November 3rd- Two Wheels from a Static Standpoint

I've always loved motorbikes. Fascinated by them. There's a picture of me aged 2, grinning like crazy in my dad's Italian-flag-coloured bike helmet (I'm also on a potty, which should go a long way towards explaining why it does not appear here, you pervs). I had my first pillion ride on the back of a BMW tourer when I was seven, and got hooked on the adrenaline of riding the statistically most dangerous method of transportation before the engine started on that two-mile trip up the road and back.

As is the recurring theme through these half-baked memoirs, I blame my ancestors. Both grandads rode bikes, my dad had owned motorcycles almost all his adult life and my mum told some brilliant stories of her adventures on two wheels (the tale of the Honda, the classified nuclear submarine files and a terminal clutch failure is one that still makes me dislike the RAC to this day). I grew up round them, and they stirred me in a way cars never have and probably never will.

I was nine when my dad got into classic motorbike racing. For whatever reason he came home one day with a 1960's Ducati 350, red like lust should be and all curves and grunt. When he fired her up the noise could be heard a quarter of a mile away. I was in love.

Classic bikes are nothing like the cock-rockets of today. They have an organic quality about them that brings out the sixth-form poet in me. Modern bikes, even those made by the grandiose marques like Ducati, Moto Guzzi and Triumph, sound muted, muzzled by emission laws and the desire of 99.9% of the population not to have to suffer the incredible growl and roar of an uninhibited engine. Classic bikes have no such pretensions of civic responsibility. I used to stand in the paddock at race meets, just listening to the sound of fifty engines all roaring and grunting in unison as their owners tweaked, picked and tinkered with their geriatric pride and joys.

That noise! I went to the Isle of Man Grand Prix last summer, where classic and vintage motorbikes gather in numbers so large that after a day you cease to gawp as ten bikes that normally sit behind glass in a transport museum trundle sedately along the seafront, proud owners riding in long brown coats, bucket helmets and pipes clamped between tea-and nicotine-stained teeth. The holding pen for the classic bikes before that morning's race had a roar so primeval it sounded like something HP Lovecraft would have written endless short stories about. It's not a flat note but rises and falls like the breathing of something huge and terrible, something alive. I stood there, transfixed as these relics breathed smoke and speed and recklessness. It took me back to being a little kid in a neon-coloured fleece, watching in awe as my dad and his friends grunted monosyllabic approval as various Ducatis, Goldstars and Tritons sputtered into existence after an hour or so standing around offering advice on which grumnut had come loose.

These bikes required more maintenance than your average member of the Pussycat Dolls. Every other race meet an engine would blow up, fall off, blow out, or just plain fail. Parts, which the makers had stopped producing before the end of segregation, required either buying from dodgy guys in flat caps who owned eerie graveyards of bike carcasses and the odd mangy dog, or buying another bike and cannibalising it as a sacrifice to the ever-hungry engine. I was about 10 when our sacrifice arrived, a dark red Ducati 250. I helped unload it off the trailer and stood admiring it for ages. In my daydreams, dad would secretly rebuild it and give it to me, and I would race it and become the first Lady Champion of Scotland (I had developed quite the thing for being the first female to win or achieve things back then. I had also latched on to this word "Lady", a term I've barely used since I hit puberty. Too many years reading old Pony Club annuals from the 1970's I think).

It was a cruel day when I went down to see "my" bike one Saturday, to find it eviscerated, leaking stinking black blood on the floor of the garage, lifeless eye fixed on me as my dad cheerfully asked to pass him that wrench over there, and did I was to see him replace that clutch that had broken last race? I tentatively asked if he was going to fix up the other bike later.

I never did become Lady Champion of Scotland. Childhood optimism will only get you so far it seems.

So, racing. As a little pit-rat I got to know most of the guys who would turn up to race meets. I made myself useful, gofering for coffee, wrenches, screwdrivers and long, pointless trips which I now realise were clever attempts to make me bugger off and stop asking if I could sit on the back of their priceless Norton Commando or whatever. Some of them would buy me fudge from the ubiquitous home-made sweetie stall, or keep an eye on me when the pater familias was out on the track. As a result I had to deal with the realities of motorbikes and their inherent danger rather sooner than I'd have liked.

I never really knew the guy that died. He didn't race old bikes, at least not like the ones I knew. We were at Knockhill racing circuit in Fife, on a grey Autumn day. The race was on it's first lap when there was a pile-up on the corner we were watching from. It looked pretty nasty, but when the ambulance came out and there was a flurry of fluorescent yellow and green activity, we knew something had gone wrong. I never heard directly at the time, but I overheard that he had broken his neck. I'd never considered that this was really dangerous before, and to be honest it still didn't make much sense afterwards. The guy went in an ambulance and went away, and we all packed up and went home early, and there was no music in the car on the way home. I think if dad had a machine that ran more than one race out of ten then that would have been an end to it, but his chances of being close enough to the main pack to actually be in an accident like that seemed slim enough that it didn't cause him to do much than ride more conservatively when the Ducati did more than fart smoke and screws and cost another hundred quid.

Then Big Andy happened. he was an old friend of my dad's, always friendly and pleasant with me and my sister. I liked him, not least because he would finish races and even do really well in them from time to time (no kids, so more money to throw at the bike-graveyard owners).

It was a glorious summer's day, dry, and perfect for racing. My sister and mother were elsewhere, and dad and I had settled by the finish line to watch Big Andy race. The bikes lined up, ignitions started, and that primordial purring and howling drowned out everything but the sun. They went off round the track for a practice lap, then reigned in again on the start for the race itself. I had my fingers crossed like I always did when people I knew raced, and I knew Andy would do well. In a roar and a scream and a smell of burning petrol they were off and gone. Suddenly, we could see orange flags all along the circuit, being frantically waved by the marshals in their gravel traps. Waving flags meant an accident. I wasn't unduly fussed, and nobody else seemed to be either. Orange waving flags meant a restart, but that was OK. Probably some idiot with an exploding engine was now sitting in a gravel pit looking a bit bewildered. The bikes came back to the line, and waited. Waited. Waited. I got out the race programme and began matching up numbers to names.

Big Andy wasn't there. There were two bikes missing, and Big Andy wasn't there.

Intuition is a wonderful thing. We both knew that this went beyond sitting dazed in a gravel trap, and this was confirmed when the other riders started getting off their bikes and heading back to their paddocks. The announcers were being tactful, saying there had been an accident, and asking for patience. My dad did the decent thing, told me to stay where he was, and promptly ran off to the main office, just as his name was called over the tannoy. I was numb with shock. The memory of the other guy dead in an ambulance suddenly loomed large, and I was alone and frightened in what was suddenly a place where danger was extremely loud and incredibly close.

I wandered, looking for the medical centre, the office, dad, someone. I didn't cry, 'cause I was ten now and you just didn't. I went everywhere I could think of. Our car. His car. The cafe. The sweet stall. They were playing music over the tannoy to keep us entertained, and even now the Crash Test Dummies stir up feelings more powerful than a song with the worst chorus in the world has any right to. It can't have been more than ten or so minutes, but to me it was an eternity of heat, fear, noise, and that fucking grunge-esque classic.

I found the medics just as they were bringing out the ambulance. Feet first with a blanket over him, and I was sure he was dead. After all, that's how dead people look in films, right? And there, thankfully, was dad, looking more worried than I'd hoped he would. Again, he told me to stay put, and this time I did as I was told and sat outside the prefab medics hut while he followed the stretcher. I was sure he was dead.

I cried then. Big Andy was my friend and now he was dead and I'd seen him and it was my fault 'cause I must have crossed the wrong fingers and where was my dad and I wanted my muuuuuuuum......

Dad reappeared, and told me that Big Andy was alive but we now needed to go to hospital with him to make sure he was going to be alright. On the way he explained that there had been another accident over the brow of a small hill on the circuit. Big Andy had hit another bike at full speed, pitching him off the bike and causing his machine to land on him, shattering his shoulder. He was going to be OK but he was very sore, and we needed to go and fill out some forms and then we could go home.

At the hospital they were cutting off his leathers in preparation for surgery. He was conscious, but delirious and kept asking the same few questions over and over again. I was so pleased to hear his voice (confused as it was), that it was like the accident was nothing.

It plagued me though. I actually did have bad dreams about it, seeing him coming out the ambulance, of wandering the circuit looking for the living and running from the dead. I never went back to the racetrack to watch my dad race, in case I got left behind if anything happened to anybody else. A few months later and my dad came off, shattering his collarbone. It didn't register as high on the scale, but the bike came home in one piece but dead, and dad came home alive but with more bits than he left with. Eventually the bike was quietly sold to the flat-capped keepers of the spare parts, and I quietly shelved my plans for world superbike domination. It seemed that riding a motorcycle on a secure track, with the only other traffic doing the same thing at the same speed was too dangerous. Bikes in the real world was another matter entirely...