even older. They made me think of Mack Sennet and Fatty Arbuckle and Jackie Coogan. If I got round to buying one I knew that I would have to wear a big flat peaked cap like Coogan’s. Eighteen gears apart – perhaps she would settle for fifteen – and providing we could find one with an open rather than a man’s diamond frame model, this seemed exactly the sort of bike, in the absence of her beloved Bianchi, that Wanda needed to carry her the length and breadth of Ireland and even up and down a holy mountain or two.
‘“To buy a mountain bike now”,’ I read, ‘“is to win yourself a place in the first of the few rather than the last of the many.”’
It was a wet Sunday evening in Dorset. We were in bed surrounded by the avalanche of catalogues and lists I had brought down on us by clipping out the coupons in The Bicycle Buyer’s Bible. One dealer, in what seemed to me an excess of optimism, had also sent order forms which read:
PLEASE SEND … MOUNTAIN BICYCLES(S), MODEL(S) … FRAME SIZE(S) … COLOUR(S) … PLEASE GIVE ALTERNATE COLOUR(S). I ENCLOSE A CHEQUE/BANKER’S ORDER, VALUE …
‘I don’t want to be one of the first of the few,’ Wanda said.
‘Shall I go on?’ I said. ‘There’s worse to follow.’
‘Okay, go on.’
‘“From prototype to production model they have been around for less than a decade. In that short time they have been blasted across the Sahara, up Kilimanjaro, down the Rockies and along the Great Wall of China.”’
‘Isn’t it true that the Great Wall of China’s got so many holes in it that you can’t even walk along it, let alone cycle along it?’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said, ‘but there is a picture here of two men sitting on their bikes on the top of Kilimanjaro. And anyway, just listen to this: “With each off-the-wall off-the-road adventure, with each unlikely test-to-destruction, the off-road-state-of-knowledge has rolled the off-road-state-of-the-art further forward.”’
‘Read it again,’ she said. ‘More slowly. It sounds like bloddy nonsense to me.’
‘There’s no need to be foul-mouthed,’ I said.
‘It was you who taught me,’ she replied.
I read it again. It still sounded like bloody nonsense and it came as no surprise when I later discovered that some of the early practitioners of this off-the-road-state-of-the-art mountain bike business hailed from Marin, that deceptively normal-looking county out beyond the Golden Gate Bridge on the way up to the big redwoods, which gives shelter to more well-heeled loonies to the square mile within its confines, all of them into everything from free association in Zen to biodegradable chain cleaning fluid, than any other comparable suburban area in the entire United States.
‘Read on,’ Wanda said.
‘“You don’t have to be some gung-ho lunatic to get your kicks”,’ I read on. ‘“Take a mountain bike along the next time the family or a group of friends head off for a picnic in the woods. There’ll be plenty of places to put the bike through its paces and it sure beats playing Frisbee after lunch [interval while I explained the nature of this, I thought outmoded, pastime to Wanda]. Or take the bike on a trip to the seaside – rock-hopping along the beach is a blast.”’
‘That’s enough,’ she said in the Balkan version of her voice. ‘I can just see you on your mountain bike, a gong-ho (what is gongho?), Frisbee-playing, rock-hopping lunatic.’
‘I say,’ I said, some time later when the lights were out, ‘I hope all this isn’t going to make you lose your enthusiasm.’
‘Enthusiasm for what?’
‘For these bikes, and Ireland and everything,’ I said, lamely.
‘Not for these bikes, I haven’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve never had any. Nor for Ireland in winter. If I come it will only be to make sure you don’t get into trobble.’
‘What sort of trouble?’
‘In Ireland all sorts of trobble,’ she said, darkly.
We went to London to make the rounds of shops selling mountain bicycles, and if possible purchase some. Under the arches off the Strand, in the substructure which was all that remained of the Adelphi, the Adam brothers’ great riverside composition, we saw and rode our first mountain bikes. Wanda tried something called a Muddy Fox Seeker Mixte, which had an open frame constructed from Japanese fully lugged chrome molybdenum tubing with Mangaloy manganese alloy forks; I tried a Muddy Fox Pathfinder which had a lugless frame of the same material, put together by the TIG (Tungsten Inert Gas) welding process. Wanda quite liked her Mixte which reminded her a bit of the old Bianchi open-framed bike on which she had ridden out to bring me and my friends food and clothing in the autumn of 1943.
What the staff of most of the bicycle shops we visited had in common, we discovered, was almost complete indifference as to whether we bought one of their bikes or not. This was surprising, considering how much money was involved and the fact that the industry was going through one of its periodic slumps. In mountain bikes there was nothing worth buying under £200. From £200 to £300 the choice was very limited and it was only in the £300 to £500 range that one started to find high quality bikes. From £500 to around £1000 or more, one was in a world of prototypes and purely competitive machines in which everything, as the Buyer’s Bible put it in a way that I was beginning to find insidiously corrupting, was ‘silly money’. One thing we had learned was that whatever make we bought, our bikes should come from a firm that actually built, or at least assembled them, on the premises. But time was now running out and if we did not leave for Ireland within ten days we would have to wait until after Christmas. One of the firms we had not yet visited was called Overbury’s, in Bristol, who designed and built their own racing, touring and mountain bikes. And Bristol had the added attraction that our daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren lived there.
Overbury’s premises, in Ashley Road, can scarcely be described as being at ‘the better end’ of Bristol; in fact Bristol has no better end. The more enviable parts are perched high above the city at the top of impossibly steep hills or on huge cliffs above the Avon Gorge, from both of which eyries the inhabitants look down with Olympian detachment on those less fortunate mortals below. Overbury’s, which is run by Andy Powell and his mother, Enid, is about the size of an average newsagent’s and is crammed with bikes that are either beautiful or sophisticated, or both, and all the complex bits and pieces that go to make them up. What space remains is taken up by machines in various states of malfunction or collapse awaiting attention. In fact on the Monday morning we visited, it was rather like being in a National Health doctor’s waiting room during surgery hours. One of the more spectacular accidents had befallen an ATB-riding log-hopper who had failed to clear a huge pile of them in a Forestry Commission conifer wood. The resulting smash had destroyed the special welded guard bar, fitted under the bottom bracket to protect the triple chain rings from just such a mishap, doing a wealth of damage.
‘You’re looking at more than a hundred nicker,’ the owner said with gloomy pride, when I showed an interest in it. ‘That’s the end of guards for me.’
We were lent a couple of test bikes on deposit and we set off with them in the back of our van for an attractive open expanse called Ashton Court Park, to try them out. Wanda’s was the most expensive and the most unconventional in appearance.
