What does the title mean? I saw a film about 20 years ago called Even Cowgirls Get the Blues based on a book by Tim Robbins. It involved cowgirls among other themes and when I left the cinema, I unlocked my bike and reflected that much like cowgirls are connected to their horses, I am to my bike. It is my freedom, my means of getting around, I take great pleasure in riding around rain or shine and it makes me feel good. At the time I was living in Holland and I was by no means unusual in my choice of transport but I felt constantly grateful for having that access to my bikes and where I could go - the roads I cycled on, the fantastic cycle paths and the ease and simplicity that it brought to my life as well as everyone else's. The Netherlanders take it completely for granted but I never did.
I was born in Reading, Berkshire, UK in a suburb south of the River Thames called Caversham. The dead end street I lived on was called Short Street and there were 11 houses, I lived at number 10. It was a perfect place to learn to ride a bike, when I was 6 or 7, my Dad got a child's bike frame from a salvage yard (my Dad and I went there with his hand truck on a regular basis, him to look for tools and things, me to find pretty shiny things). He painted the frame Red and built me a bike, I still remember learning to ride it with the saddle down low, like young kids do now with step bikes. I was on it all the time and once as a punishment, my Dad took the saddle off it. I missed it so much I got a cushion off the sofa and started riding round with the cushion instead. Needless to say I got the saddle back quite quickly, he was taken by my tenacity.
When I was 9 my parents divorced, I saw it coming and had already decided I would stay with my Dad, we were best friends despite his moodiness. He said himself he was a crap husband but a good Dad, to me at least and later to my younger sister who didn't really get to know him again properly until she was an adult as she went with my Mum and new husband. The divorce was the most amicable in history, everything including us two girls was split down the middle. My Dad lives in a world of his own, a free thinker a rarity in any time. He didn't drive and had no intention of doing so, as a boy he'd loved Bugatti's and the romance of the motor car but the idea of driving everywhere in one never appealed to him. To him they are lethal weapons in the hands of most drivers (really rather true) and preferred to rely on his own muscle strength plus for long distances the train, to get from A to B.
What then do you do in 1980 with a 9 year old if you need to commute to Reading Station to get on a train to go to work? Dad was a primary school teacher, so it made sense that I travelled with him to his school and negate the need for child care completely, but how? He joked, we'll get a tandem! a month or so later outside the Emporium, a favourite source of old hand tools and for me a favourite source of costume jewellery and antique bottles, was a Holdsworth pre-war mixty bar ladyback tandem for £70. It was fate. We rode it home, Dad stripped it down and along with a Falcon roadbike frame that he'd earmarked for me when I was older we took the stripped down frames on the train to London to a shop on the Old Kent Road to get them sprayed and badged, I chose sky blue, the tandem was a sort of royal blue. When we went to collect them we brought them back and Dad built the tandem with hub brakes - two people are heavy and he thought this to be more reliable, 4 dérailleur gears, widely spaced with a crawler gear necessary in Reading. The star attraction was the back carrier made entirely out of Dexion (I shall check the spelling) - Mechano for adults, he called it, it had two main functions, it was good for holding bungees in place, you could carry practically anything, and frequently did with enough bungees and finally there was a handle about 5 inches long and half and inch thick bolted in at the end across the rear light so that I could lift the back of the tandem on and off trains. In those days all trains had guards wagons, often full of sacks of post and we would have to clamber over the sacks of post with the tandem sometimes although mostly it was simply a case of opening the double doors, Dad would lift the front in and I would follow with the back wheel using the handle. Worked a treat. For two years we commuted from Reading to Crowthorne on the Guildford train from platform 4b, the trains froze, caught fire, broke down and generally got us there and back most of the time, occasionally we'd wait for hours at Crowthorne station, and then when nothing came through, cycle on to Wokingham to catch the Waterloo to Reading train. A few times I think we cycled all the way, roughly 10 miles I think but usually this was a last resort. Holidays involved taking camping equipment to Steam Rallies and cycling I'm not sure how far on busy major A roads. I remember it took all day and a couple of years I think Janet, my younger sister who would have been 10 or 11 cycled on the back of the tandem and I cycled on the Falcon, that by then fit me.
As a teenager, I could more or less decide on a spec and my Dad would build a bike to suit, I already had the choice of borrowing his bikes; a Holdsworth road bike that had such a short wheel base, cycling it makes you wonder if the bike is possessed with it's own power, a Trade Bike with a huge metal frame basket that was fixed to the frame, the handlebars and front wheel moved independently which took a bit of getting used to. And the tandem of course, I did occasionally take friends on it, boyfriends later on into my 20's. I had the Falcon and a roadster style bike with a frame with cross handlebars, sturdy carrier for bungying my enormous Saxophone case. It was much like the hybrids that later came into fashion for commuting in London, but with mudguards and a carrier. I liked the wide handlebars that implied a bmx style, comfy too. This was my going to school bike.
Dad and I would do pub crawls in the Summer on the Tandem. We would cycle out west where the A34 western bypass now is on ancient b roads and do a round trip of about 10 miles of an evening taking in the Furze Bush, the Craven Arms and other pubs on the way. We listened in the pubs to live music and chatted there and back about anything and everything. Dad later allowed his house to be a washing and bath station for all the Newbury bypass protesters. Hundreds of protesters used his bathroom! I left Newbury in my late teens, hated the place and have only ever returned to visit my Dad since. I cycled out west to see what a mess they'd made of our favourite pub crawl a few years ago. Words fail me.
In the 80's, School uniform did not include trousers for girls and this really annoyed me, often I would cycle to school in trousers and 'forget' to bring my skirt. It annoyed me that half a century or more of emancipation and I was still forced to wear a flippin' skirt.
My best mate in my early teens lived at the top of a steep hill, by then we'd moved to Newbury by the way. We lived almost at the bottom of the hill and I had the choice of 5 different hills I could cycle up to get there, I visited most evenings so, some taking considerably longer than the closest but I chose different hills to keep it interesting I suppose. I was quite good at climbing hills, from riding the tandem, Dad rarely got off and walked we just plodded up the hill however long it took. There were very few hills that defeated him.
Neither of us had super light bikes, chose the extra weight of mudguards and carriers for convenience and practicality, he is in his early 70's now and still cycles up all 5 of these hills and more, a month or so ago he reported to me a journey where he cycled a 30 mile round trip which ended up with him cycling home along the A4 between Reading and Newbury at 11 o'clock at night, cycling on the path, the path ran out, he wobbled into a ditch and ended up in the branches of a tree, bike and all. He got home OK. Somehow.
I am notorious with my old school friend for taking her on bikes round the terrifying Robin Hood Roundabout in Newbury, we were about 15, there are maybe 7 different exits and the roundabout is probably about 100m across from exit to exit. I would fearlessly cycle anywhere but for most people who might cycle purely for leisure, they would avoid roundabouts as much as anything else because they didn't know how to cycle across them. My tactic was to take the lane like a driver would, simple as that. It's worked for me all over London when I lived and cycled there. Made sense to me the perceived danger for most people will see it otherwise. As far as I know, cyclists don't often get hit on roundabouts though, mainly things turning left or right on to them or changing lanes without seeing them. Roundabouts look scary on a bike to most people and yet they aren't hard. It's annoying when a car will undertake or overtake on a roundabout, it's not done and it usually serves to put me in the wrong lane to come off. One never overtakes anything on a roundabout so why do drivers think they can over take bikes?
Anyway, roundabouts is one of the reasons I'm starting this blog. Why, in England do they build cycle paths where the road is clearly wide enough anyway, then write END when you get to anything where a 'normal' person might require some assistance? I will be exploring possible solutions - there are a variety of ways, depending on the size and number of exits you can make a roundabout less intimidating for cyclists who aren't like me or the other many thousands of cyclists who use the roads today. Most of these are Men, men who drive or at least have good road sense. Whether they stop at red lights or not (I do but only since I turned 30 and decided it was time I set an example), they are saving the economy millions by leaving their car at home. I want to see roads across the UK that are fit for women and children to use safely. Having lived in Holland for all of the 90's, this will form a large part of my inspiration but not entirely.
Bikes have formed a large part of my life and they still are, they might be a part of a lot of other women in the UK, if only they were given the opportunity.
This is a jumble, but I am attempting to create some sort of context, I am not your typical cyclist, who is? What interests me is what we can do to make cycling for women as easy as it clearly is in Holland and Germany. We really really need to. I don't want to force everyone onto a bike - just want people to have the choice to leave their car in the driveway and walk, jump on a bus, tram or train or of course, jump on a bike.
No comments:
Post a Comment