13

He attacked every hill in a rage of effort, as though at each pedal

thrust to stamp on his own frustration and avenge an insult. Take
that and that and that!

Our settled domestic routine was paying dividends in results,

and being licensed to a French club had immense advantages.
Our racing programme was organised for us, and our travelling
expenses negotiated. Without the club’s provision of transport,
the ambulance’s protracted breakdown would have cost us dear
in lost opportunities to race. The big bonus though was being able
access our prize money. By mid-May our cash was running low.
Few ordinary people then possessed chequebook bank accounts and
there was no such thing as the credit card. Cash was king. Jock, in
particular, felt the financial strain and before the Tour de Champagne
had his suitcase packed ready to return home. Without affiliation
to the BCR, his £100 prize-money would have passed direct to the
NCU and remained out of reach until the season’s end. But now,
inside the month, our winnings awaited claim from the Rheims
branch of the Federation Française du Cyclisme. We simply presented
our licences, signed on the dotted line and emerged clutching our
wad of banknotes. The joy of that first big payday! It was more
than money. It was tangible evidence of a success that no one could
gainsay. That day we walked on air.

Annie and Francine, two very attractive demoiselles, worked behind

the counter at the FFC where, to the envy of all their friends, they got
to meet lots of bronzed, muscular, sexy Frenchmen, racing cyclists
all. But we were special, or so we thought. We were English, the
only English, and they seemed to enjoy having us chat them up. It
was bold-as-brass Jock who suggested inviting them for an evening
meal in the ambulance. ‘Have a drink, have a drink, have a drink
on me,’ he sang, an out-of-key Lonnie Donegan, as heads together
behind a filing cabinet they pondered their decision. The idiot’s
going to scare them off, I thought, and was astonished when they
emerged to say, ‘Oui, ça va.’

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 As the great day approached our anticipation gave way to anxiety.
What would these chic French girls make of our rudimentary living
quarters – especially the greasy stove and kitchenette littered with
bottles and cans? And what had swayed their decision? Was it just
curiosity – the chance to go slumming in a menagerie? We went
into an absolute frenzy of tidying and cleaning, swabbing the floor,
scrubbing the grime-encrusted pans, folding our blankets and
stuffing them with all our other meagre possessions out of sight
under the bunks. Remember, as ex-squaddies, we were trained in
the arts of ‘bull’. But nothing we did could disguise the fact that our
ambulance was simply a boys’ hostel on wheels.
We strove mightily to impress. A big questionmark surrounded
the choice of meal. Our self-appointed master chef Jock volunteered
himself to prepare his pièce de résistance of steak and spaghetti,
preceded by a hors d’oeuvres of grated carrot in an oil and vinegar
dressing, with dessert of fresh fruit salad. Finger-kissing superb!
Such unexpected quasi-français cuisine would knock them cold with
its calculated sophistication. Furthermore, to demonstrate how
deeply we were embedded into French culture, we purchased a
bottle of cheap vin de table. We showered, shaved, dressed in our
best clothes, Brylcreemed our hair and with increasing nervousness
sat on our bunks to await their coming.

Haute cusine nomade style

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 They arrived by car, late, heralded by peals of laughter. Nerves,
we assumed charitably, – unless, of course, clapping eyes on the
ambulance for the first time, they were in real hysterics. Maybe
they were more scared of us than we of them, since they were
accompanied by an apologetic driver/chaperone, somebody’s
brother or cousin, who hung back, smiling fulsomely, whilst looking
repeatedly over his shoulder as though ready to do a runner if we
took offence at his uninvited presence. We all shook hands rather
awkwardly. Then the giggling recommenced as we gave them a
guided tour of the ambulance, bumping bottoms in the confined
space. We demonstrated the folding table and bunks doubling as
benches, on which they were expected to sit and eat.
‘It’s very basic!’ I apologised. ‘Absolutely!’ said Annie. ‘But full
marks for effort. You are, after all, men living alone.’ It sounded like
a well-rehearsed comment and, exchanging glances, they suddenly
doubled up again into paroxysms of uncontrollable laughter.
‘Oh, you must excuse us, please!’ they spluttered. But the more
they excused themselves, the more they laughed over whatever
secret it was they shared and had no intention of disclosing. And
the more they laughed and tossed their heads and their luscious hair
glinted in the soft glow from the storm lantern, the more beautiful
they appeared. How could we possibly take offence? In fact, the
comedy was so infectious that extrovert Jock unashamedly began
to play himself for laughs.
The girls observed his preparation of the meal with critical
amusement, as he pretended to count each stick of spaghetti like
a miser, demanding, ‘Combien en voulez-vous exactement?’ and then,
with a pantomime gesture, tossed the steak in the pan as if it were
pancake.
‘Attendez!’ exclaimed Francine. ‘J’ai quelque chose.’
She dashed off to the car and returned with a covered dish, which
she revealed as the most exquisite quiche decorated with tomatoes
and olives. The appearance of competition distracted our chef long
enough for his steak to curl up and burn, something we were only
alerted to when smoke began drifting into the ambulance. Vic tried
to waft it out and tripped over the table-leg. Cutlery and plates
slid onto the floor. Nothing was broken, but for a while hysteria
reigned and then redoubled as, to demonstrate our high standards
of hygiene, I washed the floored items in a bucket of cold, soapy
water and wiped them on our one stained tea towel. The steak wasn’t

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the only culinary disaster. In the confusion, Jock forgot the pasta,
which overcooked until it resembled a tangled pudding fit only for
the pig bin.
Perhaps unsurprisingly after all that, their perfumes drowned
in cooking odours, the girls picked politely at their plates and ate
almost nothing. They drank none of the wine, though Annie swirled
hers like a connoisseur, sniffed the glass and held it critically up to
the light. (Plonk!). From their handbags they had produced napkins
to cover their knees. First the chaperone, now the napkins – was
some self-defence mechanism at play, I wondered, predicated by
someone’s Maman? What exactly was it they feared: food poisoning,
kidnap? For our part, napkin-less exiles from John Bull’s island, we
showed them the ravenous bikies’ way, gobbling everything: burnt
steak, sloshy tangled spaghetti and especially Francine’s delicious
mouth-melting quiche.
‘C’est bon!’ we assured the girls and their embarrassed
chaperone.
‘Mais bien sûr!’ they chorused, pushing their full plates aside.
Really they were very sweet and couldn’t have thought too
badly of us, for afterwards we were invited to see where they lived
and we all squeezed into the chaperone’s cramped car, the girls
sitting delightfully across our knees, for a bumpy sensuous tour of
the suburbs. In the eyes of Vic and me, council estate lads, Annie’s
parents’ comfortable bourgeois dwelling, with its nice Louis Quinze
reproduction furniture, oil paintings and polished parquet floors,
looked enviably sumptuous.
Nothing much came of this encounter. We remained good friends
with the girls, but our ambitions left small space for romantic
involvement. For their part, young and chic, they had wide choice, so
why should they be bothered with apparently penniless comedians,
whose prospects, to say the least, were questionable?
When Pierre and Eliane came to hear of our little soirée, they too
roared with laughter. Clearly, in our naivety, we had missed the true
depths of this comedy, which had something to do with Englishmen
cooking badly in the land of haute cuisine.
Nevertheless, we rated this as the best and happiest evening we
ever spent in the old ambulance.

Not everyone in the BCR was as welcoming as Pierre and Eliane.

André had been the club’s one and only real star until we blew into

80
town. He was an excellent rider, a later winner of the ‘Tour de Merde’
and the coveted lanterne rouge of the Tour de France as member of
a Paris-Nord-Est team; also he was somewhat acquainted with our
island, having raced there in the 1954 Tour of Britain as domestique
to the victorious Tamburlini. However, he wasn’t exactly joyous in
our presence and his aloofness spoke volumes: the publicity and
acclaim surrounding our successes had been to his detriment and,
sick of sharing top dog spot with a bunch of foreign interlopers, he
determined to put us in our place.
One day he invited us for a training ride. ‘He will show you the
countryside around Rheims,’ Pierre said reassuringly. Taking this to
mean a gentle, sightseeing tour, we made no special preparations,
arriving at the pre-arranged rendezvous in sweaters and full-length
trousers strapped up below the knee. We carried bulky musettes.
Our bikes had mudguards. There to greet us was an André stripped
for action: shorts, vest, racing cap, spare tubular criss-crossed over
shoulders, chain dripping oil. He shook hands without dismounting
and then took off like a greyhound from the slips.
A modest 16/17 mph of side-by-side cycling with interludes for
chatting was our normal training mode. Frequent racing took care
of any need for speed-work, and turning recovery rides into races
seemed to us a formula for burnout.
But now we were in a race and no mistake, with André storming
off at the front. His chosen route was through the Montagne de
Reims, slope after sun-drenched slope ablaze with verdant ranks
of venerable gnarled and twisted champagne vines. Whenever the
road ahead rose, so did André, straining every sinew out of the
saddle to drop us. Honour demanded we stay with him, whatever
the cost in pain. He attacked every hill in a rage of effort, as though
at each pedal thrust to stamp on his own frustration and avenge an
insult. Take that and that and that! This, he seemed to be saying, is
my cycling fiefdom and my master class.
Two and a half hours later, every pore exuding, we squealed to a
halt before the towering Rheims cathedral, where we were christened
honorary champenois in our own holy sweat. In all that time, not a
single word had passed between us. We must have covered over 90
kilometres. The landscape had flashed by in a golden blur of lanes
and dusty by-ways, and clinging to André’s back wheel, we had paid
no attention to signposts. So much for ‘showing us the countryside’.

81
Our limbs throbbed from heat and fatigue.
André’s strained salt-lined face told of his impressive efforts to
show us the way. ‘Alors, ça va?’ he growled, extending his hand. I
felt a bit like a public school fag after taking a beating from prefect
Smythe-Major – was I supposed to shake it and say thank you,
Monsieur André? In fact, that’s exactly what happened. ‘Oui, merci,
André!’ I replied. ‘Ça va!’ And we all solemnly shook hands and he
pedalled off.
We never trained with André again. But thereafter his attitude
towards us visibly softened. His indignation must have been
requited; he was much less aloof and on occasions even greeted us
with a smile.

The quasi-British team at the start of the Tour de l’Ouest, 1958.

L to R: Lach, Pusey, Andrews, Hewson, Ricketts, Brown,
the masseur, Bartrop, Sutton, Mater.

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