On the Road Bike (6 page)

From that moment on, his presence on the local scene was established. The cycling community became aware of this taciturn kid with the cut-off jeans and the tennis shoes, an entire tool kit strapped to his seat post by a spare tyre. Bit by bit, he shed his naïvety, and inevitably, the prospect of a career in cycling presented itself.

In 1963, at the age of nineteen, in his own words, ‘I was an aeroplane, I was a jet. I could do nothing wrong.'

Having ridden with great success as a junior, he now started to take out bigger and bigger races. He rode the Beacon mountain time trial, taking seven minutes out of the established star, Hugh Porter, who accused him of riding a two-up time trial with another rider to get the better of him. ‘He was unforgiving, you know. Very, very nasty.' (Porter, now a hugely venerated television commentator, remembers the race well, and stands by his accusation to this day.)

On the final climb of that race, and as a portent of things that lay in wait many decades down the line, his heart stopped beating, then started again of its own accord. But for a while, ‘I was dead', he recalls. ‘There's a pain barrier. And you can go through it. And then you get wings, you fly!'

In the 1960s a lack of understanding from the general public, and a lack of tolerance from the authorities, meant that roads were seldom closed to traffic for a ‘mass start' road race. This resulted in a prevailing culture of time-trialling: races that could, by their nature, co-exist with the traffic on open roads.

Webb became prodigiously good at them. He rose to the top. At Brentwood, he rode the fastest 25-mile time trial of the year, a significant feather in his cap. But he remembers that day for a very different reason. When he returned home in the evening, he walked in to the house to find his stepfather, Albert, dead on the couch. Albert had succumbed to the effects of chronic alcoholism and bronchitis. He'd ‘coughed himself to death', in Graham's no-nonsense words.

Despite his bitterness towards Albert, this discovery had a profound effect on Graham. He attributes a life-long battle with depression to this moment. But he cannot explain why.

In 1964 and '65 he raced on, but his heart wasn't in it. He tried his hand at the insurance business. He married his girlfriend Karen. He was drifting away from cycling.

Then, in 1966, an old friend came to stay, after being thrown out of his own family home. The Webbs put him up. He used to cycle to his factory job early every morning. Since Graham's job in insurance didn't start till ten, he used to tag along for the ride. That rekindled his enthusiasm. He got fit and started racing again.

Under the guidance of the 1948 Olympic bronze medallist Tommy Godwin, he broke a significant British record, completing the furthest distance round a track in one hour. He bettered Les West's Hour Record by 414 yards. It was a major achievement.

‘It was so easy. That night, I said, “I wonder if I can make a career out of cycling.”'

That then was the moment when the penny dropped. That was the moment in which Graham Webb embarked on the journey that led him to his homely bungalow in Wachtebeke, and voluntary exile. He knew that the road to success lay overseas. The money and the races just weren't there in Britain. ‘It was hopeless in England trying to make a career of cycling.'

So, he worked all winter without training, then rode the Good Friday Meeting at Herne Hill (‘I cleaned up there') and the Butts Meeting in Coventry on Easter Monday (‘I cleaned up there, too') and then on the Tuesday, he and Karen ‘found ourselves standing in Amsterdam Central Station with two suitcases, not knowing where we were going to sleep that night'.

‘Did it work out for you?' I ask.

‘Perfectly.' And just this once, a smile sweeps across his features, unknitting his brow.

We break, while Graham makes a coffee for me. It's decaf, for which he apologises.

That year, 1967, the Amateur World Road Race Championships were in Heelen; fifteen hilly laps, two hundred kilometres in total. The field had been whittled down to an elite bunch of a dozen or so, and on the final lap, he just rode away from them. No one could touch him; as he crossed the line, he was still pulling away, and he won by a good hundred yards; the first Briton to win that medal in forty-five years.

He pulled on the Rainbow Jersey, and stood awkwardly on the podium (‘a necessary evil'), shyly scanning the sea of faces in the crowd. Suddenly he spotted someone he knew.

‘Who came pushing through the crowd towards the podium? My mum.'

She'd never before seen him race. But here she was, as far as Graham knew, on foreign soil for the first time in her life, watching her son being crowned World Champion. The British cycling fans who'd also made the trip lifted her onto the podium.

‘Did you two talk to each other at all? Do you remember what she said to you?'

‘Nothing was said.'

‘Nothing was said?'

‘No.'

There was an abnormally long pause. I tried to discern what he might be thinking about this. He stared fixedly back at me.

‘And then what happened?'

‘I imagine she just continued her trip home. Because she was the queen of the trip. Her son was a World Champion.'

The very next day, he turned professional with Mercier. It should have been the start of a glorious career. But that's not the way it worked out.

That winter, accompanied by Karen, he went off to a training camp in Sardinia. He was scheduled to ride the early season races in the South of France. But a general strike in Sardinia shut the place down, and kept him effectively imprisoned on the island. He missed all the races the team had wanted to enter him in.

Eventually, at the end of February, they got off the island. But in Turin, everything was stolen from the back of his car, including, significantly, his racing shoes, whose plates had been assembled just right for his pedal stroke.

That had a bad effect on his form. ‘I had a lot of trouble. My bike had a bent pedal, too.' It all led to a debilitative knee injury.

Carrying this pain, he was nonetheless entered by the team for Paris–Nice. He had to abandon on Stage 2. The team stopped paying him and, despite returning to fitness and resuming his racing, eventually he was summarily dismissed. There was little to stop them doing what they wanted with riders in those days.

And that, put simply, was that for his professional career. Gone before it had even got underway. Money problems piled up. His marriage to Karen fell apart. Together with their son Jean-Paul she returned to England in 1968.

Beset with debt, and labouring in a furniture factory, Graham remarried eventually, this time to a Flemish lady called Marie-Rose Verspecht. Together, almost in the tradition of retired English footballers, they opened a pub called De Neeuw Derby, in a village just north of Ghent.

In cycling-mad country like Flanders, the very fact of Graham's career, however brief, held considerable prestige, enough to guarantee the success of the business. They paid off the debts. But the racing was gone.

Then Graham Webb tells me the story, which he first told me over canapés and champagne at that British cycling dinner months before. I hear it again. But to hear it in context, sitting in his living room as the November night has closed in outside, surrounded by photographs from 1967, I now understand that this is why I came to talk to him.

The ‘Rainbow Jersey' is a particularly potent icon in cycling, perhaps even more rich in association than the Yellow Jersey of the Tour de France. Although Graham Webb had won the amateur competition, it was still a huge achievement. It was certainly the apotheosis of all that his career yielded. This beloved jersey hung on the wall of the bar, slowly turning yellow from the smokers and from the wood stove below. There it remained through the years, testifying to his ability, telling anyone who cared to ask about it that the proprietor had pedigree, real class.

One day, in the winter, when he was elsewhere, one of his least favourite drinkers came in. Marie-Rose was on her own in the pub.

‘He was a very bad criminal. He'd been released from jail. My missus served him and he made a comment about the jersey. My Rainbow Jersey. He said to my wife, “What would you think if I tore it down?” She didn't have an answer.

‘When I came home later, she told me what had happened.'

Something within him, already frayed, must have snapped. In an instant, he knew that it was over. His attachment to a past, which only pointed to an unsatisfactory present, broke free. The jersey, its brilliant white fabric jaundiced, was the problem.

‘I said, “Well, he won't have the chance.” I tore it down, and stuffed it in the stove. I burnt it.'

It lit and then ignited. In seconds, maybe a minute, it was gone. Not many world champions have deliberately incinerated their memories.

‘I had a happy childhood.'

‘Did you?' There is a trace of scepticism in my question.

‘I think so.' Graham pauses. ‘Maybe because of my bike.'

In the morning I left early, to drive the distance back to Calais without recourse to the motorway. I also wanted to visit the Menin Gate in Ypres. It was Armistice Day.

11/11/11.

I drove for an hour through the November fog. Yesterday's clear blue skies had led to a still, grey Flanders morning. At times it seemed to be getting darker, rather than lighter. Turning off the main road I negotiated a path to the centre of Ypres and, on sighting a group of veterans, I pulled over and parked. They seemed to know the way, so I dropped in behind them and followed as they walked cheerily to the main square and the vast monument that was to stage the centrepiece of the day's Remembrance service.

I listened to their chatter.

‘I can't bloody push you straight. Can't you bloody get up and walk?' One elderly man laughed at his much younger friend who was in a wheelchair and had lost both his legs from below the knee. ‘What's the matter with you?'

‘Oh piss off, and do your job will you?'

For some reason, I thought of Graham. He would not have looked out of place in a uniform. And as a veteran. He belonged to that kind of Britishness. In fact, he told me that he could never forgive his mother for refusing to lie about his age so that he could begin an RAF apprenticeship. It was the alternative path his life never took.

The veterans, in increasing numbers as their ranks were swelled by comrades, walked past pretty Flemish shop fronts, some of which exploited this annual pilgrimage and its associated year-long trickle of tourists. Tommy's Spirits and Cigarettes. The Old Bill Pub. Poppy's Pizzeria.

After Ypres, I meandered through Flanders as I crossed into France. These were the routes that Graham, as well as scores of other British riders, had ridden. He still rides them to this day, tentatively now, because of his heart.

The roadside was clustered with signs to military cemeteries. I had always thought that these had been constructed after the event, moved to appropriate locations, chosen for the purpose. But the names suggested otherwise. Many, many smaller graveyards were created at the site of the loss of life. There and then. Red Farm Cemetery. Hop House Cemetery.

All along the straight roads, with their mountains of sugar beet harvested and awaiting transport, the Flemish had taken to their bikes. Armistice Day amounts to a public holiday in Belgium. As the British lay wreaths in their towns, so many Belgians take advantage of the free time and quiet roads to get out for a long ride and a chat. The first opportunity of the year to don the winter clothing.

At the mouth of the tunnel, there was an almighty queue. For three-quarters of an hour we inched forwards to the UK Passport Control. Belgian cars, French cars. There was a German BMW to my right from Cologne. Tempers flared, as people started to miss their departure slots.

I was the next car in line for passport control when we all stopped moving completely. I could make out the immigration officer in her hut, dealing with the Belgian sports car in front of me.

She appeared suddenly to be standing motionless at her desk, staring ahead. I glanced at the clock. Twelve midday in Calais, but it was eleven o'clock on the other side of the channel. She did not carry on her work for the full two minutes, and along the line, nobody moved.

It was a weird re-enactment. A thin line of determinedly different islanders facing down waves of Continentals. From the battlefields of the First World War, to the retreat at Dunkirk, this narrow strip of water, and the passage of British youth across it, has been a step into the unknown, a step into, or out of no-man's-land.

I thought of Graham's emigration. I had seen how Britain unsettles him, and how his peace of mind only returns when he reaches home again in Flanders.

He's a Dunkirk soldier no one went to pick up. I'm not sure he wanted anyone to pick him up.

THE TOUR OF
Britain is not the Tour de France in the same way that there is no adequate translation into French for ‘Sausage Roll'. There are no Alps; there are no Pyrenees. And sometimes, there is no race.