I refer to my father as ‘Rodney’ because I was never allowed to call him ‘Dad’. This was one of the conventions of the intellectual wing of the Communist Party. Children spoke to, and of, their parents by using their first names. I do not know what anyone hoped to gain from this practice. It certainly did not promote family love and intimacy. Probably the idea was that children should consider themselves as part of a larger family, or something bigger and better than any family could be – the Party.
My parents were mismatched and had grown apart in the years when Rodney was fighting in the north African desert. I remember them mainly as hosts to other Party members. Our Birmingham home was the centre of a quite large community of local Marxists. The local Party branch had a strength of about twenty comrades. Their meetings were held every Thursday evening at our house, 90 Bristol Road, near the corner of Speedwell Road, from 1948 to 1956. My task was to pour beer for the comrades after they had finished their business. At a quite early age I was allowed (‘compelled’ might be a better word) to take part in the discussions. Little wonder that, ever afterwards, I have done my best not to attend meetings of any kind. I don’t even go to the AGM of my own cycling club.
Our Party branch, which was based in the University of Birmingham, had quite a good run. There were eight years of regular meetings and other activities – demonstrations, summer schools, pamphlet distribution, and so on – before the collapse of British communism in 1956. This was the world of my childhood. It made me into a cyclist. Cycling is not a middle-class sport and in the 1950s was certainly not practised by university people. But I wanted the life of the bicycle. I became a cyclist because I was brought up as a communist, which made me classless. I am also devoted to the bike because it represents freedom. And, as I was soon to find, cyclists had a generosity that did not exist among the crazed Stalinists of my early days.
Before I got a bike it was already obvious to me that there was a life of friendship and pleasure beyond the four walls of the Party branch meeting. From my chair near the door (comrades always sat in the same places, week after week) I could gaze through the window and dream while some paper on culture or industrial strategy was being read. During the past half century capitalism has ceased to be a progressive force; the bourgeoisie has ceased to be a progressive class; and so bourgeois culture, including poetry, is losing its vitality. Through the window I could see the pear tree and thought of its fruit. Our contemporary poetry is not the work of the ruling class – I wonder how long this talk will last what does big business care about poetry? – but of a small and isolated section of the community, I wish I had more mates at school the middle-class intelligentsia I can see to the very top of that pear tree spurned by the ruling class when he shuts up I can go to the kitchen to get the beer but still hesitating to join hands with the masses of the people now that the cloud has come over by the Pershore Road the pear-tree leaves look silvery, not green the proletariat, who alone have the strength why doesn’t my mother play the piano any longer? to break through the iron ring of monopoly capitalism!
It was characteristic of these talks that, just when a boy thought that a conclusion had been reached, the comrade coughed, lit another cigarette and started up again, like a car revving up after a breakdown. And so bourgeois poetry has lost touch with the underlying forces of social change. I wonder if I could be a poet. It is no longer the work of a people, or even of a class, but of a coterie. Hasn’t he said that before? Unless the bourgeois poet can learn to reorientate his art, he will soon have no one to sing to but himself…– And my present-day reader will understand that, as soon as I had a bicycle, I could indeed sing to myself. The bike was my escape from the dullness and conformity, and I would even say the ugliness, of a communist household.
When I was eleven Rodney and Margaret, trying to maintain or revivify their marriage, went to France and Italy without me. I was to stay with Margaret’s parents in their big house in Raynes Park, which is at the further side of Wimbledon. (Raynes Park is notable as a catchment area for the Redmon Cycling Club, whose name is an anagram of Morden.) My grandparents were gentle people, old, each of them absorbed in their own thoughts. Early on the morning of my parents’ departure I went and hid in a creosoted shed in the garden and then in the Raynes Park church. I thought that Rodney and Margaret would not dream of searching the church, and I was right. And I reckoned that they had to catch their boat train or all would be lost to them. So it was. Off they went without saying goodbye, which is what I wanted.
I received a couple of postcards in the next few days. They must have meant a lot to me, for I kept them and have them still, after forty years and more. This was Margaret: ‘Dear Tim, where oh where were you when we wanted to say goodbye this morning? We are on deck on this boat now and it is very cold and blowy. We shall be in Paris at suppertime.’ Bon appétit, comrades everywhere. The next week my father writes from Italy – Florence actually, now I look at the postmark. ‘Dear Tim, we had a very jolly ride in a bus today. In every village the people were having feasts in the open air to celebrate the paper which is the Italian Daily Worker. Lots of Love Rodney.’
I resented these messages, since I liked being in France and thought that I should not have been left in Raynes Park. My grandparents did not know what to do with me. By good fortune, they had a library in their house, a real library with fitted bookshelves. Within this room I dreamt of becoming a writer. Its windows opened on to a large garden. There was a veranda, a workshop, a garage, lawns, a tennis court, the orchard, the kitchen garden and then the chicken runs. One day in that summer of 1951, bored, lonely and not a happy boy, I wandered into the garage. My grandfather had a Bentley but scarcely ever drove it, preferring to potter among his redcurrant bushes. So the garage was not much used. I pushed open the door and saw a bicycle behind the Bentley. And that is how I began.
Most boys or girls need to be taught how to ride a bicycle. In my case no tuition was needed. I was a natural. Just as some young animals swim as soon as they are thrown into the water, I was immediately balanced, fast and athletic. The machine from the garage was too big and I perched between the saddle and the top tube. None the less I managed. Within half an hour the bike and its rider were on the road, down Grand Drive towards the Kingston by-pass, whose concrete blocks and expansion gaps I recalled in many a later time-trialling effort.
My first days as a cyclist were magical. Never in my short life had I felt anything like the aerial liberation the bicycle granted me. Yet the Raynes Park bike was nothing special. Later on, I had another crucial physical experience. That was when I first rode a light racing machine. Suddenly I was a bird: uncatchable, self-contained, soaring and zooming towards the horizon, free from human worry and therefore happy. Cycling is about physical pleasure and happiness. I know that the bike can also make you weep, especially when you’re a teenager and don’t understand your body. Pleasure is none the less our goal and daily bread; and at some point in a good ride – as any time triallist will tell you, but will not be able to explain – pleasure and suffering are one and the same thing.
After long pleading with the ruling class of 90 Bristol Road I was finally granted my own bike. It was not to be a new machine. Some puritanical ukase of the communist ethos forbad expenditure on goods that were easily advertised. For years, I’m amazed to recall, my family didn’t even have a radio. However, from the cycling point of view I was fortunate that my first bike was patched together. It was built by an old metalworker who produced cheap machines as a hobby. Bikes of his sort were known as ASPs, the initials standing for All Spare Parts. Superficially, my ASP had the look of a racing machine. It had dropped bars, a bottle cage and Benelux gears. In reality the ASP was cumbersome and went dead on the hills. But it taught me to appreciate good equipment. Nowadays one of my spacious garden sheds contains twelve good bicycles, all in use at various times of