I am old enough to remember the haystacks and still think it was a good way to spend Saturday night. Today, veteran cyclists bore their sons and teenage clubmates with tales of rough nights when they burrowed into barns and ricks, fearful of the farmer even after the pint or two they had probably drunk. How scratchy the haystacks were, how rural they smelt, how a lad longed for a lass to be with him in his hayhole!
Haystacks were useful to us for quite practical reasons. They provided cost-free lodgings close to the start of time-trial courses. You could spend Saturday night in a haystack and be there and ready to race on Sunday morning. Many time triallists camped before an event, but there was more than a touch of respectability about their Bukta or Blacks-of-Greenock tents, their shaven faces and wifely wives. A racing man from a haystack was a more dangerous sort of cyclist.
Haystack nights disappeared in the 1960s, when people had more money and looked for a different style. The old prestige accorded to haystackers came from their vagabond or wild-man demeanour. Cycling lore contains many stories about strangers who appear in the night or who join the road from a woodland path. A lone cyclist enters a remote country pub. He asks for a pint and an empty smaller glass, then produces half a dozen duck eggs from a brown paper bag. The mysterious wheelman pours a little beer from his pint into the smaller glass, cracks an egg into it and drinks the mixture. He does this five more times. Then he finishes his beer and leaves the hostelry, away on his bike to who knows where.
All stories signify something beyond themselves. What does this story mean? Perhaps the cyclist is really a fox. Are there parallels in the folk legends of, for instance, Belgium, a country of beer, cycling, early dark nights and short distances between country and town?
Another cycling legend – one that does have equivalents in British folklore – concerns the old-timer. In song and story he is not awheel but is encountered at the side of a road. He wears unfashionable clothes, carefully washed and stitched where necessary. He is not the sort of person who takes his rest in a haystack. He might be a ghost. The old-timer’s bike is ancient. Some of its accessories, in this story usually the mudguards, are held to the frame by twisted pieces of wire. But the transmission – chainset, chain and back sprocket, the heart of a bicycle – is expertly and beautifully maintained. The old-timer has climbed off to eat his sandwiches or to smoke a pipe. Other cyclists riding the same road instinctively brake and stop to say a word in fellowship or homage. He replies only with the words ‘It’s a grand life’. Just as no one has seen him ride, nobody knows where he comes from. But some versions of this myth give the old-timer a Black Country accent.
Is it merely coincidence that the photographs of Reg Harris, advertising his Raleigh bicycle, used to put the world champion in this old-timer pose, on a grassy verge by an English hedge, with pipe in hand, smiling in kindly fashion?
One final country legend. Almost as memorable as the old-timer is the icon of the peripatetic poet. He is on his bike in the countryside, sometimes glimpsed by other cyclists, shepherds and thoughtful rural folk. On occasion he is lying on the verge of the road, apparently asleep. What does this mean?
The cycling figure is surely formed from two more familiar icons. The first is the scholar-gypsy, who, as we know, flits from river to inn to hilly path. The second is the wandering minstrel. Why do minstrels wander? Any bright young Birmingham Marxist of the 1950s will immediately put his hand up with the answer. It is because they have been expelled, by capitalism, from their true home in the feudal hall, and so must endlessly travel, with no warm place to lay their heads and few people to hear their melancholy song. Sir Walter Scott will tell you the same story. And, as the cycling poet recounts,
His head on his battered musette, a dreamy look in his eye, The cyclist lay by the roadside, watching the world go by.
And his mind went off on a journey, to the land of make-believe,
Where the laws no longer run that bind the sons of Adam and Eve.
Etymologically, the French musette means, originally, a sheep’s bladder; then, a bag; then, a primitive form of bagpipes, made from the bladder; and so we have the more familiar notion of the bal-musette, a rustic dance or jolly occasion in some quartier where country met city, and in which the ceremonies were led by traditional and informal music.
For the modern cyclist, a musette is a small fabric bag slung over the back for carrying provisions such as maps, Mars bars, ‘speed mixture’ (which is a cake of prunes and rice that wards off the bonk), amphetamines, inner tubes. British cyclists often call them ‘bonk bags’*. Leaguers made them from that striped material used in deck chairs. In long races musettes containing food are handed up to riders by someone at the roadside. The professionals then throw them away, while the rest of us fold musettes and keep them in the pocket of a road jersey. I always carry one, just in case; and in autumn days I use a musette to ride home with shaggy woodland parasol mushrooms, or perhaps a pheasant that has been struck dead by some murdering bourgeois in a big black car. A freshly killed pheasant in a musette gives a little warm nudge to the lower vertebrae, a strange feeling that I suppose is known only to cyclists – and poachers, now I come to think of it.
* ‘The bonk’ is a cycling term for a sudden loss of power and energy. It is accompanied by depression and sometimes tears. The condition is unknown to other sports and therefore to anyone who is not a cyclist. It can hit you very suddenly, when a cyclist will say ‘I’ve blown’. There are many other demotic terms. We speak of ‘The knock’, ‘hunger knock’, ‘the sags’, and fear the time when ‘Old Mr Saggy comes knocking at the door’. The rather official French word is défaillance. Bonk is caused by a lowering of the blood sugar level. The remedy is in food and drink. Hardriders always carry bonk bars, in former days prepared to gruesome recipes. Try oats slowly baked with syrup, lard, margarine and cocoa powder, together with chopped mixed fruits previously soaked in Guinness. But never eat anything that will make your handlebars sticky. Always have a bonk bar after two hours, even if you’re not hungry. The first time my son had the bonk (aged 12) I got him home, my arm around his shoulders. Then he had four giant helpings of Coco-Pops and milk before falling asleep, still wearing track mitts. No bonk is worse than the bonk you suffered as a teenager.
The connection between cycling and Georgian rolling-road mythology found a visual poetry in the art of Frank Patterson, which captures the spirit of cycling in the years before the motor car occupied our highways and byways. Patterson drew illustrations for cycling magazines for half a century. His career coincided with the period of the bicycle’s most popular appeal. Drawings by Patterson first appeared in Cycling in 1893. They filled its pages until his death in 1952 and are still reproduced, for this unique artist had neither a rival nor a successor.
It is said that Patterson produced some 26,000 drawings for publication. I believe this figure. Patterson was fluent, regular and knew exactly what he was about. His style, established early in life, was constant. Very thin pen lines, often elongated, each line close to the next, describe rural scenes, landscapes and quaint country buildings. Patterson never used cross-hatching or a wash. His line, though not distinguished, did everything he needed. The original drawings were three or four times larger than their published reproductions, so readers of Cycling and the CTC Gazette marvelled at his virtuoso penmanship.
Patterson’s drawings always included a cyclist or a bicycle. They depicted the things that old-fashioned cyclists like – a drovers’ road over Welsh hills, Lakeland passes and Peak District rough-stuff tracks, the Great North Road at Eaton Socon, so familiar to time triallists; market towns with coaching inns; castles, wishing wells, thatched country pubs, the Roman Wall, remote parish