Written to the prompt ‘Write whatever you want to’
Bikes
Sometimes parents have to disappoint their children. And the younger you are when you are disappointed, the longer you have to brood about it and chew it over at family reunions.
Take bikes. Dad would not let my brother and me have two-wheelers. Our terraced street which was a favourite haunt of driving instructors and their wannabe Stirling Mosses. (Dad obviously considered 1960s Doncaster to be Silverstone by any other name.) The fact that we had a network of back lanes to ride about in was neither here nor there. A few hundred yards away was the huge Town Field where we could have ridden across the grass traffic-free, but Dad’s mind was made up. ‘You’re not having a bike, and that’s final.’
The first consequence of Dad’s decision was that we had to go to the black market for bike hire. Round the corner from us lived a brother and sister whose parents had no qualms about giving their children a life skill. Gillian and Raymond (I’m not afraid to name names, here) had at least five bikes between them and one summer they hired them out from their garden shed. Much pocket money was spent on trolling up and down the back lane on one of Gillian’s kiddie bikes – a small brown-framed job with chunky fat tyres which were so wide there was no danger of overbalancing and falling off, but I had to have the stabilisers on it as well. This meant that there was equally no danger of learning the skills of balance necessary for riding a bigger bike. Eventually my confidence grew and I was able to propel an unstabilised bike up and down the back lane using two feet on the pedals and one hand on the wall. When other children learn to ride a bike, they normally get cut knees or scraped shins; I ended up with badly-bruised palms and no visible fingerprints.
The second consequence of Dad’s decision was much further-reaching. I didn’t get to grips with cycling until my mid-thirties, and so the care, maintenance, repair and general technicalities of a bike are mysteries as deep to me as the finer points of income tax law or why chicken tikka pizza exists. I have nieces and nephews who could probably overhaul a Tour de France winning machine using only a nail file and a length of dental floss, but if something goes wrong with my bike, my sole contribution to the repair is, ‘I’ll make some tea.’
I’m probably the only cycle-riding female whose husband gets the bike into the correct gear before she sets off, and I’m definitely the only woman of a certain age riding round our local reservoir on a bike whose handlebars carry a sketch of various types of terrain and their relevant gears. This was drawn by my husband after he’d had an extra set of gears fitted (to the bike, not to himself) to enable me to cycle up the hills in Norfolk. (It was Cornwall, actually, but the principle’s the same, only the gradient’s steeper.)
I still have very little confidence about riding my bike on a road, principally because I daren’t let go of the handlebars to indicate which direction I’m going in, and as for looking behind me to see if it’s safe to overtake a parked car, forget it unless you want to see me going base over apex into someone’s boot.
And what about my brother? Well, as lads do, he soon moved his attention onto cars and I don’t think he feels the deep trauma which has obviously scarred my psyche for the rest of my life. Although I did notice that when he had children of his own, he made damned sure that they had bikes.
© Carol Carman 2025
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