the printers, or Metal Box, or the Rolls-Royce aero-engine factory at Leavesden, when they’d wolfed their suppers and tinkered with their bikes, they’d put on their jeans and black USAF leather jackets and ride over to the Busy Bee, the transport café in the dip, next to the Red Lion. And there, to Elvis records on the jukebox, they’d suck fizzy orangeade through straws until the summer sun went down; or, while the winter moon scuttled family men off to their wives, they’d sit and drink cup after cup of hot, sweet tea, waiting.
Others would arrive in packs, from the Ace on the North Circular, from the Dugout, or the Cellar by the bridge at Eton. Once it was night, they’d improvise illicit races along the black main road. They’d burn it up, in twos or threes or whole packs, trying for the ton, the machines shuddering, the engines thrashing under the cold stars. The bypass was all for racing. It took, on average, one lad per week.
The straight was the lure, flawless but for an extra roundabout that lets the little Elstree Road cross down to the film studios just behind a row of trees. That one scrubby oblong leads a gradual left into a right chicane. It’s a test of skill. Regulars could have reminded Alan – you need to watch out for the kink. But he was untutored that night, and if ever he’d made a note of the Elstree through the back window of his parents’ car he didn’t recall it. What with the bike and the weather thickening, he had no idea what was coming.
Two dim red lights glowed in front before he even reached it. He swerved, barely in time to overtake a doddering pre-war saloon, and, all at once, he couldn’t make out the tarmac. No use to slap at his goggles. Only when he reached down to swipe the snow from his headlamp did he see the fugitive island, its reflective black-and-white zigzags brilliantly revealed against shadowy, onrushing vegetation. He dug into the pedal far too late and yanked once more with the fingers of his right hand.
The brakes hardly registered. He clung on blindly while the kink wooed and pocketed him, tightening all the time, racing him in until there was nothing for it – he was forced to steer right. For a second, the handlebar was muscled like a snake. Then it went limp, and he was skidding. Only just in time, the tyres gripped and the brakes bit and he felt his wheel miraculously cheat the kerb.
But a shape filled the beam, an oncoming rush of wagon-side and big wheels. He glimpsed a painted trade name, heard the blaring of a horn already past. The one chance, pulling left, was the direction that could flip him and his sidecar like a tossed coin.
He was sure he was about to die, watching the artic’s rusted girder go on for ever along that terrible curve, until somehow, by another stroke of fate, the tailbolt missed him. Still everything remained cruelly drawn out, and all he could feel in one broken moment of night and ice and careering snowscape was that his father, whom he loved, was somehow waiting to gather him out there, to receive him and hide him in his coat as he’d done against the cold, years before. In a kind of dream he saw him, on a dark snowy plain, trackless under the moon – in Russia would it be, far off, or America – a figure growing ever larger under the birches, his coat warm and protective, his arms stretched to embrace his son. Half out of the saddle, Alan lunged his whole weight over to bring the sidecar down.
He found himself on the wrong side of a clear road. It was so strange. He was completely unharmed and the straight lay ahead. All that remained was a drench of fear, like the secret thawing of his bones. As though nothing had happened, he let the bike drift back across the tarmac, then screwed open the throttle. The snow thinned into shards again, and cold air jagged his lips and cheeks. At sixty-five the Triumph began a front-wheel shudder; at seventy, it calmed. He was exalted, untouchable.
SCRAWLED ON THE angled, space-age frontage, the neon spelled a challenge: The Busy Bee. Why not? He’d won his spurs. Enough glare came from the café’s windows to shine up the row of bikes outside – choice specimens, glinting, spotless, with their clip-on handlebars and alloy tanks, their racing seats and TT silencers. He drove nearer, jolting on the rutted car park. A Norton Dominator and a BSA Gold Star with a cut-away fairing were still hot, their cylinder fins hissing in the snowfall. He let his engine die beside them, dragged off his goggles and dismounted.
The cold sleeve he wiped across his forehead undid his elation. Trying to shrug off the pain in his back and get the blood moving in his fingers, he was checked by a flash of the fate he’d so narrowly avoided. It left him momentarily gauche, a jumped-up kid who ought not to have stopped at all, should rather have pressed on home and put himself to bed. The Bee, of all places … He searched his pockets for a comb, imagining the stares as he walked in; though merely slicking his soaked hair into a Teddy-boy quiff would hardly do the trick, hardly make him one of the lads.
Yet he’d done it, hadn’t he, that whole journey through the capital, his first time on a bike, in the dark and in a snowstorm? The family had tried to talk him out of it, but he’d been determined, and if this didn’t vindicate him he’d like to know what would. Once he’d passed his test and got rid of the sidecar, he’d pull some cash together, do his own modifications.
The wind seemed altogether different now. A snowflake melted on the newly exposed skin under his eye. Two truck drivers approached from the other side of the car park, and one of them nodded to him. As they filed through the slamming doorway, a snatch of rock-and-roll music leaked from the Bee’s interior. Alan thrust back his fears and followed them.
Scratched plywood tables set in ranks, tube-framed chairs bolted to a scuffed, grimy floor, steam under paper chains mingling with the strains of Eddie Cochrane – the legend had never laid claim to smartness, but the inside was a let-down. It was cavernous, yellow-tiled, strip-lit, and for all the cowboy hats beside the Christmas tree, for all the automobile posters dreaming of sunshine freeways, there was a very English air of fag-ends and fly papers. A kicked panel disfigured the serving counter. Behind it, a man in a vest tapped boiling water from a huge tin urn. The woman next to him chatted to the truckers, elbows raised, pinning up her hair. Her cigarette wagged between her lips as she flicked a glance in Alan’s direction.
The bike boys were almost lost in the emptiness. About a dozen of them sat at the far side, marked out by their leather jackets and winkle-picker shoes. One lad had his feet up on the table; another’s shoulders still glistened with melted snow. There were a few girls with them. Alan looked down at his own fake suede windcheater, baggy and snow-stained, with only a thin, synthetic sheepskin showing at the lapel. The silk college scarf he’d commandeered from his father was ridiculous with maroon stripes. His ruined black shoes were chiselled, not pointed. In his oil-stained sweater, he might just pass for a down-on-his-luck grease monkey. All the tube lights seemed to sting the damp folds in his jeans.
He bought tea and sat at a table near one of the front windows, but the agonised curve of his near miss began instantly replaying in his head. He’d nearly been smashed to pieces. If he hadn’t lurched himself over to slam the wheel back on the tar … Suddenly, his legs were trembling so much he half-wondered how he was ever going to climb back on the bike. Shivering despite the fug of the café, sipping his tea and cradling the heat in his hands, he tried to think of home. His house was only another half-hour away. But there was the lorry again, racing into his mind’s eye. It came on and on. He clutched hard at the white china mug, recalled that dazed vision of his dad, like God, like Father Christmas, waiting to take him. For Christ’s sake, he’d looked death in the face and it had been almost soothing! He forced his arms against the edge of the table, feeling faint, rickety, remembering a dark pool he’d seen once under the water mill at Gaddesden. A girl went over to the jukebox. ‘Teenangel’ played to the smell of frying bacon.
His tea was nearly cold before he got a grip on himself. Then he saw how foolish he’d been, how puffed up and vainglorious. He’d persuaded his parents he could handle the bike and manage the long drive. He’d assured them he’d be fine on his own in the empty house for a day or so. Now he wished he’d never set out. He thought of the dinner the day before, the lighted fires,
