I was fifteen and joking around with my friend Minto. We'd seen a competition in the Sunday Mail to win an electric motorbike. "Imagine rolling up at your pal's house. Their telly goes funny. Aw that must be Gregor on his electric motorbike."
But an idea was planted. Couldn't you get a motorbike of some sort at 16? I'd been into cars from whenever, probably influenced by my dad who had been in mechanic in the RAF and a designer at Austin. He used to say that at age three, I could recognise every car I saw, though he was prone to exaggeration. At fifteen, I suddenly realised that I was a year closer to motorised transport than I'd previously thought.
At that age, I could be very single-minded. Perhaps obsessive. I would set a goal - a new cassette recorder, a flashgun or whatever, and save like the blazes for it. Operation Moped, for that was all you could ride at 16, was put into action. Stage one was research. Drive magazine, which my dad received by post from the AA, had an article about sports mopeds in it, essentially suggesting that these machines, souped up and with pedals whose only real function was to make the bike meet the legal requirements, should be banned, restricted, tamed. The sports moped was a phenomenon that had arisen when the age at which you could ride a proper motorcycle had been raised to 17. I wanted one. I knew I would never be able to afford one. I didn't have a job or parents who spoiled me. Plan B was to persuade myself that a district nurse-style step-thru moped would be OK.
This wasn't difficult because I didn't give a hoot about looking silly, or perhaps I did, but not enough to dissuade me from having my own transport.
At school, there was a boy called Mouse whose brother did up bikes. We'd been sort-of-friends but, as is often the case with boys, became firm friends when we discovered a shared interest. A month before my sixteenth birthday, Mouse told me that his brother had a moped for sale. At £25, it was in my price range. My dad took me to see it and I ended up swapping my savings for a ten year old Raleigh Supermatic. This moped had a double seat that I would never use, and a bizarre automatic transmission system with a rubber belt and expanding pulley. To compensate for the changing pulley diameter, the engine hinged backwards and forwards.
There was a field near our house. My dad went over the bike's controls with me. I sat astride. You could put the Raleigh on its stand and start it by pedalling, dropping it to the ground and holding it on the brake as the automatic clutch disengaged. I sat on one of the lowest-powered motor vehicles available with its 49cc engine idling beneath me. Tentatively twisting back the throttle, I raised my feet up and took off. Forget the low power. I felt the hand of God on my back.
My O Grade exams planked themselves inconveniently between my getting the bike and my sixteenth birthday. When the day came, I had the bike on my driveway as I waited for 9 a.m.
when my insurance became valid. I wore a bright orange open-face helmet, a birthday present to replace the ragingly-eccentric pudding basin job donated by an uncle. Nine. I was off. Nothing will ever shift the memory of that first ride. I felt I was reaching escape velocity. Perhaps I was thinking in cliches, but I had a real sense of breaking free. There's a point about a mile from my house where that feeling crystallised, a pond on the other side of the road from a wood. I can never walk, cycle or drive past there without remembering that moment.
So that's how it began. The Raleigh was unreliable, particularly in my unsympathetic hands. It forced me to learn about basic mechanics - before I got it I suspect that I knew more about the theory of engines than anyone else in my year apart from Mouse, but I'd never changed a tyre. From fourteen to thirty I probably only visited the doctor twice, save for the two years when I had motorbikes. Two x-rays and Bell's palsy. Freedom came at a price, on balance, a small one.
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