The Curious Spanner

Long ago, when pleasures were home made and innocence was worn unsullied into maturing youth, three boys spent Summer evenings playing kick-about in the park. It was a simpler time, when children were lean and fit and phone free and chatted excitedly about this week's adventures of Dan Dare and the Mekon as they pedalled their bikes towards their stadium of dreams. Two discarded jumpers, a patch of balding grassland, and a slow punctured ball were all that was required for time to escort them gently on their journey through summer evenings towards encroaching darkness and home.

Johnny had the best bike, a Claude Butler racer that had once been his dad's, with drop handlebars and clips on the pedals to secure your feet. This was the bike of every boys dream, but even with the fierce looking saddle at its lowest setting, Johnny, being the shortest of us, could never come to a halt without looking as if someone had just pushed him over. In spite of this, he was so chuffed with his mudguardless inheritance that he happily wore the consequences of rainy excursions like a right of passage; a moist black splatter line up his back, from his bum to the top of his ginger mop. 

Oggy, on the other hand, had an old Raleigh bike which he'd had for some years and had now seriously outgrown, with the saddle set at its dizziest height to avoid hitting himself under the chin with his knees. Oggy was tall and gangly and his seemingly unstoppable growth rate meant that none of his clothes ever fitted him for more than a few weeks before he began to look as if he was wearing someone else's.  When together, Johnny and Oggy looked like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on shire horse and donkey as they rode alongside each other. Life would have been easier for both if they'd just swapped bikes, but then that's life!

Tommo was the proud possessor of a newly refurbished Hercules Roadster, with 3-speed Sturmey-Archer gears and a sensible leather saddle.
From the back of this, hung a leather pouch containing wizardry; a puncture repair kit in a harmonica shaped tin and a mysterious multi-function spanner. The two most dazzling items of specialist technology yet to enter Tommo's life. 

The puncture repair outfit was an object of intrigue, a pale blue tin with the words Cycle Repair Outfit emblazoned across it, in case you ever forgot what it was, Tommo assumed. Above that, appeared the mysterious words Self Vulcanising, a phrase he relegated to that part of his mind labelled, Things I Don't Need to Know. Inside the tin was a strip of repair patches, a tube of Dunlop rubber solution glue, a piece of sandpaper and a mysterious little tin of something called French chalk. Tommo longed for the day he got his first puncture.

The curious spanner had imprinted on Tommo from the moment he'd first opened the leather pouch. An object so alien to his world that he'd left it untouched until such time as he felt up to getting involved with it. He'd seen  spanners in his dad's tool box, but this was something else, something that required understanding and some sort of connection to Tommo's simple existence. The curious spanner sent Tommo little mental reminders of its existence every so often from its leather pouch and he wasn't quite sure how long he could ignore them.

Before setting off for the park, the trio met up at Oggy's house because his dad had a shed full of wonderful stuff, and amongst it was bound to be what they needed for their latest ruse: to make their bikes sound like mopeds. They had to find a way of securing something flexible to their rear forks which would be flicked by the spokes and sound like a motor as they raced down the street. They spent an hour experimenting before finally leaving the shed in a complete mess and minus a roll of black insulation tape and the lid of the cardboard box that housed Nobby, the tortoise. Impressive moped fluttering with bits of Nobby's lid was short lived, although Johnny's did actually survive until just before the park gates before finally disintegrating.

Failed moped flutter quickly forgotten, the trio laid their bikes to rest on the grassy play area and were delighted to find a kickabout already in progress by a group of ne'er-do-wells they knew by reputation from school. They were mostly from the year above and one or two were trainee gangsters, but they had wooden fence stakes for goal posts and a real, fully inflated, leather football. A relatively aggro-free combined five-a-side saw them well into the evening until fading energy levels and a spat between Oggy and Knocker, one of the gangsters, brought play to a close. 

Oggy, taking exception to being elbowed in the ribs and called a lanky twat, ankle tapped Knocker as they chased the ball at full pelt. The boy crashed to the ground into a heap of seriously mangled gangster's dignity and the game came to a halt. The ball was snatched, the stakes were drawn and the players slowly dissolved into the twilight. Tommo was sitting on the grass by his bike wondering what to do with what was left of the daylight, when one of those messages suddenly reached him from the little leather pouch behind the comfortable saddle. He unfastened the two straps, lifted the lid, and made direct eye contact with the curious spanner. The time had come.

The curious spanner clearly had ten different functions, all of which appeared to be of the tightening up variety, and this seemed an ideal time to finally discover exactly what they were. Tommo quickly immersed himself in the challenge, finding suitable nuts and bolts on his bike to fit each of the purpose made facets. As he matched each part, he gave it a hefty heave to make absolutely sure that everything was fully tightened. Things were going well, and Tommo was feeling particularly pleased with himself as boy, spanner and Hercules Roadster became fully acquainted. Until that is, the final and smallest facet of all. However hard he looked, he could not find a match.

And then it dawned on him. Each of his spokes had a small nut where it attached to the rim of the wheel and to his horror, it appeared that every single spoke on both wheels needed some tightening. Tommo set about the task with vigour, delighted with his new found prowess as a bicycle mechanic and even more delighted that he and his curious spanner had saved him and his steed from some unimaginable loose-spoke disaster. 

There were thirty-two spokes on each wheel and tightening them all turned out to be no simple task. The curious spanner wasn't the easiest of tools to use as it was only possible to turn each nut a fraction before having to reposition. It took forever, and by the time the arduous task had been completed it was almost dark. Tommo looked around and realised he was completely alone in the park, didn't have any lights on his bike and should have been back home long ago. His new found pride in the most tightened-up bike in town was suddenly tinged with anxiety.

With new found urgency, he put the no-longer-curious spanner back into its pouch next to the puncture repair kit, fastened down the two straps and mounted the bike ready for the short journey home. Almost instantly, Tommo's simple and orderly world was shattered by confusion and total disbelief. Both of his wheels were so badly buckled, that the bike was impossible to ride. He held it at arm's length and stared at it, completely at a loss as to how this could have happened. Someone must have run over it while he was playing in the five aside. It must have been one of the trainee gangsters. 

So horrified was Tommo as he trudged home in the darkness, struggling to push his ruptured Roadster, that tears of utter confusion streamed down his face. His mum and dad would be angry because he was late home, and even more angry at the state of his bike. But when he finally arrived, and they sensed their son's evident distress, Tommo's mum busied herself making a cup of his favourite cocoa, while his dad sat him on the sofa and listened intently to a blow by blow account of the evening's events.

At the point where he described how horrified he was to have found that every single spoke on his bike was loose and how difficult and time consuming it had been to tighten them all, Tommo's dad put his arm around his son's shoulders and a large grin of understanding spread across his face, just as the cocoa arrived. They would talk about spanners and spokes after a good night's sleep.