Worms to Catch

by Guy Martin

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  1. All I could blame it on was the motorcycles

  2. Kaspars is a blind Latvian MOT inspector

  3. It was like swimming with a shark

  4. They needed to have faith in me

  5. I was 100 metres from the work gates when …

  6. 80.8 mph riding blind

  7. I’d only slept four and a half hours in four days

  8. Legendary in the Transit world

  9. No one’s putting the right pair of sunglasses on before being photographed

  10. I’d been soft for too long

  11. Locking the door to keep the bears out

  12. When I finally stopped pedalling I started to cry

  13. Racing hasn’t retired me, I’ve retired from racing

  14. Gina and Nicky’s netball lasses and free butties from the wagon

  15. I could show them a front wheel and they knew what was coming

  16. You need a lot of power to run the dribble bar

  17. I felt sorry for him, because I stunk the day I met him

  18. I laughed and reminded her I wasn’t here to go steady

  19. Clinging on for grim death, sawing at the steering wheel to keep it in a straight line

  20. I know I have a bad earth or two

  21. I don’t want anyone to believe the hype

  Stop Press

  Never Say Never

  Picture Section

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  In August 2015 Guy Martin crashed out of the lead of an Ulster Grand Prix superbike race held on the world’s fastest racetrack. He had invasive surgery to bolt his broken spine and hand back together, and within days he decided he needed some time away from road racing. But he wasn’t about to take it easy…

  In his brand new book, discover how Britain’s favourite daredevil fills his time when road racing is taken out of the equation.

  He set about breaking records on the world’s biggest Wall of Death, cycling 2,745 miles across the length of the United States (while sleeping rough), attempting to be the fastest person ever on two wheels and travelling to Latvia to investigate his family’s roots.

  There’s some thrilling racing too, including wild Harley choppers on dirt and turbo-charged Transit vans through the Nevada desert. And there’s the day job to get back to in North Lincolnshire – the truck yard and the butty van.

  About the Author

  Except for one summer spent sleeping inside a truck in a concrete yard in Northern Ireland, Guy Martin has lived within 20 miles of the Grimsby hospital he was born in, on the 4th November 1981. But that hasn’t stopped the professional truck mechanic from winning multiple international road races, plus scoring fifteen Isle of Man TT podiums. Nor has it prevented him from becoming a regular face on prime-time Channel 4, presenting critically acclaimed documentaries and travelogues, as well as his popular returning series Speed with Guy Martin. Did we mention he’s also the author of two phenomenal number-one bestselling memoirs? Not bad for a truck fitter.

  CHAPTER 1

  All I could blame it on was the motorcycles

  IN AUGUST 2015, I was in a Belfast hospital, and all I could think was, It’s going to be a few weeks of lying about before I get back to normal. I wasn’t bothered about the pain, but I couldn’t stand the thought of being forced to lie about. I’d crashed my BMW S1000RR leading a race at the Ulster Grand Prix and broken my back and my hand. It was the second time I’d broken my spine crashing a motorbike in just over five years, and I’d got away without too much lasting damage. I had a big scar up my back, where they’d cut me open to bolt my spine together, and some more new metalwork in my hand. Bloody lucky really, but all I could blame it on was the motorcycles.

  I’d been thinking and talking about the Tour Divide, a 2,745-mile mountain-bike race in Canada and America, for ages, and it became something to focus on instead of motorbikes, for a while at least. I would compete in that the following June. I also decided I wouldn’t commit to any road races until after the Tour Divide, mainly because even a small injury would knacker up my training. I thought that all those hours on my own, cycling from the top to the bottom of America, would be the perfect time to think about me and motorbikes. Racing had been a way of life for 15 years, more or less, and if I did pack them in it wasn’t going to be because of a snap decision.

  The wall of death record attempt had to be cancelled because of the back injury too. The date hadn’t been decided 100 per cent, but it was going to be in October. It would have been a hell of a job to get the Rob North Triumph finished for then. I’d have done it, I reckon, but it wouldn’t have been as good as I’d hoped.

  My diary was clear all of a sudden – there’s only so much you can do with a broken back – but I was determined that it wasn’t going to slow me up for long. And plenty of folk did a good job of filling it back up, but not straight away.

  For a week after the crash I was laid up in the hospital, then I got home and had another week of not being able to do much. I was hardly sleeping. I’d already finished When You Dead, You Dead, and it was on its way to the printers, but the end needed a bit of a rewrite to include what had happened at the Ulster. It seemed a bit daft to have had this potentially life-changing crash and not mention it in the book if we could squeeze it in. And we did.

  Then I went back to work. The first day in the truck yard I was useless. I was in so much pain I couldn’t do anything. I fitted a door handle on a truck and that was it, I had to come home. I couldn’t lift my arms up. The next day I went in, and that was a bit better. I put a header tank in a Scania 730 and that’s a bugger to do because you have to take loads of stuff off to get access to it. It’s a five-hour job when I’m fit, and I thought to myself, If I can do that by the end of the week, I’ll be alright. I gave myself four full days, but I managed it in a day with time left to do another small job, so I was pleased with that.

  My boss, Mick Moody was glad to see me back and he was brilliant. He explained what we needed to do at work and asked, ‘What do you reckon?’ There were some things I couldn’t manage at first. I couldn’t handle the big windy gun, so Moody would come do that if I got stuck. He was spot on. One day I was putting an air filter in a wagon. I had to lie on my back at the side of the pit, the big hole in the ground that the lorries park over so you can work under the truck, and reach up to push this air filter into place. It’s not heavy, but it’s awkward. And that movement, laying on my back, pushing something away from my chest, hurt so much I squealed like a girl. Moody could hear me in his office, 100 yards away across the yard, and came to see what was up. ‘Are you alright?’ he asked. I told him I was a bit sore, but I would be. I think it was so painful because the muscles weren’t attached – they’d been cut off when the metalwork was bolted to my spine – and I was asking them to do something they weren’t ready for. But I fitted the filter in the end. It probably took me ten times longer than normal, but I did do it.

  I started thinking about getting back on my pushbike as early as the first few days back at work, so not even three weeks after the break. I’d get up at five o’clock, because I always have worms to catch, get my bike out and cycle as far as the end of the village, half a mile away, before admitting to myself, ‘Bastard, I can’t do this,’ and turning back for home. Even though I was on my mountain bike, which is comfier than the Rourke bike I normally ride to work on, I still couldn’t hack it. The rucksack on my back was hurting and everything was still sore as hell. I’d come home, take the dog for a bit of a walk, have another cup of tea and then drive the van in.

&nb
sp; The second week, I managed to bike in one way, then I got a lift home with Belty, Moody’s valeter, who lives near me. Then I’d do that again, one way, and by the end of the week I was sometimes biking both ways. Only writing this makes me remember the pain, otherwise all I’d remember about the aftermath of the accident is the inconvenience.

  My girlfriend Sharon and my mum and dad thought I’d gone back to work too early, but a week later Sharon could see it was good for me and knew I was coming along loads faster than if I’d stayed laying on the sofa. For me it’s the right thing. I wasn’t trying to be a hero or anything, but I needed to prove I could still do it. I wasn’t down – I don’t think I ever get down. And I was off the painkillers after the first week. They put me on tramadol and I was supposed to be taking four a day, but I’d had trouble with them when I’d broken my back at the TT in 2010. I was addicted to them for a short while and I didn’t want to go down that road again, so I gritted my teeth instead.

  I wrote in the introduction to the last book, ‘Why another one?’ I wondered the same before starting this one, but there’s a demand. People like reading them, and I like writing them. I can imagine reading them in ten years and it bringing back a load of memories. I like reading and the book people reckoned that a lot of folk who bought the last two books weren’t big book buyers, so if mine get people reading and that maybe even leads them to a bit of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley then I think that’s great.

  I thought packing in road racing, at least until after the Tour Divide, would let me have more time to myself, but it’s been the opposite, so there’s plenty to write about. I’ve had a right exciting year. Every year I wonder, How is this year going to top the last? But it always does. Every year seems madder than the previous one. So, thanks very much for buying the book. I hope you enjoy it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Kaspars is a blind Latvian MOT inspector

  THE ULSTER CRASH only kept me out of the truck yard for a couple of weeks, but it did scupper some big stuff I was looking forward to, including the attempt to set the fastest ever speed on a wall of death, which was meant to be shown live on the telly before Christmas. Every year deals way beyond my level of involvement are made between North One, the production company I’ve always worked with, and Channel 4, about delivering programmes. Now that the wall of death wasn’t going to happen for a good few months the TV bods were looking for something else to fill the gap. Making the travel programme about India felt like a big commitment, going out there for a fortnight, but I enjoyed it and it went down well. So North One said, ‘Why don’t we do another travel programme? Where do you want to go?’

  I’m not the kind of traveller who goes places to say they’ve been there. I’m not a box-ticker – I want a good reason to visit somewhere. I’ve always been interested in communism, so I went to Cuba a few years back to see all that before it ended, and I went to Croatia before it changed and became too westernised.

  I came up with Latvia, because of my granddad on my mum’s side, Voldemars ‘Walter’ Kidals. It was going on for ten years since Walter had died. I knew he’d had a fascinating life, being forced to fight for the Nazis in the Second World War before escaping, becoming a prisoner of war and eventually ending up married to Double-Decker Lil in North Lincolnshire. But there was a lot the family didn’t know. Walter was a quiet man. He wasn’t unfriendly – he’d take me into the shed and show me what he was up to, take us to see his sheep and chickens. And I used Walter’s thoughts on the afterlife – when you dead, you dead – for the name of my last book.

  They said. ‘Latvia? Right then! We’ll do some research.’ I’m not blowing my own trumpet, but the TV lot are dead keen for me to make programmes. They’d have twice as many, if I wanted to do them, so when we agree to do summat that we’re both happy with, things start moving quickly.

  Walter and Lil had four sons and a daughter, the daughter being my mum, Rita. The relative who knew the most about Walter was my uncle John, my mum’s younger brother. My mum knew a bit, but my dad probably knew more than her because he talked to Walter about his past more than my mum did. But no one knew the whole picture or, as it turned out, anything close to the whole picture. Uncle John was the main contact and he put the TV lot in touch with the other side of the family in Latvia, and research discovered stuff that we would never have found out.

  I was dead interested to see what we were going to learn when I flew with the TV crew from Luton to Riga, the capital of Latvia, on 29 October. Ahead of us was a week and a bit of travelling around the country, looking into what Walter had done in Latvia before leaving and why he came to England, and seeing what we could find out about his family.

  I’d been given some books on the history of the country, and I read that every man and his dog had had a go at ruling Latvia. Back in the thirteenth century some German warrior monks were in charge. I’m not sure what a warrior monk is, but they sound dead cool. I’d like to see Quentin Tarantino have a stab at making a film about German warrior monks. By the sixteenth century, Poles and Lithuanians had taken over. The Swedes were running the job in the seventeenth century, then it was the Russians’ turn.

  After the First World War the Latvians finally got their independence, and it all sounded good for the country, but it only lasted for 25 years. As the world watched Hitler’s army invade Poland and then France, the Russians rolled into Latvia and took all the privately owned goods and services into state ownership.

  My first impression of Riga was that everything looked very new, giving me the feeling it had been built with EU money. But there was a medieval part of Riga too, and we visited the huge indoor market, the biggest in Europe, which is housed in old hangars built for Zeppelins in the 1920s. I liked the city.

  The TV lot had found something for me to drive around in, a Russian-built Lada 1300 S, the perfect car for the job, especially as it was the same age as me – a 1981 model. The bloke who we borrowed it from reckoned it had been used as a rally car. His name was Kaspars, and he was based in Strazdumuiža, about half an hour out of Riga. We were told that Kaspars was a blind Latvian MOT inspector. He was legendary in the area for being dead good with cars, even though he had this disability. I was impressed, and wondered how he could work on cars for a living if he couldn’t see what he was doing. I watched as he felt his way around the car, so I had no doubt that he was blind until I turned around and he was texting on his phone. The TV bods cracked up with laughter, but we were trying to keep it in, because we didn’t want him to think we were laughing at him. The Lada showed up in the TV programme, but Kaspars didn’t. I think he might have been on the fiddle.

  I met with Dr Aleks Feigmanis, a family-tree specialist, who looked through loads of records to find out anything he could about my granddad and his family. We sat behind a table with big, old ledger-type books giving details of births and other moments in Walter’s life. I’m not the tallest, but the researcher wasn’t a big lad, and he asked to sit on a cushion to look a bit taller. No bother, mate.

  The earliest record of the relevant Kidals was in the 1835 census. Aleks found out that I’m a descendant of the Curonians, who he described as a brave tribe of ruthless pirates who went to war with the Vikings. He told me that church bells had inscriptions saying ‘Save us from God and Curonians’.

  In 1853, my great-great-granddad was in the Russian army, at a time when service was a minimum of 25 years. It was also during the period of the Crimean War.

  We learned that my granddad’s first name wasn’t even Voldemars – it was Janis. Voldemars was his middle name. We can only guess why he changed it, and if I had to I’d say it was because he wanted a new start when he eventually reached England. Research showed that Voldemars grew up in a rural village called Asite (pronounced Ass-E-tay), and records listed Walter as growing up in a school. The expert reckoned the most likely reason for that was because he’d been orphaned. He was born in 1920 and we knew he hadn’t had an easy life, by any measure, but none of our family kne
w that about him. I set off in the Lada to see what I could see.

  Asite was right out in the sticks, a four-hour drive and a lot of it on dirt roads. We found the school, but it was explained to us that it looked a lot different to how it would have when Walter was there in the early 1930s. The Russians had dismantled part of it for materials to build other stuff. Now it was a house with an old couple living in it. They were happy for us to look around.

  Asite used to have a population of 2,500 people. There were 319 farms in the area, smallholdings I suppose, and a couple of windmills, but it was caught in the middle of the fighting on the Eastern Front in 1944 and was totally flattened. I met an old forest ranger called Sigurd, who remembered the time when Walter lived there, though he didn’t remember Walter. Aleks had told us the name of the farm where my granddad was born, and Sigurd had a 90-year-old hunting map he used to show us exactly where Walter grew up before he was orphaned.

  We searched for it and found a few stones that we thought could be from the old farmhouse. Uncle John had told us that Voldemars had said he used to enjoy going to a nearby church, and we found the remains of it. It had been built in 1700 or thereabouts, but it was in ruins from the Second World War. It was emotional to see where he’d come from.

  The war would change every Latvian’s life. The country was invaded three times in quick succession. In June 1940, when the Russians rolled in, anyone who stood up to them was sent to the Gulag – the Russian forced-labour camps that few ever got out of alive.

  Latvians called that time the Year of Terror. Understandably, most hated the communists. The Russians and Germans had a pre-war agreement that they wouldn’t tread on each other’s toes, but Hitler sent his troops into Latvia. They chased the Russians out with not much bother, and the Nazis were welcomed with open arms, because the locals hated the Russians so much. Little did they know. With the help of extreme right-wing Latvians, the Nazis went after the Jewish population, killing 25,000 in just two nights. Around 80,000 Latvian Jews were killed in total, and nearly a third of the population of the country fled or were killed or deported over this time.