spite of this setback, she did succeed in climbing the hill, from the top of which we roared downhill towards the hamlet of Steeple, which consists of a manor, a vicarage, a very old church which houses a giant eighteenth-century version of a pianola and a plaque displaying the stars and stripes of the Lawrences, a family who were collateral ancestors of George Washington. From here a hill climbs to the summit of West Creech Hill, a rise of about 295 feet in 1000 yards, which may not seem much, and certainly doesn’t look much, but is in fact excruciating. If any of the Alpine passes I rode over on my way to Italy in 1971 had been as difficult as parts of this hill, I would never have ridden a bike over the Alps at all.
‘You go on,’ said Wanda, when the time came to tackle it. ‘Don’t watch me.’
From the top, completely breathless, I watched the little figure gallantly toiling up, very slowly, very wobbly at times, but she made it.
‘I did it,’ she said. ‘Not bad for a grandmother, am I?’
I felt so proud of her I wanted to cry; but privately I prayed that there wouldn’t be many similar hills in Ireland.
When we got back to the house Wanda allowed me a fleeting glimpse of what her hand-finished, calf leather, high-density, memory-retentive foam Desmoplan base saddle had done to her in the course of about six miles and I knew that unless a better alternative could be found she would be a non-starter in the Irish Cycling Stakes, 1985. So I got on the telephone to Enid in Bristol and the following morning a large carton full of saddles arrived by special delivery.
I had solved the saddle problem on my mountain bike by ordering a Brooks B66 leather saddle which had big springs at the back. Most mountain bike saddles seem to have been designed by men who don’t realize that on a mountain bike the rider sits more or less upright, as on a roadster, so that the whole weight of the body, divided on a bicycle with dropped handlebars between the saddle and the bars, falls on the saddle. It is even worse for women. Women have wider hips and, as the Buyer’s Bible delicately put it, having presumably taken female advice, ‘the pubic arch between the legs is shallower, making the genital area very vulnerable to pressure’.
The saddles we now received were mostly similar in construction to the one that had originally come with Wanda’s bike. Some had been injected with silicon fluid, to make them more bouncy beneath the layer of ‘high-density memory-retentive foam’ already referred to. With all these lying around in the hall, it resembled a saddle fetishist’s den. Eventually, Wanda chose a Brooks B72 leather touring saddle, ‘specially designed for women cyclists and those wanting a broader support’.
I now spent the time, when not engaged in packing my pannier bags (we were leaving the next day), in bashing her saddle with a lump of wood, and rubbing it with Brooks Proofhide and something called Neatsfoot Oil in order to take some of the sting out of it for Wanda’s inaugural Irish ride, which I was planning with my customary inefficiency.
There lay the green shore of Ireland, like some coast of plenty. We could see towns, towers, churches, harvests; but the curse of eight hundred years we could not discern.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. English Traits, 1856
Ireland is not Paradise.
JONATHAN SWIFT, in a letter to Alexander Pope,
30 August 1716
I spent our last evening in England in the basement bedroom of our daughter and son-in-law’s house up on the highest heights of Bristol, where those who are chronic worriers wear oxygen masks, making final adjustments to the Crossfell and the Wild Cat.
There were no other contenders for this utterly boring task. Somewhere upstairs, above ground, my eleven-year-old grandson, using his father’s computer, was extracting information in a matter of seconds from what appeared to be thin air. Elsewhere in the building my granddaughter was dancing the sort of dances that little girls of six habitually execute, dreaming of being Flossie Footlights or Fonteyn. In the kitchen my daughter was about to start roasting a duck, happy, one hoped, at the thought of going back to work in the outside world from which bringing up her children had largely excluded her. Half a mile up the road, immured somewhere in a wing of the University, her husband, a mathematician turned biologist, was locked in what looked like becoming a lifelong struggle to extract the secret of what makes eyes and ears function.
And somewhere in the house was Wanda. She was about as interested in the finer points of her Wild Cat as I imagine Queen Boadicea would have been in the alignment of scythes on the axles of her chariot wheels. Both assumed, rightly, that some member of the lumpenproletariat would be keeping their equipment up to scratch. For Shimano Deore XT hubs, Biopace computer-designed drive system chainwheels, 600 EX headsets with O ring seals, and such – all items I had been forced to take an interest in, simply to know what to try and do if they went wrong – she cared not a hoot.
One of the best reasons for owning an ordinary bicycle with no expensive trimmings is that everything about it, apart from mending punctures, which is a bore whatever sort of bike you have, is comparatively simple. With expensive, thoroughbred bicycles it is another matter altogether.
If I had ever forgotten this I re-discovered it when I tried to fit Wanda’s final selection, the Brooks B72 leather saddle, the one ‘for those wanting a broader support’, to a highly sophisticated, space age Sr Laprade XL forged alloy fluted seatpin with micro-adjustment and a replacement value of around £20. A lot of money, you may say. But worth every penny of it since, according to those who know, anything nameless in the field of seatpins may snap off with rough off-the-road usage, leaving the rider either impaled on what is left of it or, at the very least, pedalling away without any visible means of support, rather like a fakir using a bicycle to perform a variation of the Indian rope trick. I had asked Overbury’s for a seatpin which gave the maximum amount of adjustment and this was it.
By now it was seven o’clock. ‘It won’t take long,’ I said, talking to myself in the absence of an audience.
The saddle was mounted on a frame which consisted of two sets of parallel wire tracks and each of these tracks had to be attached to the Laprade pin by means of a clamp with two parallel grooves on it. The principal difficulty I experienced in performing this ostensibly easy task was that the track wires were not only too far apart to fit into the grooves but were extraordinarily resistant to being drawn together. However I finally succeeded in doing this making use of a form of Spanish windlass made with a lace from a climbing boot and a skewer.
I was so pleased with myself at having accomplished this feat that I failed to notice that when I inserted the tracks into the grooves I did so with the saddle the wrong way up.
This was the moment when my daughter, fearing for her dinner and my sanity, set off in the rain and darkness to enlist the help of Charlie Quinn, who lived a few doors away. Apparently Charlie Quinn was a schoolboy who was completely dotty about bikes and when not engaged in doing his homework spent most of his spare time either riding them or working on them in a part-time capacity at Clifton Cycles, a rival bike shop to Overbury’s.
Charlie arrived with a comprehensive tool kit which included a pair of clamps, with the help of which he drew the wire tracks together with shameful ease, and inserted them in the grooves. It was therefore not without a certain despicable satisfaction that I noted that when he tightened the bolt the tracks were
