddy would try to escape constraints such as school and the confines of the shop, which became cramped as the family expanded, with all the children sharing one room and a lodger occupying another. His mother would try to restrain him. Jules would grumble at him that he would never be any good at anything, Guillaume Michiels recalls, for example, when he was carrying empty bottles out of the shop, and dropped one or two. Eventually, thanks to the bike, he would escape for good and become a nomad, living almost constantly on the road, either training, racing or travelling.
Eddy took after his father, who had been a good runner and a better than average footballer, and remained a cycling fan. Merckx junior was not the healthiest child, suffering from earache, headaches, growing pains and cramps, but that didn’t restrain him. Any sport would do: Eddy would try them all – boxing, basketball, table tennis, lawn tennis, and football as well as races on his bike round the local streets. He played lawn tennis for his school, and inside-right for the junior side of the local team which later became Royal White Star Woluwe (motto today Be The Best). After one match, he was made to stay behind so he could be given a full set of kit as a reward for scoring several goals. A photograph in the Merckx family album, reprinted in Pierre Thonon’s account of his early years (Eddy Merckx, l’Irrésistible Ascension d’un Jeune Champion) shows him borne shoulder-high by his peers after winning a local boxing tournament, one glove punching the air in the style of Muhammad Ali.
Such successes mattered. He was an immensely competitive child. He loved playing cards, and was extremely unhappy if he didn’t win a table-tennis match or if he lost at dominoes. Later, he was
just as competitive in poker games in race hotels while killing time with his teammates. He had a love of mechanical things from early on, making soapbox carts and sometimes stripping his first racing bike and repainting it. He was curiously sensitive – he cried when his younger brother and sister told him Father Christmas did not exist, and his mother confirmed the devastating news. All these traits would shine through in the man and the champion.
The Merckxs were a Catholic family. There was mass on Sunday – something young Eddy found difficult because of the need to keep still for more than a short while – and prayers in May in front of the statue of Mary at the end of the road. It was a hard-working environment. Sunday was a busy day in the shop, because competing businesses were closed, so young Eddy had to help out cutting ham and cheese, weighing fruit and serving behind the counter, while his friends were playing.
Later, Eddy would insist that they were not a rich family. These things are relative. The accommodation above the shop was cramped – Jules’s comment when Jenny told him she was expecting twins was ‘where shall we put them?’ – but the Merckxs were by no means poor. They certainly did not experience the near-starvation that was the background to the early lives of Fausto Coppi, Federico Bahamontes, Rik Van Steenbergen, or even a contemporary such as Luis Ocaña, who walked four miles a day each way to school in the Pyrenees, without a coat, as his parents could not afford one. The few pictures of the young Coppi show groups of children with the stick legs and big heads that speak of deprivation. Young Eddy has fat cheeks and is often dressed up for this or that celebration. The Merckxs could afford a car and seaside holidays. Eddy would be given his chance to ‘move up’ socially in the conventional way, by studying and getting a good job, but he chose cycling. Unlike Coppi, Bahamontes or Van Steenbergen, cycling was a life choice for Eddy Merckx. The alternative was not subsistence agriculture or industrial labouring, but something easier and probably nearly as lucrative: a comfortable middle-class life. Eddy clearly needed to race his bike but he didn’t have to do it out of economic necessity.
Jules and Jenny Merckx were contrasting characters. ‘My mother was very gentle, with beautiful manners, very concerned at the idea I might have an accident,’ recalled Eddy. ‘I inherited her kind nature, perhaps a bit too much of it.’ As for Jules, ‘nervous, introverted and permanently worried … and not given to talking much’ were terms that Eddy used to describe him. They could also be used for Eddy himself. Jules had a short fuse, but was never angry for long. He was ‘not a man for discussion. Most of the time, he preferred a slap to a long sermon,’ said Eddy. Jules liked to use maxims such as ‘the more you have, the more you want’ and ‘in life, you will always find someone who is superior’. The first applied to his elder son, the second clearly didn’t.
Trained as a carpenter, turned grocer, Jules’s life ‘was work, work again, and always work,’ said Eddy. Early in the morning, Jules would go to the market to buy fresh vegetables for the shop: every day in summer, three or four times a week in winter, on foot because initially at least they did not have a car. His acute sensibility made him shy, partly because of the language barrier no doubt. It was Jenny who served behind the counter in the shop, while Jules put his carpentry skills to use in making the wooden boxes in which the goods were displayed, working through the night to do so. The picture painted of Jules is that of an economic migrant, working his fingers to the bone for fear that he might fail and have to return whence he came.
He was a despot, said Eddy’s younger brother Michel, a patriarchal character. ‘No one dared put their spoon in their soup before him.’ Michel recalled him as an ‘unhappy ascetic, a man skinned alive, a sensitive character who hid his feelings with a tyrant’s image’, a man who worried so much it made him ill, and who would then hide the resulting stomach pains. It was Eddy who was most often on the receiving end of his temper – so disruptive an influence that at times Jules had to soak his head in cold water to calm him down. And on occasion, it was Eddy who would intervene to ensure that he got punished rather than his siblings.
Like a good Catholic father, Jules was strict: plates had to be cleared at the dinner table, and clear moral lines were laid down, as Eddy found out at the age of seven when he sneaked a toy off one of his teachers’ desks, then told his mother it was a present. There were occasional little acts of rebellion. The teenage Eddy would sometimes smoke illicit cigarettes and would be berated when his father realised what was going on. One day, Eddy insisted on the barber shaving his head like a convict’s. Tellingly, the youth was so sure this was what he wanted that he refused to get out of the barber’s chair unless the razor was used. That didn’t go down well either.
Guillaume Michiels recalls the Merckx parents as being ‘too kind, too generous’, something that would later be said of their celebrated son. ‘When he raced, Eddy had four or five local supporters. After the race on a Sunday, Mme Merckx would say “come and drink a glass”. Then they would stay to eat – because Jenny had the shop, it was just a matter of cutting a few slices of ham from behind the counter. Eddy would say ‘ma mère invite tout le monde’ – my mum asks everyone round. Michiels describes Jules as ‘a man who would get an idea and stick to it’.
As his son grew increasingly famous, Jules would immerse himself in his work, and stay away from bike races. ‘He was an introvert, he would never show his feelings, which he drowned in litres of coffee. He could not express his pride,’ Jenny Merckx told Thirion. Eddy described his father as ‘hypersensitive’, and put it down to his shyness, which Jules himself apparently viewed as a weakness. Merckx senior was naïve, lost money to merchants who were more cunning – and again, his son would later show similar traits. Jules was a worrier, who, when he took his son to his first bike race in Laeken, on the other side of Brussels, ordered a taxi to make sure they wouldn’t get lost. And he was also a perfectionist, who would watch his son cleaning his racing bike in the evenings and would then clean it again himself, just to make sure.
Jules Merckx’s only distraction from his work was his longstanding love of cycling. In 1935, at the age of fifteen, he had ridden his bike the fifty-five kilometres from Meensel-Kiezegem south to Floreffe, close to Namur, to watch Jean Aerts become world road race champion. Eddy Merckx and his father were both fans of Constant Ockers – Stan to the Walloons, Stanneke to the Flemish – the Antwerp champion whose career coincided with Merckx’s childhood years. Eddy was only six when Ockers came second to Coppi in the 1952 Tour de France, only ten when he won the 1955 world road race championship. Racing around the neighbourhood, Merckx played the role of Ockers while his friends acted the parts of Rik Van Steenbergen or the Flandrian hero Brik Schotte. He was only eleven when Ockers died of head injuries sustained in a track race at Antwerp, on 29 September 1956. Jenny Merckx was aware of the death of her husband and son’s hero, and it was one reason why she was initially against Eddy becoming a cyclist. She remained worried about her son racing for many years: when he eventually quit bike racing after seventeen years in the saddle, she said it was the biggest relief of her life.
Merckx senior and junior were by no means Ockers’s only fans: briefly, in the mid-1950s, Ockers became massively popular throughout Belgium for his combative racing style and his funeral was close to being a state occasion. Given Merckx’s future career, Ockers was an intriguing role model. He was not a beefy Flandrian in the Van Steenbergen mould, but a small man, aggressive in his racing style. He was not a pure Classics man but able to perform in the Tours and the hillier Classics such as Flèche Wallonne and Liège–Bastogne–Liège, a rider who had all-round talent as both sprinter and climber. But unlike Merckx, who would blossom from his early twenties, Ockers did not achieve greatness until well into his thirties.
Merckx’s admiration for Ockers reflected the fact that his view of cycling as a child was subtly different from that of a pure Flandrian. ‘People where I lived called me “Tour de France”,’ he told me, adding that he wasn’t interested in the Classics �
�� something which would have been unthinkable for a child brought up in Flanders. Another reason for this was the fact the great one-day races took place on a Sunday. On that day he would have been working in the shop or was perhaps en famille with his grandmother at Meensel-Kiezegem. ‘I listened to the Tour on the radio and my father took me to see it two or three times, and a couple of times he took me to see the six-day at the Brussels Palais des Sports’, he told me in 1997. Still more improbably for a young Belgian, another boyhood hero was Jacques Anquetil, whose best years coincided with Eddy’s adolescence. Merckx’s wife Claudine told the writer François Terbéen: ‘You can repeat it and shout it loud, Eddy placed Anquetil above them all, he was his hero. He dreamed only of him and deeply admired him.’
Eddy had begun riding a bike at three or four and by the age of eight he was riding to school, climbing back up the steep Kouterstraat every day. Later he was given a more substantial machine to deliver packages for his father. The story went that he didn’t get paid tips from customers because he was the boss’s son, so he transferred his services to the local milkman, which meant that he could save up for a racing bike. He used his bicycle to brave trams and cars to visit a bakery where they sold a cake called ‘the atomic bomb’. On one occasion when he was with his mother, he broke the pedal of his kid’s bike trying to catch a vélomoteur on a cycle path: he fell off and hit his head.
Jenny Merckx was not particularly happy at the idea of her son racing his bike, particularly as he became more serious about it. In 1960, at the age of fifteen, Eddy watched the Olympic Games road race, televised from Rome. The event was won by the USSR’s Viktor Kapitonov, and the youngster set himself a target: he would be selected to ride in the 1964 Games in Tokyo. He had already raced his bike, at the age of twelve, in an unofficial event at Meensel-Kiezegem, against a field mainly composed of older children, up to eighteen. Jenny, on the other hand, had looked into it and had been told – correctly – that the dropout rate was high; that no matter how promising a young cyclist’s talent might be, only a few ever made a living out of it. She felt that her son’s health was not suitable, and that Eddy was intelligent enough to pass his exams. She probably also feared that disappointment would make him unhappy. Jules, on the other hand, was apparently more cold-blooded about it: ‘let him go and fight in the peloton if he doesn’t want to go to school. Maybe he’ll come back in tears.’
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 3
