Bicycle - Riding Out With Dad

Christmas, 1967, I was given a bicycle.  Shiny and new with white tyres and the ‘Triumph 20’ logo on the pale blue metallic frame.  It was a wonderful surprise and I loved it. If only I could ride it. If only I wasn’t too timid to learn. I’d had great times with my trusty trike, up and down the promenade, and round all the tables in what we called the ‘Main Bar’, but I’d grown out of it ages ago and now I was twelve it was time for a proper ladies' bike.  No stabilisers, just my dad jogging along next to me, holding the back of my saddle to keep me steady.  All was well until I realised he’d let go, then I’d wobble, fall and cry with frustration at the ‘stupid’ bike. It would be put away until another day.

Practice makes perfect, they say, and eventually I got the hang of it. As I gained confidence, my dad and I went out on longer bike rides. He had a racing bike for serious cycling and a small-wheeled ‘sit-up-and-beg’ bicycle that he used to come out with me. We went on the roads so he could teach me the cyclist’s Highway Code. These trips included the promenade and up Harrowside bridge, which I hated because it was steep enough to hurt my legs. Sometimes that was our turning point for going home, so I would have to pedal up both sides, and remember to use the brakes gently when free-wheeling down. In nice weather we would venture a little further, on to the moss and the back roads towards St Anne’s. We did it all again years later, by car when I was learning to drive and he was brave enough to sit with me.

In my teens I went out cycling with a group of friends, usually to the villages of rural Fylde. We would take a packed lunch, find somewhere pleasant to picnic and no one would mention ‘O’ levels, essays or homework. Happy, carefree times of youth club, Girls Guides and choir, before the bombshell of moving to Cheshire was dropped.

I suppose we all have books and films that we love so much, we know them almost word for word. One of mine is ‘Goodnight, Mr Tom’ and I’m always weeping when William is trying to ride the bicycle that belonged to his late friend, Zach. Of course, he perseveres and succeeds, by which time I’m drowning in my own tears. Always.

Here is another favourite poem, one that makes me think I was around in a long gone era. Perhaps it’s inherited memory, if such a thing exists, rather than déjà vu. It’s the bicycle and the angel-cake.

Myfanwy

Kind o’er the kinderbank leans my Myfanwy,
White o’er the play-pen the sheen of her dress,
Fresh from the bathroom and soft in the nursery
Soap-scented fingers I long to caress.

Were you a prefect and head of your dormit’ry?
Were you a hockey girl, tennis or gym?
Who was your favourite? Who had a crush on you?
Which were the baths where they taught you to swim?

Smooth down the Avenue glitters the bicycle,
Black-stockinged legs under navy-blue serge,
Home and Colonial, Star, International,
Balancing bicycle leant on the verge.

Trace me your wheel-tracks, you fortunate bicycle,
Out of the shopping and into the dark,
Back down the Avenue, back to the potting shed,
Back to the house on the fringe of the park.

Golden the light on the locks of Myfanwy,
Golden the light on the book on her knee,
Finger-marked pages of Rackham’s Hans Andersen,
Time for the children to come down to tea.

Oh! Fuller’s angel-cake, Robertson’s marmalade,
Liberty lampshade, come, shine on us all,
My! What a spread for the friends of Myfanwy
Some in the alcove and some in the hall.

Then what sardines in the half-lighted passages!
Locking of fingers in long hide-and-seek.
You will protect me, my silken Myfanwy,
Ringleader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak.

                 John Betjeman

Thanks for reading, Pam x

Read More

Chance Lead Me

I’m going cycling tonight. I don’t know where but I rarely do. Fellow cyclists, planning their routes in exhaustive detail, regard this behaviour as morally suspect but it’s my normality. I’ll set off around five from Broughton Interchange and, depending which slip-lane is running freer, head north or south on the motorway. After that, it’s down to the way the light plays on the hills – if Pendle catches my eye, I’ll swerve off at the Tickled Trout. On the northbound option, the Kentmere fells might make a pleasing grouping and it’s off at the Kendal turn for a wrestle with the stony Lakeland passes of Garburn and Gatesgarth.

 

That makes logical sense when you’re dodging the capricious weather of Northern England. It would, after all, be foolishly intransigent to head up the rain-sodden and cloud-capped Howgills with some specious allegiance to Plan while the neighbouring Longsleddale Fells bask in sun. But it’s more than practicality – the experiences taste the sweeter for the wrappers being removed with eyes closed. So tonight I might encounter a fox slinking into the bracken, a deer browsing the edges of a cool wood, or a dazzling swathe of red campion. Whatever it is, it will be better, looser, lighter without the dread burden of Expectation.

You’re a grown-up, so you know how these things work: everything’s a metaphor for writing, yes? I’m inordinately fond of Robert Frost’s aphorism, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” and we’ve all encountered over-plotted novels or poems so corseted by form they make you long to scratch in sympathy. So dive in to your poem, take a turn that surprises you, shift register when your reader has just got comfortable and remember that everything is the fleeting, chance result of a trillion caprices. That Dylan fella put it well: "I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me."

 

Here’s a poem from way back, reflecting on a rock-climbing experience and trying to make peace with disorder. The triumph/disaster line is swiped from Kipling, of course. These days, you can’t be too careful with citing sources. 

Pebble

Fingers scrabble upward, Brailing for texture.

On the blank slate: no hyphen of a welcome ledge,

just this full-stop pebble - hard, conclusive,

a goitred eyeball staring, Odin-wise. 

Now I see where necessity leads me:

to tug the world down like a Roman blind,

commit all that I am to this obstinate fragment,

stretch, trembling, into a hopeful sky. 

I ponder how securely this nugget is bonded.

Two futures open: triumph, disaster

(neither impostors, the distinction concrete).

 

To…

 

pluck the jewel between surprised fingers,

catch the critical eye of cartoon gravity

and scatter my flesh among distant boulders

 

or…

 

find it firmly-founded; reach and seize the windswept rim.

 

But spin the clock the other way, watch the birches recede,

see ice sheets pulsate across the land,

oceans spill over and continents cleave

to find this land, Sahara-scorched, Pangaean.

 

A storm-tossed pebble lies loose on a beach.

Emergent from the shimmer: three-horned beasts.

Will they swagger past, snorting stale breath on primitive bromeliads?

Or will one lumber near, impose its thunderous mass,

tamp the pebble down, cemented for a billion frosts?

 

Two pasts converge where two futures part

and here am I,

nailed to the crosshair of decision,

then, now and always.

 

 

In a postscript, chance led me to Troutbeck and Ambleside last night. There was a deer – a young roe fawn curled up in the grass. Also a close encounter with a heron and a cackling yaffing-gale. A pretty good haul on the wildlife front but topped by a human encounter: a last-minute decision to turn down a lane caused me to bump into a Garstang friend (he lives just down my street, in fact).

Norman Hadley

Read More