In they’d walk, to Carrie screaming and shouting, and me sitting there looking put-upon, an imaginary halo floating above my head. Still, Carrie and I were always playing together, and we had a lot of fun, especially in the garden, and up at the top of the road – where we were allowed to play – in an area we called ‘the Conkers,’ a clearing with huge chestnut trees. As we got older Carrie and I only became closer and closer, even as our own interests diverged. She was more into art than sport, and she loved reading, going on eventually to work in publishing. She was always highly intelligent, and became ‘Dux’ of our school, though, despite her talents, she has never seemed to have any ego at all. That can be seen in her support for me throughout my cycling career, which has been incredible, from attending all my major events, to, afterwards, spending hours producing beautiful albums of the press cuttings and photographs. These are no Pritt Stick jobs – they are stunning coffee table-sized books, and priceless mementos which have to be seen, and flicked through, to be fully appreciated.
My parents bought the family house in 1969, when they were newly married – and they remain there to this day, forty years on. It has proved a solid investment, then, though their friends questioned that at the time, since it meant – according to my dad – that they couldn’t afford furniture and didn’t go out for more than a year. After a year, so the family legend goes, they bought a fridge and went to the cinema. Or should that be ‘the pictures’?
The story of how they bought the house was unusual, too. It was owned by a wealthy friend of my grandma – my dad’s mum – who allowed my parents to live in the top-floor flat while they were looking for property; the arrangement was for six months. But in the midst of that she decided to sell, and offered them first refusal. The house was valued at around £5,000 and my parents, who had fallen for it, really pushed the boat out to buy it.
The house was far too big for the pair of them, but, with the shared entrance, it was impossible to rent out one of the floors. A solution presented itself a year later, when my dad’s parents, Jerry and Mary, lost the house in which they lived. My grandpa was the manager of a grocery depot, and he and my grandma lived in a flat above the warehouse, which was in Leith, and thus explains my dad’s allegiance to the Leith football team, Hibernian. The flat came with the job, and when grandpa retired, in 1970, they had to move. So it was that they came to live with my parents in Murrayfield, occupying the first floor, while we – not that I was born quite yet – lived upstairs.
Having my grandparents downstairs was fantastic, the perfect scenario for a young kid. There was the security aspect; if we were playing in the garden, or on the street, they could keep an eye on us (most of the time), as well as my parents. And of course, it meant I saw them all the time, frequently as I rushed past after coming in their – and our – front door, before dashing up the internal stair that led into our flat. After dinner I’d often sneak downstairs for some biscuits from my grandma, though my abiding memory of evenings with my grandparents was the intense heat. Like a lot of older people, they had the heating up to the maximum, and their living room was like a sauna. When I went back upstairs it wasn’t the crumbs around my mouth that gave away the fact I’d been scoffing biscuits, it was my rosy cheeks.
I loved having my grandparents downstairs, though, inevitably, being so young, I didn’t fully appreciate how much I loved having them downstairs until they were gone. They died, as I have said, within a week of each other in 1984, my grandpa first and then my grandma, when I was eight. It was my first experience of dealing with a family death, and the sadness and sense of upheaval were exacerbated by the fact we were so close, in both senses of the word. Coming home from school and not passing my grandparents on my way upstairs was very strange and a hard thing to deal with; it meant everything changed instantly, and in more ways that I anticipated.
It was a tough time for my parents, but they also had a pressing, and practical, problem: what to do with the house. It was too big – and too expensive – for my parents, Carrie and me, so they had to sell the bottom flat. The problem, however, was the shared front door.
My dad worked in the building trade, having not gone to university. Eventually he did go to university, in his fifties, to do a surveying degree – he actually graduated the year before me – but when I was in primary school he ran a building company, with a team of three or four builders, though I think he did a lot of the work himself. He was very hands-on, and he’s got great practical skills. The trouble is – and I hope he won’t mind me saying – it takes him an age to get things done. He is great at taking on jobs, especially for other people; he can’t say no. If he has a fault, it’s that he over commits, and takes on more than he can manage.
When my grandparents died business for my dad was far from booming: it was a tough time for industry, the property industry especially. So my dad decided to take a year out, more or less, and take on a big project: turning the house into two flats, with separate front doors.
I can understand if my mum felt some trepidation – for the reasons discussed above, and because, though he did jobs for other people to perfection, our house was often a bit of a building site by contrast. Still, in the aftermath of his parents’ death, he got started on this project. First he removed the internal staircase, which led up to our flat. Then he built an external staircase, with a new front door. Where the internal stair had been, he built two new rooms. And then, to make the ground-floor flat attractive to prospective buyers, he built a double garage, which – much to my disappointment – reduced the garden by about half.
It was like a Grand Designs project, and I can imagine Kevin McCloud, had the TV programme existed back then, wandering into our house-cum-building site, saying: ‘I just wonder if he’s taken on too much here.’ It really was like a construction site for much of that year, and at one point the plumbing was disconnected upstairs. Initially we still had a toilet downstairs, but then that was cut off, too. For about three days we had to visit the Texaco garage at the bottom of the road, each time with some spurious excuse for returning, in order to use the toilet there. On the plus side, we were never out of milk, since that was the standard purchase to justify all the toilet trips. After the best part of a year, though, my dad had managed to convert the house into two separate flats. And 25 years later, as he likes to joke, the job is … very close to completion.
Mum, meanwhile, was a night owl. As a nurse she worked the night shift in the sleep department at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, which meant she left at eight in the evening and got home at seven in the morning. She’d sleep during the day, and, when I came in from school at about four I’d put the kettle on, make her a cup of tea and wake her up. If that makes me sound like a model child, I should confess that, lurking towards the forefront of my mind, was the thought of dinner. I don’t know how Mum did it, but she would get up, do the housework, make our dinner, and then go back to work: that was her life, really. Carrie was good at helping around the house, but it makes me a bit embarrassed to think of my contribution, given how hard my mum and dad worked. If I picked my scattered clothes up off my bedroom floor, that was me mucking in and doing my bit.
I know that I had a privileged upbringing – not financially, but in a far more important way, with my family providing the most stable foundation. We weren’t exactly the Waltons – more like the Simpsons – and there’d be nagging and arguments, but they would blow over, and it was a happy home; or, for the first eight years of my life, two homes, each as happy as the other, and one considerably hotter.
* * *
It was around the time of my grandparents’ death that I began to get really serious about BMXing. Though I was serious about football and rugby, my commitment to BMX was on another level. It had to be, because what started as a bit of fun on my pimped-up old bike from the church jumble sale soon developed to the point where I was no longer just riding local tracks, and competing against riders from the Edinburgh area, but joining sponsored teams, riding fancier bikes, and travelling
