On the Road Bike

by Ned Boulting

  It began with his dad and it returned, often, to that same touchstone.

  The Good Friday Meeting at the Herne Hill Velodrome was a part of Garry Beckett’s life. His father had been a towering figure at the track, a well-known judge and commissaire. On the day of the venerable old meeting in 2005, just after the racing finished, Ron Beckett, who had been there all day, collapsed very suddenly and died.

  Ron Beckett had been a telephone engineer, back in the days when there was real engineering to be done in order to make and receive a phone call. He was also a considerable, prodigious bike rider, and in his son’s words a ‘right skinny bastard’, the result of a pauper’s diet, Garry suggests. Perhaps that’s why most of his peers knew him as ‘Porky’. Brits are funny like that.

  For Ron, like with so many others of his post-war generation, car ownership came later. He used to go everywhere by bike, neatly integrating his working life and his passionate hobby. Sometimes, during the holidays or when childcare arrangements had broken down, young Garry would go to work with him.

  ‘I can remember going to a big Taylor Woodrow’s [the builders’] yard somewhere out near Heathrow, and going into the exchange room, with all these machines going clack clack clack. A massive room. These things used to fascinate me. He’d be wiring them up, and I used to pull them all back and watch them click round. I didn’t know that I was actually dialling a number.’

  But it was cycling, not telephones, that his dad lived for. Ron’s weekends, and often his evenings, were spent chasing round and round flat left-handed circuits in pursuit of prizes.

  ‘His big thing was grass-track racing. My mum’s still got a drawer at home full of old left-hand pedals that were all bent from cornering at grass-track races. That’s where you could make your money.’

  In the 1960s this particular branch of the sport was very popular. It didn’t require a velodrome, for starters, just a field, some whitewash for the lanes and a few hay bales. It goes without saying that it was strictly amateur. Although ‘strictly’ was an elastic term.

  ‘You were only allowed to win a certain amount of money, which wasn’t very much, before you were considered a pro. So at grass-track meetings they’d win all manner of products to get round that rule. It was a way for him to more than double his weekly salary.’

  Keen that his son develop a passion for the sport, Ron introduced Garry at an early age to the very particular world of bicycle polo. This is an eccentric sport, which involves a lot of trying to stay still on a bike. There are few things more quixotic than this. It’s like trying to walk to work on a stepladder, a bit daft.

  Nonetheless, it is a sport with a surprisingly long history and, once upon a time, considerable status beyond the vague hipster modish appeal that its reborn version now enjoys in the achingly cool East End of London. It used to be, if not mainstream, then fairly common. Bicycle polo exhibition games were often staged before kick-off at football grounds, to give the crowd something to laugh at, I can only imagine. It even put in a guest appearance at the London Olympics of 1908. But then again, those games were quirky to say the least, and were mostly obsessed with firearms: ‘Army Gun’ and ‘Running Deer’, also featured in that particular Olympic line-up.

  ‘I was a skinny little ten-year-old, and all the other boys were fifteen or sixteen. Like in football when you’d line up in the playground to get picked – I was the last one. And I was always stuck in goal. I was useless. I didn’t enjoy that. It was always fucking cold. Wet. And when I did get onto the pitch I got knocked off in the air all the time.’

  He stuck at it though. ‘Eventually I loved it, and I became good at it. When you know you’re better than the others, you start floating along.’

  It wasn’t long before, in the reasonably small gene pool of the bicycle polo world, he achieved the highest imaginable honour. ‘I was the England captain for eight years, which sounds very grand, but in a sport where there aren’t many people playing . . .’

  I interrupted. ‘You were the England captain, Garry?’

  This revelation seriously impressed me. Perhaps more so than it should have done. In fact, so amazed was I to find out that Garry captained his country that I failed to follow it up with the obvious question: who on earth did England play at bicycle polo?

  The Beckett family, it seemed to me, had quite deliberately gone out of their way to find, and then excel at, cycling’s most abstruse manifestations.

  Grass-track cycling and bicycle polo were, in their different ways and to my uneducated ears, as far removed from the grandiosity of the great bike races of the world as it was possible to get, and still maintain that you were part of the same genus. I chanced my arm with Garry. ‘Was there something a bit weird about you?’

  ‘Absolutely. A bit of a weirdo.’

  ‘Is that how your mates saw you?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ Garry didn’t seem to mind me calling him a weirdo, which I found a bit weird. ‘Perhaps there’s something inside each and every cyclist that celebrates their inner weirdness.’

  He carried on. ‘I went to a funeral last week for a guy in his seventies. I never saw him not on a bike. This guy never owned a car. Well, two hundred people turned up on bikes. And you’ve got to say, some of the guys who turned up, well, fuck me! They probably hadn’t changed their bikes since the late fifties. Or their clothes. There was a lot of the old knit-your-own-shorts brigade, with beards with sparrows’ nests hanging out of them. That’s the type of person that cyclists used to be perceived as.’

  But their shared family passion for sweating (or, in the case of bicycle polo, not sweating) on a bike went deeper than that. Or rather, further.

  Like Garry, Ron, the popular, no-nonsense figure at the track, was also a high-ranking member of the Bec Cycling Club.

  For many years the club had lacked a flagship event, the signature race that it now boasts. The rival Catford Cycling Club, also from South London, had a longer history, and a notable hill climb which to this day claims to be the ‘oldest continuing cycle race in the world’, although it was not held during the war years, which knocks a bit of a hole in that claim.

  Either way, the Catford Hill Climb was first held in 1886. And it was very prestigious. So the Bec needed a hill. And Ron Beckett went off looking for one.

  ‘My mum and dad, my uncle and my aunt went out searching for a hill on their tandems for a few weekends, and they came across that one.’ It was White Lane, a 700-yard climb from the B269 to the B2024 out of Titsey in Kent. The road is single track, very steep near the top, and shrouded in a dense canopy of wild woodland.

  ‘They tested it on their tandems and said “This’ll do.” And that was it.’

  For thirty years, as Garry was doing all his growing up, the whole family would administrate the hill climb every October. Some of his earliest memories are of standing in the pelting rain, or the bitter cold, or both, with a clipboard or a sign. They’d marshal the roads, set up the finish line, help with the time keeping, and generally make sure it all went off as smoothly as it could.

  Ron eventually handed over the reins to his son in 1987. It proved to be a memorable autumn, not a bad year to pass the buck, as it happens. Perhaps he’d been fixing the phones at the Met Office and had overheard someone talking about what was brewing up over the Atlantic, and heading for Britain.

  ‘That was the year of the Great Fall, two days before my first one. A load of fucking trees come down.’ The first hill climb Garry took charge of coincided with the Great Storm, which turned nearby Sevenoaks into Oneoak, and wreaked almighty damage on the woodland around White Lane. It took hours of hard work to clear the road of the debris, but the race went ahead.

  By coincidence, and almost at the same time, the stock market crashed, which also left Garry with some tidying up to do. Three years previously, Garry had changed jobs and had moved into a brave new world. After a spell working for Harrods in their warehouse, he had decided to send a CV, rather speculatively, to a firm in
the City that was looking to hire foreign exchange traders. This was the time of unfettered growth in the Square Mile, and there was a voguish and defining move away from the privately educated Oxbridge graduate towards the more streetwise local recruit. Garry, with his natural charm and sharp tongue, would probably impress, but, he still had to cobble together a convincing CV.

  Garry recalls how he squeezed every ounce of relevance from a thinly populated list of achievements. Under the section ‘Other Qualifications’, he listed his captaincy of the England bicycle polo team. Not perhaps the first thing you would demand for the role of Forex trader. But maybe they saw something in his ability to stand still and not fall off.

  ‘Stating that on my interview papers got me a job in the City.’ I look at him incredulously. ‘Seriously. I put captain of the England bicycle polo team. The guy stood up in front of all the other people and said, “This is Garry. He’s going to be joining us. Because anyone who has captain of the England bicycle polo team on their CV has got to be given a chance.”’

  For years he sat at a desk in the noisy trading room of Tullet and Tokyo Forex, juggling telephones, fielding calls from across the globe and effecting huge trades on international markets. His desk, he recalls, had a semi-circular section cut out of it to accommodate the expanding girths of the traders. Presumably, the bigger the semi-circle, the older the trader, the fatter the bonus, and the closer the heart attack. Their professional life expectancy was limited to about thirty-five years old. By forty they were toast.

  Garry thrived in this world, conducting his intercontinental symphony; the master of a clutch of telephones, connected to the eighties equivalents of those whirring and clicking exchanges that his dad had used to maintain, often trying to lead two conversations simultaneously, one phone on either ear, men in suits in Hong Kong and New York hanging on his every bid. He was, for a while, prodigiously good at it.

  But, what he didn’t know was that his right ear was failing him. He was going progressively deaf. The first signs were easy to ignore but, step by step, he started to miss trades. Vital bits of key information, prices shouted down the wires and through crackling receivers slipped through the net. No one needs a deaf trader.

  In 1993, although he was still a young man, he was pensioned off on medical grounds. His foray into the City was done. It was a tumultuous time in his life, and it ushered in an era of slapstick comedy. The payout he received was generous, and Garry was followed for years by private detectives from the medical insurance company, convinced that he was committing a fraud. They’d wait in cars outside his house, and if he went anywhere, they’d follow. Garry became expert at throwing them off his scent.

  But with a life of high finance already behind him, and many good years still to come, he renewed his childhood passion. Back to the bikes.

  ‘I was a debauched, drunken bum. Great years. But hell did they take their toll.’

  I took my leave of him, pushing through Borough Market to get back to the station. I crossed Borough High Street, and re-entered some sort of normality.

  At London Bridge I glanced across at the dense mass of banks and investment houses, their lights twinkling in the dusk, their impenetrable business thundering silently on. Right here is where a little of the City’s wealth spills over like a tidal surge and splashes the South London Thames shores. That’s kind of what it did to Garry, in real life.

  My start time for the hill climb was now frighteningly close.

  ‘Whenever I’m up there, I still see the old man. With his Eric Morecambe glasses, with his Bec top on, with his loudhailer. It’s special.’

  We were at the top of the hill, gently free-wheeling down to the start. It was race day. Garry had decided, on his fifty-fifth birthday, to try and race the hill climb for the very first time. He had passed a childhood, swiftly followed by an adulthood, of watching on and recording times, but never participating. Today this would come to an end.

  Cleverly, I got him talking about his beautiful steel frame bike so that I didn’t have to contribute anything to the conversation. I no longer cared if he was as scared as me. I’d make him do all the talking, so I could wallow in my fear.

  It was not only the fact of the race. It was the setting, too. It had attracted a ghoulish host of onlookers, some of whom I knew very well. What was I doing here, flesh and beating blood?

  Maurice Burton had brought half his team down to watch (I would be racing in their vivid yellow colours), including his son Germain, who had won the last two Bec Hill Climbs. Germain was still recovering from a chest infection that he picked up after riding for Great Britain at the Junior World Championships, so he would not be defending his title. Instead, they were hoping that I didn’t dishonour the ‘De Ver’ brand by finishing stone last.

  There was some talk that this might indeed happen. Maurice had looked particularly unsure when he saw me before I went off to warm up. Germain had also exuded scepticism.

  Ron Keeble, never one to knowingly relax an amateur cyclist, had been on my case for weeks, offering to look my bike over to check I’d got small enough gears. He’d even offered to drive me down to the hill ‘any time I want’ so that I could put in some training efforts. I had found a range of excuses not to, opting instead to bury my head in the sand.

  He grabbed me on the day, just as I was turning to head down to the start.

  ‘There’s a tree, covered in ivy, right in front of you as you start. Head for that, and it’ll take you onto the right side of the road for the climb. The gradient’s not so bad there.’ He looked me up and down, full of visible paternal concern, mixed with violent paternal fury. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said. He might as well have been pushing me over the edge of Tower Bridge by booting me up the arse.

  Alan Peiper, who rode the Tour de France five times and who had shared that bizarre accommodation in Ghent along with Maurice Burton and Jan ‘The Papers’, would be racing. So would a clutch of very decent domestic elite riders, a host of keen and experienced amateurs and the reigning National Hill Climb Champion, the curiously Scandinavian-sounding Gunnar Gronlund, who had smashed his way up a certain Long Hill in Buxton quicker than anyone else to gain the title and red, white and blue bands.

  And last, but by no means least, there was a frighteningly outspoken, no-nonsense rider called Tony Gibb, one of the undisputed hard men of the British track and criterium scene, and a man who had competed in dozens of races which I had televised. He was the MC for the day, with microphone, and loudspeaker. In a strange reversal of the norm, he would be commentating on my effort.

  All around me, men and women in perfectly fitting kit with specially adapted handlebars had been getting bikes out of the back of liveried estate cars, and had started to warm up on ‘rollers’. My warm up had consisted of a brief ride up and down a bit of the B2024 and a cup of tea. Kath, I remembered, had very kindly offered to provide some soup from a Thermos that would fortify me for my effort. Knowing what I now know about the hill climb, I am very glad that I didn’t accept. Soup and hill climbs wouldn’t work well together.

  And suddenly I was at the bottom of the White Lane. I had the number ‘30’ pinned to my back. Number ‘27’ had just started his race. I understood the intractable, fateful grind of time. I felt crushed by the weight of the inevitable.

  By the time that ‘28’ and ‘29’ had both disappeared from view, my mouth had gone completely dry. I made my way forward to the start position.

  ‘Number Thirty. Ned Boulting.’ A race official unsmilingly noted my number, made a few tick marks on a clipboard, and pointed with his pencil at a digital clock that was counting down from sixty seconds. We were already at twenty-four seconds.

  The friendly chap who was holding my bike upright seemed concerned. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Well I am now. But I’m not going to be very soon,’ I hazarded a guess.

  I looked away from the clock as it entered the final ten seconds. Ahead of me, I could see Ron Keeble’s ivy-cover
ed tree. I blinked, and when I refocused, I could swear it had moved back a few yards, as if playing some devious reverse-flow vegetation-variant of Grandmother’s Footsteps.

  ‘Fucking tree.’ I said that. I didn’t just think it.

  Three. Two. One.

  I stepped hard on my pedals. Well, as hard as I could. And I set off up the hill.

  Within about thirty seconds, I knew that I had made a grave mistake. No crowd had gathered on the lower slopes of the hill, and I was alone with the awkward grunting and febrile moans that already, involuntarily, escaped my lips. I had gone off way too fast. I knew I would. I was a hopeless amateur, and that’s what hopeless amateurs do.

  But once locked into my ludicrous effort, I understood that I had no other option than to plough on to the best of my ability. I understood, too, that I had nothing left to give, even though I had barely started climbing.

  This, then, was perhaps the merest, most fleeting glimpse into the world of ‘suffering’ of which cyclists talk. This is the greatest virtue a rider can possess. Forget speed, stamina, acceleration, bravery and brains. It is the ability to endure agony that defines them. Mark Cavendish once told me that it’s like someone pulling out your fingernails very, very slowly. Not shouting ‘Stop!’ is the thing you have to learn. The loser shouts ‘Stop!’

  After those opening thirty seconds, and as my breathing went from laboured to grotesquely rasping, my body was trying to transition. The exercise had ceased to be ‘anaerobic’ (i.e. the kind of effort a one-hundred-metre runner puts in), but it was too early and too extreme for it to be called ‘aerobic’ (the graduated, smooth effort of the endurance athlete). So this was why cyclists feared hill climbs so intensely! Like the 800 metres in athletics, it is essentially a sprint over a far, far greater period of time than anyone can reasonably be expected to sprint. It confuses the system. It messes with everything. In short, the body has nothing to feed on, and nowhere to turn for succour.