I was obsessed with that bike; it completely changed my world. Before that I’d had a Raleigh Boxer, which was like a baby BMX. Mine was yellow, so it was sort of cool, but my neighbours had a Chopper and a Grifter, and next to those it was a case of little man/big man syndrome (‘How big is yours?’). My piddly little Boxer was, well, little. I couldn’t actually ride Grifters because they were too big for me. I couldn’t reach the floor. But I borrowed my neighbour’s Chopper once and that was really cool – or it was until I came off, and because my legs weren’t long enough to touch the ground properly I ripped my bollocks on the gear stick. That really bloody hurt.
Once I had the Aero-Pro Burner, though, it was a different story. I was the man, I was unstoppable. When I got that bike I suddenly got my freedom.
I rode absolutely everywhere on it. I used to bike the 5 miles to school every day, and that’s a lot of pedalling. Me and David Coates, who had an Xtra Burner which was all right but not as good as mine, used to ride out to this old campsite, next to the lake at Castle Howard. We’d do a circuit of the campsite and the guy who ran it always used to come out and shout and tell us off, but we didn’t care. We’d fly past and ignore him. One day he put a scaffolding bar across the top of the gate posts. We didn’t see it until it was too late. We were lucky it didn’t take our heads off. It was like some comedy sketch: one minute we were bombing along, standing on our pedals, the next we were swinging from a metal bar and our bikes were hurtling off into the distance without us. We could hardly breathe we were so winded. I’m not sure we went back there after that. But there were plenty of other places for two BMXers to get into trouble. Plenty.
The first time I got arrested I was on my Aero-Pro Burner. There was this disused farmhouse about 4 miles away from the back of our farm; no one had lived in it for ten years at least. One day David and I decided to ride over there. It was completely abandoned, like something out of Scooby Doo, so of course we climbed in through a window and found all this amazing stuff, like tankards, and playing cards with half-naked women on them. We thought, ‘Right, we’re having them,’ so we loaded them up and took them back to our den.
Our den was round the back of the farm. It was almost like a hayloft, with a rope ladder we used to get up to it. It looked really cool with all the loot from the old farmhouse in it. Then one day my dad found it. He realised what we’d done and he did what any reasonable protective father would do: he called the police. They came and took me away and put me in a cell. I was ten. There was no mention of David, it was just me, on my own, down the local nick. No one had been in this farm for a decade, it’s not like anyone was going to miss anything, but my dad wanted to teach me a lesson, and being an ex-copper he was mates with the local police, so they banged me up and left me in a cell for two hours. I got hauled in front of the superintendent and everything. Got a right ear bashing. It was almost as if my dad had orchestrated it all and told them exactly what to say. And it was all staged, but I was ten years old. I thought I was going down.
We never went back to the old farmhouse. Instead we found other ways to amuse ourselves, one of which involved a ramp and the local girls’ Brownie pack. I had this BMX ramp, a really, really good one, that I’d bought with my pocket money. It was 3 feet long with a strip of that non-slip black sandpaper type stuff up the centre for extra grip, and it had clips at the back so you could set it to different heights. We used to set it up in David’s back garden, or at the bottom of the hill on the farm. We’d both pedal furiously down the hill towards it, picking up a fair speed to the point where we couldn’t actually pedal as fast as we were going, we’d go flying off the end of this thing, and we’d go a pretty long way. Our other place to jump was outside the village hall. There wasn’t a hill to ride down, but there was a mound of grass by the car park which was perfect for giving the ramp extra height, so what you lost in run-up speed you made up for in launch angle.
Usually when we were trying to outjump each other we’d mark the distance with a stick. One of us would jump, the other would record the distance with the stick, then we’d swap. We could do that for hours. One day we were outside the village hall with our ramp when the local Brownies, who used to meet in the village hall, turned up. There they all were, gathering in the car park in their nasty brown dresses, yellow scarves and woggles, and there we were, jumping off our ramp and measuring the results with a stick. All of a sudden someone – and to be fair, I think it was one of the Brownies – came up with a great idea.
‘Why don’t we lie down, and you can jump us.’
Brilliant!
I reckoned I could jump 15 feet off this thing, which when you’re only 3 feet tall is a bloody long way, but I had no idea how many Brownies that would be, so we started off with two.
When the two Brownies were in place, we took as long a ride up as possible, pedalled furiously, went up the ramp and over. No problem. We put a third Brownie down, took a run up, pedalled furiously, got over, no problem. A fourth, a fifth and a sixth were added, and by the time we reached Brownie number 13 we were worn out from all the pedalling. We didn’t want to risk chopping a 14th Brownie in half so we put my sister’s big ted on the ground instead. We made it, just about, and then decided it was probably best to quit while we were ahead.
So that was it, the height of my BMXing achievements and my first real experience of women and some of their very strange ideas, all in one aerobatic stunt-riding go. Magic. What can I say? It was a small village in the middle of nowhere. We had to make our own entertainment.
The lime kiln at the far end of Lime Kiln Farm was this huge great mound, about 30 feet high, like a mini volcano, hollow inside with a big opening at the top. If you had a little motorbike (which I did), and you were a small kid (which I was) who had no fear (which I didn’t), it was perfect for riding your motorbike round the top of, daring yourself to get closer and closer to the edge, being careful not to get too close or you’d drop right into it, and it was a long way down. If I wasn’t jumping Brownies on my BMX or being thrown in a police cell for nicking playing cards with naked women on them, this is how I used to amuse myself.
I was about eleven when I got my first motorbike, a little Puch 50 twist-and-go scrambler. I went with my dad to Makro the discount supermarket one day when he was buying a load of drink for work, and this little bike was just waiting there. It was white with red and blue stripes and a sticker with PUCH written on it on the fuel tank. I gave it a proper look over. I sat on it and fiddled with all the bits and pieces. My dad was watching me, and after a while, once he’d got all the things he was there for, he just picked up a boxed one – it was only a little thing – and put it in his trolley. I asked him what he was doing, and he said, ‘You like it? You can have it. But you’ll pay for half of it.’ It was £150, and the maximum I’d earned that year was £40, so I had to come up with £75. Sure enough I worked to pay for it, pot washing like crazy, and the money went straight to my dad because he knew that if I got hold of the money he’d never see it. He wasn’t stupid.
I used to ride all over the fields on that thing. Either on my own or with my mate Philip Schofield. No, not that Philip Schofield. This Philip Schofield lived about 3 miles away and had an XT175, a massive bike for him and far too big for me, a big black thing with a black and white tank. Either I would cane it over to his and bomb around his fields, or he would come over to mine and we’d bomb around by the kiln. We had to stick to the fields though. I wasn’t allowed to ride out on the road on the Puch 50; for that I had my BMX. Even though we weren’t out on the roads, I always used to wear a crash helmet because I used to come off a lot, and of course the more confident you get, the more you come off, and I was always pretty confident on my little Puch 50. There wasn’t anywhere I wouldn’t go, and that included up the side of the kiln.
Because I was only small and the little Puch 50 was pretty light, if I had a good run at it I could usually get up the side of the