I loved having my grandparents downstairs, though, inevitably, being so young, I didn’t fully appreciate how much I loved having them downstairs until they were gone. They died, as I have said, within a week of each other in 1984, my grandpa first and then my grandma, when I was eight. It was my first experience of dealing with a family death, and the sadness and sense of upheaval were exacerbated by the fact we were so close, in both senses of the word. Coming home from school and not passing my grandparents on my way upstairs was very strange and a hard thing to deal with; it meant everything changed instantly, and in more ways that I anticipated.
It was a tough time for my parents, but they also had a pressing, and practical, problem: what to do with the house. It was too big – and too expensive – for my parents, Carrie and me, so they had to sell the bottom flat. The problem, however, was the shared front door.
My dad worked in the building trade, having not gone to university. Eventually he did go to university, in his fifties, to do a surveying degree – he actually graduated the year before me – but when I was in primary school he ran a building company, with a team of three or four builders, though I think he did a lot of the work himself. He was very hands-on, and he’s got great practical skills. The trouble is – and I hope he won’t mind me saying – it takes him an age to get things done. He is great at taking on jobs, especially for other people; he can’t say no. If he has a fault, it’s that he over commits, and takes on more than he can manage.
When my grandparents died business for my dad was far from booming: it was a tough time for industry, the property industry especially. So my dad decided to take a year out, more or less, and take on a big project: turning the house into two flats, with separate front doors.
I can understand if my mum felt some trepidation – for the reasons discussed above, and because, though he did jobs for other people to perfection, our house was often a bit of a building site by contrast. Still, in the aftermath of his parents’ death, he got started on this project. First he removed the internal staircase, which led up to our flat. Then he built an external staircase, with a new front door. Where the internal stair had been, he built two new rooms. And then, to make the ground-floor flat attractive to prospective buyers, he built a double garage, which – much to my disappointment – reduced the garden by about half.
It was like a Grand Designs project, and I can imagine Kevin McCloud, had the TV programme existed back then, wandering into our house-cum-building site, saying: ‘I just wonder if he’s taken on too much here.’ It really was like a construction site for much of that year, and at one point the plumbing was disconnected upstairs. Initially we still had a toilet downstairs, but then that was cut off, too. For about three days we had to visit the Texaco garage at the bottom of the road, each time with some spurious excuse for returning, in order to use the toilet there. On the plus side, we were never out of milk, since that was the standard purchase to justify all the toilet trips. After the best part of a year, though, my dad had managed to convert the house into two separate flats. And 25 years later, as he likes to joke, the job is … very close to completion.
Mum, meanwhile, was a night owl. As a nurse she worked the night shift in the sleep department at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, which meant she left at eight in the evening and got home at seven in the morning. She’d sleep during the day, and, when I came in from school at about four I’d put the kettle on, make her a cup of tea and wake her up. If that makes me sound like a model child, I should confess that, lurking towards the forefront of my mind, was the thought of dinner. I don’t know how Mum did it, but she would get up, do the housework, make our dinner, and then go back to work: that was her life, really. Carrie was good at helping around the house, but it makes me a bit embarrassed to think of my contribution, given how hard my mum and dad worked. If I picked my scattered clothes up off my bedroom floor, that was me mucking in and doing my bit.
I know that I had a privileged upbringing – not financially, but in a far more important way, with my family providing the most stable foundation. We weren’t exactly the Waltons – more like the Simpsons – and there’d be nagging and arguments, but they would blow over, and it was a happy home; or, for the first eight years of my life, two homes, each as happy as the other, and one considerably hotter.
* * *
It was around the time of my grandparents’ death that I began to get really serious about BMXing. Though I was serious about football and rugby, my commitment to BMX was on another level. It had to be, because what started as a bit of fun on my pimped-up old bike from the church jumble sale soon developed to the point where I was no longer just riding local tracks, and competing against riders from the Edinburgh area, but joining sponsored teams, riding fancier bikes, and travelling first to England, then to Europe, in search of ever more serious competition.
The race that sticks most firmly in the memory is the 1986 world championships in Slough, near London. Glamorous, eh? Slough these days stands almost as a euphemism for dreary and boring, a suburban town where nothing much happens, thanks to it being the setting for The Office, Ricky Gervais’s satirical comedy, though the town had an image problem long before that, the poet John Betjeman writing: ‘Come friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now …’
Well, Slough will always evoke entirely different emotions, and more colourful memories, in me. As far as I was concerned, Slough in 1986 was the height of glamour, and the centre of the universe, because it hosted the biggest BMX world championships in the sport’s young history. Around 1,600 riders – many of them having travelled over from America – descended on Slough for the meeting; there were 64 in my under-11 age group alone, which is a figure worth reflecting on. Could any other sport attract such a large field for an international event in such a young age category? But these were the glory days of BMX. If the E.T. chase scene had reflected this latest craze, then it had also acted as a catalyst, because BMX grew hugely in popularity from the mid to the late 1980s, before hitting a sharp decline.
For me, those 1986 championships were a defining moment. They gave me a glimpse of what might be possible and shaped my desire to carry on; to up the ante and see how far I could go. I’d been racing for two years, and doing quite well, but Slough was my first international race. I was going well; I could feel it, and I felt confident as I lined up, alongside seven fellow ten-year-olds in my heat. I won, qualifying for the eighth-finals (the stage before the quarter-finals), and then won again, going through to the quarters. And I breezed through them, finishing second – with the top four going through.
I was in the semi-finals of the world championships. Now it was really serious, because to make the final was the big thing. And here’s one reason why: all the finalists would have single-digit number-plates (i.e. 1–8, as opposed to some messy double- or triple-digit number) at the following year’s championships. There was huge kudos in that.
Let me describe a BMX race. Or, rather, let the eight-year-old me describe a BMX race (copyright: my school jotter from p4M, mistakes as original):
My Weekend
I enjoy doing BMX. BMX stands for Bicycle Motocross. I race on my bike, there are jumps you go over and the corners are banked. Scotia is my favourite BMX shop [and also my sponsors, so I already understood that it was a good idea to namedrop my sponsors at every opportunity]. Yesterday I went racing at Glasgow. Gate two seemed to be putting me into third place (the gate is a thing at the start wich you put your front wheel against and somone says ‘Riders Ready, Pedels Ready, Go’ and pushes the gate down). You pick a card and it will have a number, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6. So I got third. Scotia are taking me training on Thursdays. I have done a picture of a track on the next page.
Just for the record, this got a big red tick and ‘very good’.
Giving another flavour of the sport, a few pages later, under the heading ‘My Favourite Place’, I find another tenuous excuse to shoe-horn my obsession into my school work (see also ‘My Holiday’,