Round Ireland in Low Gear

But it will be better in Ireland, we said, putting our faith in the Gulf Stream, and in the Irish themselves with their humour, and trying to forget, while adding up their other virtues, their cooking, though even that was said to have improved.

The reason we chose to begin our journey in this dead season was simply that at home in Dorset in the not-so-dead seasons we are engaged in extensive gardening operations without any sort of outside help. We have a large kitchen garden in which we grow all our own vegetables; large expanses of grass to be cut, a lot of it in a steep-sided orchard which, no sooner than one turns one’s back on it, becomes infested with moles whose excavations knock hell out of a mower; not to speak of a long, tapering field and quite an extensive beech wood to try and keep under control.

Having decided to explore as much of Ireland as we could between December and March and the rest of it when we could afford the time, we then had to decide what means of transportation to employ. My first impulse, one not shared by my wife Wanda, was to walk it; but what makes Ireland such a meal from the walker’s point of view is its coastline, which is 3500 miles long, more than a thousand miles longer than that of England and Wales and exactly a thousand miles longer than that of Scotland, and a lot of it on the Atlantic coasts very indented. Peninsulas such as the Iveragh, the Beara, the Dingle and Mizen Head are between thirty and forty miles long. To skirt the perimeter of these four adjacent peninsulas would involve a journey of at least 255 miles – the Ring of Kerry on the Iveragh Peninsula alone is over a hundred miles – and at the end of it one would only be about sixty miles further on one’s way. Similar vast detours would also have to be made, if one was serious about it, all the way up the West coast.

According to the excellent Ireland Guide, published by the Irish Tourist Board (otherwise Bord Failte, the Welcome Board), it is possible to visit the country ‘in its entirety in a couple of weeks’ by car or motorcycle; they then go on to say, however, rather like a band of roguish leprechauns, that ‘you cannot see everything, of course’. But we both rejected the idea of using a car on the grounds that whoever is driving sees hardly anything except the road ahead – if not they shouldn’t be driving – and the one who isn’t is either permanently map-reading or looking things up in guide books to entertain the driver, and getting ticked off if he fails to do so, which leads to what my wife calls ‘rowls’. In this way no one sees anything. Motorcycles we regarded, and still do, as just plain dangerous.

Buses sounded a little more promising but a closer look at the Amchlar Bus do na Cuigi agus Expressway, otherwise the Provincialand Expressway Timetable (not surprisingly there is no equivalent for ‘Bus’ and ‘Expressway’ in the Irish language) showed that some of the services were pretty skeletal in the winter months. The Amchlar Traenach, or Train Timetable (trains, presumably because of their more ancient lineage, having somehow contrived to get themselves incorporated into the language) offered even less hope. However carefree the image the Irish Railways tried to project, it was obvious that the system had suffered the attentions of some Irish equivalent, if such can be imagined, of Beeching, the destroyer of the British railway system. To understand what had been lost as a result it was only necessary to look at the railway map in the 1912, and last, edition of that splendid work, Murray’s Handbook to Ireland.

We also ruled out horses, as we are both terrified of them. Anyway, we would have had the problem of feeding them. I could foresee us buying them dozens of packets of All Bran in supermarkets and getting soundly kicked for our pains. Remembering what happened to Mr Toad we were less than enthusiastic about hiring a caravan. What we really needed was a balloon, but that would have meant employing a balloonist, and most likely ending up beyond the Urals.

The only other practical method of making the journey, although I was not sanguine about persuading Wanda to agree, was by bicycle.

PART ONE December (#ulink_5cd44741-ce32-5ff1-b117-0517724480e0)

CHAPTER 1 State-of-the-Art (#ulink_4d914049-1736-5bc4-a916-cd595527c796)

STATE-OF-THE-ART adj. (prenominal) (of hi-fi equipment, recordings, etc.) the most recent and therefore considered the best; up-to-the-minute: a state-of-the-art amplifier.

Collins English Dictionary

A bike is a very personal thing and the only person who can really judge it is the rider.

The Bicycle Buyer’s Bible, 1985/6

When I was seven or eight I used to have an awful recurrent nightmare about Germans invading England on bicycles.

It was inspired by a story in a germ-laden, pre-First World War magazine which I rescued from a dustbin behind the block of flats we lived in by Hammersmith Bridge in south-west London. In this tale, the Germans were landed on the shores of the Wash under cover of fog – a difficult feat, but Germans were up to it. Instead of horsed cavalry, however, which would have had a pretty glutinous time of it out in the marshes, battalions of them squelched ashore with folding bicycles strapped on their backs.

Once on terra firma these pickelhaubed hordes split up into flying columns and, led by expert local navigators, traitors to a man, of whom there were inexhaustible supplies even before 1914, swept through the fog-bound low country at a terrific rate. In the course of the following night they seized all the principal cities of the Midlands, including Birmingham. (‘Only ninety kilometres as the crow flies, Herr Hauptmann,’ said some unspeakable turncoat, clicking his heels.) Cambridge fell without a shot being fired, which was not surprising considering its subsequent record – or was it the long vacation? Other columns were directed towards the metropolis. At this point the narrative ended. It was a serial and by the time I went back to have another dig in the dustbin to find the sequel it had been emptied.

They must have been foiled in the end because we later won the Great War, but for years I had this terrifying vision of Germans with spiked helmets pedalling swiftly and silently over Hammersmith Bridge in the night, finding my bedroom and spitting me on their bayonets like a knackwurst.

It was therefore to some extent paradoxical that the swiftness and silence of the bicycles about which I had dreamt with such horror, as irrational as the horror of whiteness described in Moby Dick, but equally real, were the very qualities which subsequently attracted me to this form of transport, and turned me into a keen cyclist and owner of many bicycles of varying degrees of splendour.

My first really good bicycle was a second-hand Selbach which I bought from a boy at school for £3 – it would have cost about £12 new. I was heartbroken when it was stolen from the school bicycle shed. Selbachs were the Bugattis of the cycle world. The frames were made from tapered tubes which, although almost paper thin, were immensely strong, and they were fitted with Timken roller bearings instead of conventional ball-bearings. The lightest machine Selbach built is in the Science Museum in London. He flourished between the wars, and was far ahead of his time. He was killed when the front wheel of his bicycle got stuck in a tramline in South London; he didn’t even rate an obituary in The Times. Ever since the 1890s, when for a time it was fashionable, though never as a competitive sport, cycling had been and still is hopelessly déclassé. Even today the only socially acceptable bike for a member of the British upper crust is one that looks as if it has been retrieved from a municipal rubbish dump, and probably has.

The finest bicycle I ever had was a Holdsworth which my father allowed me to order when I was sixteen. He had arranged with a Swiss business acquaintance of his called Mr Guggenheim that I should work in his silk firm in Zurich in order to learn the business and the German language, and no doubt he thought that cycling up and down the Alps would keep my thoughts in wholesome channels. It was a model called Stelvio, and was specially designed for cycling in the Alps.

It was hand-built in a small shed at the back of Holdsworth’s shop in Putney by a thin, energetic, chain-smoking genius with wispy hair and a terrible cough. He had lined the walls of the shed with a really wonderful collection of pin-ups all of which displayed enormous tits; presumably to stimulate him to even greater activity. They certainly stimulated me. It was the finest bicycle procurable at that time and it cost a colossal £20. The day I took delivery of it I remember him bouncing it up and down on its over-size hand-made tyres as if it was a ping-pong ball.

‘Luvly job,’ he said, with a cigarette stuck to his lower lip. ‘A real iron. Go out and give them Alps a bashing. Funny to think I’ll never see ’em.’

I never saw the Alps either, let alone gave them a bashing. The arrangement with Mr Guggenheim was shelved when my father found out that the kind of Schweitzerdeutsch they spoke in Zurich was so extraordinarily funny that if real German speakers heard it they fell about. I never dared tell the creator of the ‘iron’ that the furthest I got was the Black Mountains on the Welsh border.

In the war I rode huge bicycles with 28″ wheels that weighed 60 lbs or more, of the sort still popular in parts of India and Africa. At the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, which I attended in 1940, a special drill had been invented for riding these monsters:

‘Number One Platoon!’ (or whatever it was) ‘’Arf Sections Left! Prepare to Meount! … Meount! ’ And we would wobble off into the asylum country round Broadmoor.

Wanda’s affair with the bicycle was very different from mine. For her there was, and still is, a Platonic, archetypal bicycle, the first one she ever had. It was the sort of bicycle on which droves of girls used to cycle past the prison camp in which I was incarcerated in the Po Valley, near Parma, during the war. Similar droves were to be seen riding through the equally flat countryside around pre-war Ferrara in Visconti’s film The Garden of the Finzi-Contini.

It was a single-speed lightweight roadster with an open frame, raised handlebars fitted with a wicker basket and a back pedalling brake on the rear wheel, the upper part of which was covered with thin cords to prevent the wearer’s skirt becoming entangled in it, which made the whole thing look like some archaic stringed instrument on wheels.

It was a present to her from her godmother on her sixteenth birthday. Originally she had given her a wristwatch but Wanda displayed such obvious disappointment on receiving it that her godmother eventually wrung from her the confession that what she really longed for was a bicycle. Unfortunately Wanda’s godmother had no idea how much a bicycle cost, and the money she gave Wanda in lieu of the wristwatch was totally insufficient to buy even a good second-hand one, which was why Wanda’s bicycle came to be made up of salvaged parts, re-assembled by the village bicycle repairer. In spite of this it was a good bicycle, with a frame made by the still excellent firm of Bianchi.

Because of all this Wanda had the fierce affection for her bicycle that most people reserve for the living. So when the Germans occupied Italy in September 1943, and her father was arrested by the Gestapo as an anti-Fascist, her bicycle was impounded as an additional punishment, to which she took strong exception. Eventually she succeeded in tracking it down to a German military headquarters at Salsomaggiore, a spa miles away from where she lived in the foothills of the Apennines, to which literally thousands of confiscated bicycles had been taken.

‘You have stolen my bicycle,’ she said without preamble to the first German officer she encountered there, who happened to be a colonel taking a turn in the open air.

‘What, me?’ he said in genuine astonishment, saluting. ‘Why should I take your bicycle? I have no need of a bicycle.’

‘Well, if you didn’t take it your soldiers did. My father was in the Austrian Imperial Army. He never stole ladies’ bicycles.’

‘Where is your bicycle?’ he asked.

‘In there,’ she said, indicating through open doors in a hangar what appeared to be the biggest second-hand bicycle shop in the world.

‘Signorina,’ he said gallantly, anxious to be rid of this Slovenian fury he had somehow unwittingly fielded, ‘if we have taken your bicycle I can only apologize on behalf of the Wehrmacht. We are not here to make war on young ladies. We will restore you a bicycle. Please take any bicycle. I will personally authorize it. Take a good bicycle.’

‘I don’t want any bicycle,’ she said. ‘I want my bicycle.’

Eventually the colonel was constrained to send for a couple of soldiers and order them to force their way through the masses of bicycles, many of them superb machines, any of which she could have had for the asking, until they reached the enclave in which Wanda’s humble machine was finally located. For with Teutonic efficiency they were grouped according to whichever town or village they had been impounded in.

Knowing all this, and that a facsimile of her old bicycle was the only thing that would really make her content, I felt myself in the same sort of spot as the German colonel at Salsamaggiore in 1943. In one of my wilder, more fanciful moments I imagined trying to sell her the idea that dropped handlebars are nothing more than raised handlebars installed upside down. And in my mind’s eye I could see her wrestling with them, like an Amazon with the antlers of a stag at bay, trying to return them to what she regarded as their proper position.

The heart of rural Dorset is not the easiest place to find out about the latest developments in the world of bicycles, but by good fortune our local newsagent in Wareham had a copy of a magazine called The Bicycle Buyer’s Bible, 1985/6 on its shelves. By this time the question of what sort of bikes we were going to take with us if we were going to get moving before Christmas was becoming extremely urgent. The Bible gave detailed specifications of about three hundred machines with prices ranging from £105 to £1147, and £1418 for a tandem.

The machines that interested me most were the mountain bicycles, otherwise ATBs, All Terrain Bicycles. Everything about a mountain bike is big, except for the frame, which is usually smaller than that of normal lightweight touring bicycles. They are built of over-size tubing and have big pedals, ideal for someone like me with huge feet; wheels with big knobbly tyres which can be inflated with four times as much air as an ordinary high-pressure tyre; very wide flat handlebars, like motorcycle handlebars, fitted with thumb-operated gear change levers; and motorcycle-type brake levers connected to cantilever brakes of the sort originally designed for tandems, which have enormous stopping power.

Most of them are fitted with 15- or 18-speed derailleur gears made up by fitting a five- or six-sprocket freewheel block on the rear hub and three chainwheels of different sizes on the main axle in the bottom bracket where the cranks are situated; a sophistication so conspicuously unnecessary that it would have had Thorsten Veblen ecstatically adding another chapter to his great work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, had he lived to see it. This equipment produces gears ranging from 20″ or even lower (which can be a godsend when climbing mountains) to 90″ or even higher for racing downhill, or with a following wind on the flat.

(#litres_trial_promo) Not all these gears are practicable or even usable, however, for technical reasons.

These mountain bikes looked very ugly, very old-fashioned and very American, which was not surprising as they were the lineal descendants of the fat-tyred newspaper delivery bikes first produced by a man called Ignaz Schwinn in the United States in 1933. To me they looked even older. They made me think of Mack Sennet and Fatty Arbuckle and Jackie Coogan. If I got round to buying one I knew that I would have to wear a big flat peaked cap like Coogan’s. Eighteen gears apart – perhaps she would settle for fifteen – and providing we could find one with an open rather than a man’s diamond frame model, this seemed exactly the sort of bike, in the absence of her beloved Bianchi, that Wanda needed to carry her the length and breadth of Ireland and even up and down a holy mountain or two.

‘“To buy a mountain bike now”,’ I read, ‘“is to win yourself a place in the first of the few rather than the last of the many.”’

It was a wet Sunday evening in Dorset. We were in bed surrounded by the avalanche of catalogues and lists I had brought down on us by clipping out the coupons in The Bicycle Buyer’s Bible. One dealer, in what seemed to me an excess of optimism, had also sent order forms which read:

PLEASE SEND … MOUNTAIN BICYCLES(S), MODEL(S) … FRAME SIZE(S) … COLOUR(S) … PLEASE GIVE ALTERNATE COLOUR(S). I ENCLOSE A CHEQUE/BANKER’S ORDER, VALUE …

‘I don’t want to be one of the first of the few,’ Wanda said.

‘Shall I go on?’ I said. ‘There’s worse to follow.’

‘Okay, go on.’

‘“From prototype to production model they have been around for less than a decade. In that short time they have been blasted across the Sahara, up Kilimanjaro, down the Rockies and along the Great Wall of China.”’