didn’t buy it of course. It wasn’t French, it certainly wasn’t a bargain, and no doubt my mother would have had more than a few things to say about it. I was a little disappointed when he handed the keys back, but at the same time I was so shocked by the fact that we’d gone out in it in the first place I don’t think I ever got as far as thinking about what might happen at the end of the test drive. It’s a shame really. For a minute there he looked like he was really enjoying himself, like he’d remembered there was more to cars than deals and boot space. I wish he’d rediscover it again, blow off the cobwebs and the stink of garlic and get behind the wheel of a proper car. It’ll never happen though. Last I heard he’d just bought a Citroën Xantia. The cheap one.
6 BMXs, BUNNY-HOPS AND BROWNIES
It’s 1983, I’m ten, I’ve got a regular job washing pots in the kitchens of Castle Howard, and I’ve just got a Raleigh Aero-Pro Burner. Life doesn’t get much better.
You see, the Raleigh Aero-Pro Burner wasn’t just a BMX, it was the coolest BMX there was. Chrome frame, black five-spoke mag wheels, black pads, it was a proper BMXer’s bike – or it was when I was finished with it – and I was a proper BMXer. For me, BMXing was the realisation of my skateboarding dream. I could never really do skateboarding. I had all the gear, I’d tricked my board out and I was ready to pull some moves – ride railings, flip my board, fly off half pipes – but I just couldn’t stand up on the thing. BMXing was much more my thing. I was a natural.
I could do allsorts on my Aero-Pro Burner, especially once I’d tricked it. I put pegs on the front and back, like extended wheel nuts that you’d stand on to do tricks; I used them to do front bunny-hops and rear bunny-hops. I could also do front and rear bunny-hops on the pedals – much harder than on the pegs. I used to do the thing where you’d drive along, hit the front brakes so the rear end would go up, and you’d flick it round and on to something like a bench; if you had enough momentum you could bring the front up as well so the whole bike was on the bench; then you could do some bunny-hops on the pedals and jump back off again. I could even do the move where you applied the front brake, kicked the back end round and literally stepped over the frame as it swung round you. That was pretty cool. I could do loads of other things too – pick it up off the floor just by standing on the pedal, wheelies, all the usual stuff – but those were my coolest moves. I used to change the hand grips, which were a bit of a bugger to do because you had to use a scalpel to get the old ones off (and with my track record for blade injuries that was asking for trouble), then to get the new ones on you had to slide them on with Fairy Liquid, and then you had to wait for them to dry and set otherwise they’d forever be twisting round. I used to change the forks and the handlebars as well, anything to make the bike cooler and better for stunts.
I was obsessed with that bike; it completely changed my world. Before that I’d had a Raleigh Boxer, which was like a baby BMX. Mine was yellow, so it was sort of cool, but my neighbours had a Chopper and a Grifter, and next to those it was a case of little man/big man syndrome (‘How big is yours?’). My piddly little Boxer was, well, little. I couldn’t actually ride Grifters because they were too big for me. I couldn’t reach the floor. But I borrowed my neighbour’s Chopper once and that was really cool – or it was until I came off, and because my legs weren’t long enough to touch the ground properly I ripped my bollocks on the gear stick. That really bloody hurt.
Once I had the Aero-Pro Burner, though, it was a different story. I was the man, I was unstoppable. When I got that bike I suddenly got my freedom.
I rode absolutely everywhere on it. I used to bike the 5 miles to school every day, and that’s a lot of pedalling. Me and David Coates, who had an Xtra Burner which was all right but not as good as mine, used to ride out to this old campsite, next to the lake at Castle Howard. We’d do a circuit of the campsite and the guy who ran it always used to come out and shout and tell us off, but we didn’t care. We’d fly past and ignore him. One day he put a scaffolding bar across the top of the gate posts. We didn’t see it until it was too late. We were lucky it didn’t take our heads off. It was like some comedy sketch: one minute we were bombing along, standing on our pedals, the next we were swinging from a metal bar and our bikes were hurtling off into the distance without us. We could hardly breathe we were so winded. I’m not sure we went back there after that. But there were plenty of other places for two BMXers to get into trouble. Plenty.
The first time I got arrested I was on my Aero-Pro Burner. There was this disused farmhouse about 4 miles away from the back of our farm; no one had lived in it for ten years at least. One day David and I decided to ride over there. It was completely abandoned, like something out of Scooby Doo, so of course we climbed in through a window and found all this amazing stuff, like tankards, and playing cards with half-naked women on them. We thought, ‘Right, we’re having them,’ so we loaded them up and took them back to our den.
Our den was round the back of the farm. It was almost like a hayloft, with a rope ladder we used to get up to it. It looked really cool with all the loot from the old farmhouse in it. Then one day my dad found it. He realised what we’d done and he did what any reasonable protective father would do: he called the police. They came and took me away and put me in a cell. I was ten. There was no mention of David, it was just me, on my own, down the local nick. No one had been in this farm for a decade, it’s not like anyone was going to miss anything, but my dad wanted to teach me a lesson, and being an ex-copper he was mates with the local police, so they banged me up and left me in a cell for two hours. I got hauled in front of the superintendent and everything. Got a right ear bashing. It was almost as if my dad had orchestrated it all and told them exactly what to say. And it was all staged, but I was ten years old. I thought I was going down.
We never went back to the old farmhouse. Instead we found other ways to amuse ourselves, one of which involved a ramp and the local girls’ Brownie pack. I had this BMX ramp, a really, really good one, that I’d bought with my pocket money. It was 3 feet long with a strip of that non-slip black sandpaper type stuff up the centre for extra grip, and it had clips at the back so you could set it to different heights. We used to set it up in David’s back garden, or at the bottom of the hill on the farm. We’d both pedal furiously down the hill towards it, picking up a fair speed to the point where we couldn’t actually pedal as fast as we were going, we’d go flying off the end of this thing, and we’d go a pretty long way. Our other place to jump was outside the village hall. There wasn’t a hill to ride down, but there was a mound of grass by the car park which was perfect for giving the ramp extra height, so what you lost in run-up speed you made up for in launch angle.
Usually when we were trying to outjump each other we’d mark the distance with a stick. One of us would jump, the other would record the distance with the stick, then we’d swap. We could do that for hours. One day we were outside the village hall with our ramp when the local Brownies, who used to meet in the village hall, turned up. There they all were, gathering in the car park in their nasty brown dresses, yellow scarves and woggles, and there we were, jumping off our ramp and measuring the results with a stick. All of a sudden someone – and to be fair, I think it was one of the Brownies – came up with a great idea.
‘Why don’t we lie down, and you can jump us.’
Brilliant!
I reckoned I could jump 15 feet off this thing, which when you’re only 3 feet tall is a bloody long way, but I had no idea how many Brownies that would be, so we started off with two.
When the two Brownies were in place, we took as long a ride up as possible, pedalled furiously, went up the ramp and over. No problem. We put a third Brownie down, took a run up, pedalled furiously, got over, no problem. A fourth, a fifth and a sixth were added, and by the time we reached Brownie number 13 we were worn out from all the pedalling. We didn’t want to
