On the Road Bike (31 page)

By coincidence, and almost at the same time, the stock market crashed, which also left Garry with some tidying up to do. Three years previously, Garry had changed jobs and had moved into a brave new world. After a spell working for Harrods in their warehouse, he had decided to send a CV, rather speculatively, to a firm in the City that was looking to hire foreign exchange traders. This was the time of unfettered growth in the Square Mile, and there was a voguish and defining move away from the privately educated Oxbridge graduate towards the more streetwise local recruit. Garry, with his natural charm and sharp tongue, would probably impress, but, he still had to cobble together a convincing CV.

Garry recalls how he squeezed every ounce of relevance from a thinly populated list of achievements. Under the section ‘Other Qualifications', he listed his captaincy of the England bicycle polo team. Not perhaps the first thing you would demand for the role of Forex trader. But maybe they saw something in his ability to stand still and not fall off.

‘Stating that on my interview papers got me a job in the City.' I look at him incredulously. ‘Seriously. I put captain of the England bicycle polo team. The guy stood up in front of all the other people and said, “This is Garry. He's going to be joining us. Because anyone who has captain of the England bicycle polo team on their CV has got to be given a chance.”'

For years he sat at a desk in the noisy trading room of Tullet and Tokyo Forex, juggling telephones, fielding calls from across the globe and effecting huge trades on international markets. His desk, he recalls, had a semi-circular section cut out of it to accommodate the expanding girths of the traders. Presumably, the bigger the semi-circle, the older the trader, the fatter the bonus, and the closer the heart attack. Their professional life expectancy was limited to about thirty-five years old. By forty they were toast.

Garry thrived in this world, conducting his intercontinental symphony; the master of a clutch of telephones, connected to the eighties equivalents of those whirring and clicking exchanges that his dad had used to maintain, often trying to lead two conversations simultaneously, one phone on either ear, men in suits in Hong Kong and New York hanging on his every bid. He was, for a while, prodigiously good at it.

But, what he didn't know was that his right ear was failing him. He was going progressively deaf. The first signs were easy to ignore but, step by step, he started to miss trades. Vital bits of key information, prices shouted down the wires and through crackling receivers slipped through the net. No one needs a deaf trader.

In 1993, although he was still a young man, he was pensioned off on medical grounds. His foray into the City was done. It was a tumultuous time in his life, and it ushered in an era of slapstick comedy. The payout he received was generous, and Garry was followed for years by private detectives from the medical insurance company, convinced that he was committing a fraud. They'd wait in cars outside his house, and if he went anywhere, they'd follow. Garry became expert at throwing them off his scent.

But with a life of high finance already behind him, and many good years still to come, he renewed his childhood passion. Back to the bikes.

‘I was a debauched, drunken bum. Great years. But hell did they take their toll.'

I took my leave of him, pushing through Borough Market to get back to the station. I crossed Borough High Street, and re-entered some sort of normality.

At London Bridge I glanced across at the dense mass of banks and investment houses, their lights twinkling in the dusk, their impenetrable business thundering silently on. Right here is where a little of the City's wealth spills over like a tidal surge and splashes the South London Thames shores. That's kind of what it did to Garry, in real life.

My start time for the hill climb was now frighteningly close.

‘Whenever I'm up there, I still see the old man. With his Eric Morecambe glasses, with his Bec top on, with his loudhailer. It's special.'

We were at the top of the hill, gently free-wheeling down to the start. It was race day. Garry had decided, on his fifty-fifth birthday, to try and race the hill climb for the very first time. He had passed a childhood, swiftly followed by an adulthood, of watching on and recording times, but never participating. Today this would come to an end.

Cleverly, I got him talking about his beautiful steel frame bike so that I didn't have to contribute anything to the conversation. I no longer cared if he was as scared as me. I'd make him do all the talking, so I could wallow in my fear.

It was not only the fact of the race. It was the setting, too. It had attracted a ghoulish host of onlookers, some of whom I knew very well. What was I doing here, flesh and beating blood?

Maurice Burton had brought half his team down to watch (I would be racing in their vivid yellow colours), including his son Germain, who had won the last two Bec Hill Climbs. Germain was still recovering from a chest infection that he picked up after riding for Great Britain at the Junior World Championships, so he would not be defending his title. Instead, they were hoping that I didn't dishonour the ‘De Ver' brand by finishing stone last.

There was some talk that this might indeed happen. Maurice had looked particularly unsure when he saw me before I went off to warm up. Germain had also exuded scepticism.

Ron Keeble, never one to knowingly relax an amateur cyclist, had been on my case for weeks, offering to look my bike over to check I'd got small enough gears. He'd even offered to drive me down to the hill ‘any time I want' so that I could put in some training efforts. I had found a range of excuses not to, opting instead to bury my head in the sand.

He grabbed me on the day, just as I was turning to head down to the start.

‘There's a tree, covered in ivy, right in front of you as you start. Head for that, and it'll take you onto the right side of the road for the climb. The gradient's not so bad there.' He looked me up and down, full of visible paternal concern, mixed with violent paternal fury. ‘You'll be all right,' he said. He might as well have been pushing me over the edge of Tower Bridge by booting me up the arse.

Alan Peiper, who rode the Tour de France five times and who had shared that bizarre accommodation in Ghent along with Maurice Burton and Jan ‘The Papers', would be racing. So would a clutch of very decent domestic elite riders, a host of keen and experienced amateurs and the reigning National Hill Climb Champion, the curiously Scandinavian-sounding Gunnar Gronlund, who had smashed his way up a certain Long Hill in Buxton quicker than anyone else to gain the title and red, white and blue bands.

And last, but by no means least, there was a frighteningly outspoken, no-nonsense rider called Tony Gibb, one of the undisputed hard men of the British track and criterium scene, and a man who had competed in dozens of races which I had televised. He was the MC for the day, with microphone, and loudspeaker. In a strange reversal of the norm, he would be commentating on my effort.

All around me, men and women in perfectly fitting kit with specially adapted handlebars had been getting bikes out of the back of liveried estate cars, and had started to warm up on ‘rollers'. My warm up had consisted of a brief ride up and down a bit of the B2024 and a cup of tea. Kath, I remembered, had very kindly offered to provide some soup from a Thermos that would fortify me for my effort. Knowing what I now know about the hill climb, I am very glad that I didn't accept. Soup and hill climbs wouldn't work well together.

And suddenly I was at the bottom of the White Lane. I had the number ‘30' pinned to my back. Number ‘27' had just started his race. I understood the intractable, fateful grind of time. I felt crushed by the weight of the inevitable.

By the time that ‘28' and ‘29' had both disappeared from view, my mouth had gone completely dry. I made my way forward to the start position.

‘Number Thirty. Ned Boulting.' A race official unsmilingly noted my number, made a few tick marks on a clipboard, and pointed with his pencil at a digital clock that was counting down from sixty seconds. We were already at twenty-four seconds.

The friendly chap who was holding my bike upright seemed concerned. ‘Are you all right?'

‘Well I am now. But I'm not going to be very soon,' I hazarded a guess.

I looked away from the clock as it entered the final ten seconds. Ahead of me, I could see Ron Keeble's ivy-covered tree. I blinked, and when I refocused, I could swear it had moved back a few yards, as if playing some devious reverse-flow vegetation-variant of Grandmother's Footsteps.

‘Fucking tree.' I said that. I didn't just think it.

Three. Two. One.

I stepped hard on my pedals. Well, as hard as I could. And I set off up the hill.

Within about thirty seconds, I knew that I had made a grave mistake. No crowd had gathered on the lower slopes of the hill, and I was alone with the awkward grunting and febrile moans that already, involuntarily, escaped my lips. I had gone off way too fast. I knew I would. I was a hopeless amateur, and that's what hopeless amateurs do.

But once locked into my ludicrous effort, I understood that I had no other option than to plough on to the best of my ability. I understood, too, that I had nothing left to give, even though I had barely started climbing.

This, then, was perhaps the merest, most fleeting glimpse into the world of ‘suffering' of which cyclists talk. This is the greatest virtue a rider can possess. Forget speed, stamina, acceleration, bravery and brains. It is the ability to endure agony that defines them. Mark Cavendish once told me that it's like someone pulling out your fingernails very, very slowly. Not shouting ‘Stop!' is the thing you have to learn. The loser shouts ‘Stop!'

After those opening thirty seconds, and as my breathing went from laboured to grotesquely rasping, my body was trying to transition. The exercise had ceased to be ‘anaerobic' (i.e. the kind of effort a one-hundred-metre runner puts in), but it was too early and too extreme for it to be called ‘aerobic' (the graduated, smooth effort of the endurance athlete). So this was why cyclists feared hill climbs so intensely! Like the 800 metres in athletics, it is essentially a sprint over a far, far greater period of time than anyone can reasonably be expected to sprint. It confuses the system. It messes with everything. In short, the body has nothing to feed on, and nowhere to turn for succour.

And so, as the road suddenly bore steeply upwards, and I entered the unreal world of the second half of the Bec Hill Climb, I was assailed, not by the furies, but by the clichés. The head spun, my eyes popped, my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth, my legs burnt. And my vision, as if conforming to some sort of cartoonish aesthetics, blurred at the edges, eventually narrowing to a small saucer-sized circle of clarity, which veered wildly left to right, and then right to left as I swung the bike, in agony, from side to side. I tried to change down a gear, and heard a crunching sound as I screwed it up. My pedals jarred as they missed a beat.

‘Shit!' I commentated, although by now, my mouth had lost the ability to articulate a hard ‘T' sound. So it came out more as ‘Shish!' Which is a chicken kebab, I thought to myself. And, filled with the oddly relevant mental image of skewered meat, on I went.

I could hear voices shouting encouragement. I began to feel sick. I glimpsed my name, in chalk, on the road. I very nearly was sick. I felt the road steepen even more as it neared the finish line. I moved beyond sickness into pure horror.

But miraculously, it stopped. As all things do eventually stop, relent, or end in death, this one too had passed. I had walked out of the dentist's room. I had left the examination hall. I had landed on Free Parking. I had crossed the line, and coasted through a melee of other riders and concerned friends and family towards the main road. I couldn't figure out how to stop.

I just wanted to fall asleep on my handlebars.

And that, once I had finally ground to a halt, was pretty much exactly what happened.