Before we moved oop north I used to cycle seven miles every day from our village, Chinnor, to another village called Haddenham where a friend of my parents, a now-famous architect, had just built his own house. I used to labour in his garden for 15p an hour, plus lunch. The house and garden are also now famous so I like to think I played a small role in that.
I only remember having one puncture; I walked back and telephoned my Mum who came and picked me up in our Commer bus. On my route I discovered a cow's head in a ditch with a hole in it so most days used to stop and stare at it, wondering how it got there. One day for reasons I still don't understand, I thought it would be good fun to leave a trail from my house to Haddenham so I filled my Dad's garden spray with water and strapped it to the rack, setting the nozzle down by the BB to leave a steady stream of water all the way for seven miles. Odd but true.
On that road from Thame to Chinnor there's a long straight stretch and two friends, brothers from my village, Steve and Martin Watkiss, were killed there when a pal of theirs who had just got a car, saw them walking and played chicken but got it terribly wrong and hit them at speed, a shocking tragedy.
We also used to cycle along country lanes to visit nearby villages. It was probably only a mile or two but it felt like a huge distance to us. I used to ride along the upper Icknield Way to where there were chalk quarries for the cement works. in summer the white mud set rock solid and at times the tracks were boneshaking; on one occasion my back wheel went out of true and when I stopped to investigate I discovered to my amazement that the rear axle had snapped clean through. Both ends were nutted so I was able to ride home. I got a new axle and repaired it. My favourite bike was a Raleigh that had rod brakes and a 3 speed hub; I re-painted it in dark green and dark red, it had steel mudguards. We also used to push our bikes all the way to the top of Chinnor Hill, which climbs the Chiltern escarpment behind the cement works. We would fly back down at crazy speeds, nobody ever thought of helmets and that was the only time my Dad showed any concern for our safety - I remember him checking our brakes as we set off one day.
One one occasion I rode down to the local garage to buy something and walked back. A couple of days later I realised I couldn't find the bike and was beginning to think it had been stolen when my Dad came back from work and asked me "What's your bike doing down at the garage?" When I walked back to collect it Mr Parsons the garage man said: "I took it into the workshop and checked it over but couldn't find anything wrong so I wondered why you had left it" Nice to know forgetfulness isn't just a senior problem.
My pal Andy who lived in a house in Thame called Wet Paint came round one day with a lovely green racing bike somebody had lent him. It had a derailleur and two chainrings and amazingly narrow tyres. Andy and I set to cleaning it and adjusting the wheel bearings and gears etc. and I remember a friend of my Dad asking what we were doing. When I replied "we're tuning it up!" he smiled, or sneered. Andy used to ride more than me so he was stronger but we did a few time trials down to the village, round the square and back.
Andy discovered a bike frame lying in the river near our school, Lord Williams in Thame so we got some string with a hook on the end and fished it out. It was a delivery bike with a heavy basket built as part of the frame on the front. The RH crank had worn a big hole in the chainstay thanks to badly adjusted BB bearings so I took the frame to the blacksmith, who skilfully brazed over the hole and refused any payment. We laboriously hacksawed the basket off and fitted it with a spare rear wheel with a Sturmey Archer hub then pinched a small front wheel off my brother's bike; he complained about it but was graduating to riding my sister's bike by then so didn't bother too much. I swopped a penknife for a pair of apehanger bars and I built a chopper seat out of bent copper heating pipe and wood with padding and we fitted a bottle dynamo and a huge chrome headlamp. Sadly no photos exist of this creation, which was stolen along with two other bikes from our cellar right below us as we ate Sunday lunch one day shortly after arriving in Newcastle. The Police found the two other bikes dumped on the town moor with the brake cables cut but we never saw my chopper again.
