A Hare's Breath 2 - The Bicycle

A Hare’s Breath 2 - The Bicycle

For a long time all the other weans in our street and round about had bicycles given to them for their birthdays or for Christmas or for being brave when they were in the Robinson Hospital with a broken arm but for all the while I didn’t have one at all. Even the poor wee boy who had broken his arm so he had to wait a few weeks before he could ride his new bicycle that he had been given for being brave when he was in the hospital laughed with the rest of them and shouted at me there goes the poor wee boy that doesn’t have a bicycle to go about on.

As they rode off on their shiny red or blue Raleigh bicycles into the lovely County Antrim countryside to have the great adventures with apples in their pockets and sometimes a bottle of red lemonade that their mammies had given them in their saddlebags the wee boy with the broken arm stayed behind and asked me if I’d like to go to his house to see his new bicycle that he couldn’t ride yet on account of his terrible injury and I just said no which was probably rude but not as rude as what I was thinking about which was breaking his other arm. But I didn’t break it because it was only the well-behaved weans that were ever given new bicycles though he’d broken his arm when he was in a fight with his wee sister and they fell off the bed.

When the weans that had the new bicycles and no terrible injuries were away on the adventures I stayed at home with my sister and the dog to watch the black and white television that my daddy had got the man to bring us from the Radio Rentals shop in Coleraine. The thing we watched on it for a lot of the time was the black and white test card that had hundreds of lines and squares and BBC Colour written on it in. The man from the Radio Rentals shop said that the test card was there so we’d know if our television was working properly but I thought that maybe it wasn’t because for a lot of the time all we had to look at was the black and white test card. Sometimes we watched the Ulster Television test card in black and white which didn’t have colour written on it so none of us became confused but my mammy said the music was miserable. She said we were lucky because we didn’t live too many miles from the border so we could also get the RTÉ black and white test card from the Irish Free State. My daddy said the RTÉ station had modernised Ireland because the old fellas could watch the Holy Mass being said on the set in their best rooms without ever having to go out in the rain to the church and they could even have a couple of nice bottles of Guinness or a small glass of something during the proceedings to take a bit of the fear out of the sermon that the priest would be saying to scorn all the dirty sinners.

Sometimes I’d get so bored with watching the black and white test card on the BBC that I’d ask my mammy if we could change the channel to watch the Holy Mass from the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Athlone but she said that all that Catholic music was even more miserable than Ulster Television’s black and white test card music. So then I asked my mammy if I was well-behaved could I have a bicycle like all the other weans in our street and round about and in the whole of the County Antrim but she always said I couldn’t because they cost a packet and we weren’t made of money and the little extra we had was spent on the black and white television from Coleraine. I wished we were made of money because then I could have cut off two or three of the fingers that I hadn’t a need for and use the money they were made of to buy myself a lovely Raleigh bicycle with a saddlebag for the red lemonade if my mammy was in a mind to give me a bottle.

A poor wee boy without a bicycle to go about on gets this thing that the grownups get and it’s called the depression. The depression’s worse than the migraine because when the grownups have the migraine it hurts their heads when they shout at you so they don’t do it. It’s grand when my mammy has a migraine because she sends me off to Minnie Hart’s wee shop with a shiny Irish threepenny piece with a picture of a hare on one side of it and a Guinness sign on the other to buy some sweets for myself to shut me up. When I’m walking to the shop I love to look at the picture of the hare on the shiny Irish threepenny piece and on the way home I love eating the sweets I’ve bought. I love going to Minnie Hart’s because she gives me extra sweets for my money because I have an accent on me different to all the other weans in Ballymoney and it’s probably because of the Protestant mammy I have from over in England. Sometimes I think about saving up all the shiny Irish threepenny pieces until I’ve enough to buy a hare but I don’t think it would help my mammy’s migraine very much if I arrived home with a big old hare under my arm. But they don’t make a noise I’d tell her.

But this time it was the depression and not the migraine and it was me that had it and not my mammy so I couldn’t enjoy watching the black and white television from Coleraine except if there was a chance they’d be showing on it an episode of Thunderbirds. Another one I liked was Whacky Races because it had in it your woman Penelope Pitstop and wasn’t she gorgeous and my friend Bobby had to keep reminding me it was only a cartoon we were watching. The television could only be watched at certain times of the day. Sometimes there wasn’t even a black and white colour test card to look at.  But if I had a bicycle I could be having adventures in the lovely County Antrim countryside with all the other weans in our street and round about or just with myself whenever I wanted to. My mammy and daddy and my sister love a black and white television and they couldn’t see then that if I was given the bicycle I was asking for I could enjoy exercise out in the fresh air instead of sitting in front of the television with the dog lying on the mat by the fire and farting the arse off itself as my daddy always says and it would shut me up more than any bag of Black Jacks and Fruit Salads that were four for a penny from Minnie Hart’s shop would.

World of Sport with Dickie Davies and Coronation Street with Ena Sharples are what all the mammies and daddies like to be watching but I can’t be doing with them and that’s not just because of the depression I’d got by not having a bicycle. These programmes are just a load of old men in their bathers pretending to fight with each other in a square thing called a ring or a load of old women in black coats drinking milk stout and arguing about whose turn it is to scrub the front steps of the church hall.  I wished my sister would also ask for a bicycle to go about the place on but she seemed happy enough without one. She said she didn’t like World of Sport with Dickie Davies and Coronation Street with Ena Sharples either but she was fond of having a look at the black and white colour test card when she got home from the school of an afternoon.

When they got back from the beautiful Antrim countryside on their bicycles all the other weans in our street and round about but not the poor wee boy who was brave at the hospital with the broken arm laughed at me and made jokes and shouted there goes the poor wee boy who stays at home with his mammy and daddy and Ena Sharples and his sister because he hasn’t a bicycle to go about on. I don’t know why they laughed because many of their mammies and daddies hadn’t been able to get them a black and white television or a sister of any colour, though some had a cousin in Fermoy who would come over and sing a wee song of a Saturday evening to entertain them.

One day my daddy told me he’d told all the people at Glover Site Investigation where he worked that our family had the need of a bicycle. I was suddenly very excited because I thought that because Mr Investigation had been able to get my daddy a white Morris 1000 van with blue joined-up writing on the sides he’d be able to get me a bicycle without any problem at all. It didn’t need to have any writing on it but if there was a Raleigh crest on it somewhere it would be altogether grand. Just like the white Morris 1000 van it would be a perk of my daddy’s job and my mammy wouldn’t want to be going about the lovely County Antrim countryside on it because she’d get even more filthy than we all did from sitting in the white Morris 1000 van.

We’re not made of money but we have a telephone in the house because we need to talk to my Nan where she lives over in England because she’s my mammy’s mammy. Sometimes my mammy needs to talk on the telephone to Mrs Tweed who lives next door to ask her if she could let my mammy have the loan of a bit of sugar until she goes to Stewart’s supermarket in the Main Street on Friday and has she ever seen anything in her life like the state of the curtains that your woman who lives at number thirty-seven has in her window at the front.

On one of the days that we had plenty of sugar in the kitchen press I was able to talk to my Nan over in England on the telephone and I told her the great news about Mr Investigation and the new bicycle. She told me not to get carried away with myself because not everybody had a bicycle to spare but in small towns like Ballymoney everybody knew everybody and everybody knew what everybody had the need of or had the need to dispose of. So in the houses of all my daddy’s friends from where he worked there’d be talk of the poor wee boy that didn’t have a bicycle to go about on and what could be done about it. She said she was sure my daddy was doing his best to get hold of a bicycle but she couldn’t speak for Mr Investigation and was I sure that was his real name.

A few months after my daddy told me that he had told the people at his work about my need for a bicycle he arrived home from work a bit later than usual one evening and told me to go with him out to where his white Morris 1000 van was parked in the street at the back of our house next to Mr Tweed’s brand new Ford Escort car that the other men in our street and round about would often stand beside and say Jaysus, is she not a beauty? or ah the bodywork on her!

I knew what was happening and the anticipation of the appearance of a bicycle was putting me through a state of torment the likes of which only Saint Anthony the Great had ever known before me with his vision that he levitated up in the air and was attacked by demons but managed to shoo them away in the end. And I was happier than ever that my daddy had the white Morris 1000 van because you’d never fit a bicycle in the back of a brand new Ford Escort car. To me a brand new Ford Escort car like the one Mr Tweed had in the street at the back of our house was a posh car for just showing off in but my daddy’s white Morris 1000 van was Thunderbird 2 and Ballymoney’s very own heavy-duty transporter craft for carrying rescue equipment to major disasters and my new bicycle from Mr Investigation’s house to the street at the back of our house in one of its pods.

I was close to weeing my trousers with the excitement of seeing the new bicycle for the first time when the cargo doors of my daddy’s white Thunderbird 2 van opened and I saw a machine that would be the one that was to change my life forever and which had probably cost him something like the price of a couple of nice pints of Guinness or maybe even less. I’d had a go on the other weans’ bicycles before but only for a few wee minutes so hurry up and I’ll kill you if you scratch the paintwork on it was what they used to say to me so I hadn’t been paying much attention to all the technical details because I was busy being excited and careful at the same time. My new bicycle had two wheels, two pedals, an oily chain, handlebars and a saddle to sit on. It seemed perfect to me until my daddy said how well built it was as he struggled to lift it out of the white Morris 1000 van onto the road and a bit of doubt came into my mind. It weighed a ton and it already had scratches on the hand-painted frame. It was a black and white bicycle.

I didn’t know what bicycle gears were for so I didn’t realise straight away that it didn’t have any. But I did know that I’d be needing brakes to stop the thing or slow it down so I was delighted that it had really big ones that were made of a lot of metal rods and levers connected together that looked very complicated and the sort of thing that the real Thunderbird 2 might have to stop it when it arrived at a major disaster or to slow it down for taking a sharp bend and I was sure that the other weans in our street and round about would stand beside my new bicycle and say Jaysus, is she not a beauty?

It was probably the brakes that made my bicycle so heavy. I didn’t complain but I said to my daddy that it might be a bit hard for a wee boy to ride such a thing about in the lovely Antrim countryside with all the hills there are. My daddy said I’d be grand because the bicycle was built to last and because it was so heavy it wouldn’t go too fast so I wouldn’t hurt myself so much when I fell off it. He reminded me that I’d been saying that going about on a bicycle would be a good bit of exercise for me so a great heavy bicycle would be just the thing for building up the muscles in my weedy wee legs.

When all the other weans in our street and round about saw my new bicycle for the first time they had to get off their own bicycles because they were laughing so much they might have fallen off and scratched the paintwork. They shouted there goes the poor wee boy that goes about on a penny-farthing bicycle with wee wheels and his daddy stole the brakes off the Flying Scotsman to put on it. They shouldn’t have laughed because many of them had bicycles that their mammies and daddies had chosen for them because they looked nice in the shop with shiny red and blue paintwork but after a while the brakes didn’t work at all. My daddy said all the other mammies and daddies were mad for letting their weans go about on bicycles with no brakes on them because riding up some of the hills they’d be within a hair’s breadth of killing themselves on the way back down and they should at least have a brick attached to a piece of string to stop them flying away out of control.

When my new bicycle was put away in the shed and the black oil from the bicycle chain was scrubbed off my legs in the bath until they were red raw and everybody in the house was in bed because they’d finished looking at the black and white colour test card and Ena Sharples I watched the hares from my bedroom window. Hares don’t have bicycles at all and they seem happy enough. They just have each other as friends to play with when the Moon’s shining on the Green in our lovely County Antrim countryside.

Image: My own photograph of my own pre-decimalisation Irish threepenny piece with a hare on it that’s been faffed about with for ages using post-decimalisation photo-editing software on my own computer. Actually I’ve more than one. I’ve an old tobacco tin full of them.

The next part:

Coming soon!