It was odd: he hated open spaces and loved cities tight with highways and alleys, but on a map he was master of the land. What’s more, he could strip and rebuild a bicycle like it was a magic trick at Maskelyne’s Hall.
“I used to work in a repair shop as a boy,” he said, adding: “Bicycles are the future for the common man.” I could almost hear myself speaking and was proud he was my friend.
Things I still had to learn: marching, stripping guns, army etiquette. What I found hardest was cycle maneuvers. Of course, the other lads almost all had their own cycles, and I hadn’t been entirely clear with the officer who’d given me the tip back in the shop. I’d only ever ridden down a few London streets. The rest was polishing the bike while I dreamed of touring holidays. Of us new recruits, one was a grocer’s errand boy, one was a country postie, two or three belonged to cycling clubs, and there were twin brothers who had worked in a factory making bicycles. They’d all been cycling practically since they could walk. I had an image of their fat little baby legs pedaling in their cradles while mine were just kicking in the air.
The training NCOs had this thing you did, weaving between posts.
“Call yourself a cyclist?!” the training sergeant bellowed.
I wanted to say “No, I never did, not really. I just thought about it a lot.”
I was humiliated when I fell off; and just when I’d grasped the weaving with Hercules, they gave me Nora, the regulation Army cycle, and I fell off all over again. Then they mounted the gun, which shifted the balance, and it was right back to the beginning once more. I was nervous that if I didn’t grasp it, they’d send me to the infantry.
But Isaac was a true friend and when we had half a day’s leave, we went off into the countryside nearby and he laid out some stones and I practiced all afternoon. It was a kindness, because he detested the countryside with such a passion that I had doubts whether he had ever left London before: “Green, green, so much green and no houses, no one wants to live here, all that nothingness and buzzing things trying to get in your throat.”
After, I bought him a couple of beers in a public house and we came back a bit squiffy. I fell off Nora, twice, but even Isaac was all over the road and giggling. He was most unlike himself.
The relationship between bicycles and me was quite different before I had Dick’s Hercules, and it was different again now that I was training to be a professional. I expected that it would be different again when I was, in my way, a weapon.
Winter was coming: the wind and rain blew in from Russia, they said. Our new caps had flaps for our burning ears. What with the flaps and the wind, you couldn’t hear an order, which was either a disadvantage or an advantage, depending. At last we learned that some of us were to be attached to serving regiments and would be sent off to France.
“We’re looking for the cream der lah cream, as they say where some of you are going,” said our sergeant, with a wink. “Our reputation is at stake.”
He looked at us all as if we were potential saboteurs.
But when the list went up, there was one officer—our young Mr. Pierce—with a sergeant, a corporal, and twelve men, and two of those were Private Isaac Meyer and Private Francis Stanton. We had our photograph taken, all fifteen of us, holding our machines and with all our equipment neatly stowed as per King’s Regs. Underneath the picture, it said Hunts Cyclists Batt., with our badge. It was a stag rearing up, and one lad said it was like me and the bike in my early days, but I ignored him. I wrote to Dad and sent him the picture and hoped all was well in the coffin trade and said that when I got leave, I’d come and visit him.
Deep in my heart, I thought what an outcome: I, an Englishman, would be pedaling in the tracks of those French and Belgian heroes of the Tour de France. But as things turned out, I was very glad I’d kept that thought to myself.
Isaac held on to his picture, as he said he had no one to send it to. His brother would tear it up in the name of world peace and international brotherhood. Isaac was in an altogether dejected mood.
“Anyway,” he said, “some of us may not come back. And I can look at it and remember our comradeship.” And he coughed.
There was a smoking concert in the canteen the evening before our departure, and everyone was in a very merry mood. The sergeant sang “When Maiden Loves, She Sits and Sighs” and nearly brought the house down with his sighing and quivering moustaches. The lads ended the evening with a rousing performance of the famous “Song of the Hunts Cyclists.” Every verse, many of them more than once. When it got to the verse about France, we boys who were actually heading off there got a lot of nudging and even free beers coming our way.