best to quit while we were ahead.
So that was it, the height of my BMXing achievements and my first real experience of women and some of their very strange ideas, all in one aerobatic stunt-riding go. Magic. What can I say? It was a small village in the middle of nowhere. We had to make our own entertainment.
The lime kiln at the far end of Lime Kiln Farm was this huge great mound, about 30 feet high, like a mini volcano, hollow inside with a big opening at the top. If you had a little motorbike (which I did), and you were a small kid (which I was) who had no fear (which I didn’t), it was perfect for riding your motorbike round the top of, daring yourself to get closer and closer to the edge, being careful not to get too close or you’d drop right into it, and it was a long way down. If I wasn’t jumping Brownies on my BMX or being thrown in a police cell for nicking playing cards with naked women on them, this is how I used to amuse myself.
I was about eleven when I got my first motorbike, a little Puch 50 twist-and-go scrambler. I went with my dad to Makro the discount supermarket one day when he was buying a load of drink for work, and this little bike was just waiting there. It was white with red and blue stripes and a sticker with PUCH written on it on the fuel tank. I gave it a proper look over. I sat on it and fiddled with all the bits and pieces. My dad was watching me, and after a while, once he’d got all the things he was there for, he just picked up a boxed one – it was only a little thing – and put it in his trolley. I asked him what he was doing, and he said, ‘You like it? You can have it. But you’ll pay for half of it.’ It was £150, and the maximum I’d earned that year was £40, so I had to come up with £75. Sure enough I worked to pay for it, pot washing like crazy, and the money went straight to my dad because he knew that if I got hold of the money he’d never see it. He wasn’t stupid.
I used to ride all over the fields on that thing. Either on my own or with my mate Philip Schofield. No, not that Philip Schofield. This Philip Schofield lived about 3 miles away and had an XT175, a massive bike for him and far too big for me, a big black thing with a black and white tank. Either I would cane it over to his and bomb around his fields, or he would come over to mine and we’d bomb around by the kiln. We had to stick to the fields though. I wasn’t allowed to ride out on the road on the Puch 50; for that I had my BMX. Even though we weren’t out on the roads, I always used to wear a crash helmet because I used to come off a lot, and of course the more confident you get, the more you come off, and I was always pretty confident on my little Puch 50. There wasn’t anywhere I wouldn’t go, and that included up the side of the kiln.
Because I was only small and the little Puch 50 was pretty light, if I had a good run at it I could usually get up the side of the kiln. But it was steep, and the inside was even steeper. You could drive up the outside, but you couldn’t then drive down into the hole and back up the other side to the top again because it was way too steep, practically a vertical drop when you looked down into it from the top. It was so steep that the inside would have made an almost perfect wall of death to ride round, if it hadn’t been for the big hole in the front, which was presumably where they used to put things into the kiln. Shame, that would have been amazing to ride round. It’s probably just as well though. The place was lethal enough as it was.
I took incredible care of my little Puch. I had it for about a year, and when I wasn’t testing my skills to the limit I was cleaning and polishing and taking good care of my pride and joy. Until one day it was nicked. I was gutted. It wasn’t insured or anything. My dad always said to me, ‘When you’re finished with it, lock it up and put it in the shed and then lock the shed to be on the safe side.’ And, like an idiot, I didn’t. One night I left it on the hard standing at the back of our house and it got stolen. I woke up in the morning and it was gone. I was heartbroken. I went in tears to my dad, who in typical style said, ‘You’ll learn, that’ll teach you.’ He didn’t say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you another one,’ it was always, ‘You’ll learn.’ About three days later it turned up at the bottom of the village next to the telephone box. It had been completely stripped, all the leads had been pulled off it, and it had been set alight. It was just a burnt-out pile of bits, completely wrecked. I think the sight of that was worse than having it nicked in the first place. I loved that bike so much.
So that was that. My Puch 50 was no more. I was back to my BMX and working hard to save money to buy another motorbike.
Once I’d got a bit of cash together I went with my dad to the bike shop to look for a replacement. I was looking around at the Puch 50s, Yamahas and Hondas, and in the corner sat this shiny, brand spanking new Honda ATV70 three-wheeler. Now, these things really were lethal. No one knew that at the time, of course, but they ended up being replaced by quad bikes because they were so dangerous. It looked great in the shop and I said to my dad, ‘I like that.’ I only had about half the money though – my savings plus Christmas and birthday presents. I sat on it and thought it was really cool, but knowing that there was no way I could afford it I got off, had another look round and pointed out another small motorbike, nowhere near as nice as the trike but nowhere near as expensive either. I said to my dad, reluctantly, ‘I’ll have that one.’ My dad looked the little motorbike over, nodded and said, ‘Right, I’ll pay, you go and wait in the car.’ So I gave him my money and went and sat in the car.
Next thing I knew the door of the shop was opened and my dad was wheeling out the big Honda trike and pushing it into our horse box. I couldn’t believe it. I guess he must have liked it as much as I did.
We got home and filled it with fuel. My dad informed me that this was a serious bit of kit and that we were going to have to read the instructions. Then he was going to show me how to ride it. Like he knew how to ride it. I don’t think he’d ever seen one before, never mind driven one. But there he was, on the courtyard round the back of the house, looking it over like you do when you’re buying a new car, consulting the instructions and telling me that it had three gears, that’s the throttle, that’s the brake…
‘Right,’ he said when he’d finished his piece, ‘are you watching? I’m going to show you how to use it.’
He started it up with the pull cord (like the one you get on a lawn mower), sat on it, revved it up and put it into first gear. Only he still had the throttle on, and as soon as he released the clutch that was it, it reared up and fell straight back on top of him. He’s lying on his back in the middle of the courtyard pinned to the ground by this trike and I’m pissing myself laughing. And there ended my very first trike lesson. Still, there was an important lesson there for me, which inevitably I didn’t learn.
Blatting it up the side of the old lime kiln was easy enough on my little Puch 50, but on the Honda ATV70 it was a different story altogether. Looking at the stupidly steep side of the kiln now, it’s obvious it was never going to happen. When you’re a kid, though, you think that because you got up there on your little 50cc bike it should be no problem for this big three-wheeler, just as long as you get a good run at it.
Before long I was bombing it up there. The further up the mound you went, the steeper the gradient got and the more you needed to lean over the front to stop the bike rearing up; only the more you lean over the front, the less traction the back wheels have, and the steeper the gradient, the more traction you need. By the time I was three-quarters of the way up the side of the kiln I was on a 60 degree slope, leaning right over the front, and the rear wheels started to spin. And before I could say, ‘Oh fuck, what do I do?’ I found myself rolling slowly backwards wishing I’d stayed indoors and played Connect Four with my sister, like she’d asked. I was rolling, rolling, rolling, then suddenly it reared up and fell straight back, literally right on top of me.
Unlike my dad, however, I wasn’t flat on my back in the courtyard,
