The Princess

My bike is a beauty. A Pashley Princess bought on ebay from a woman in Leicester selling up and going to Spain. She kept it in her bedroom and never rode it in case life happened to it. Then life happened to her in the shape of Rodrigo and she didn’t need a bike with a hint of passion in its name. Or princess; I’m sure he made her feel like a queen. So the Pashley, more state of the nation than state of the art with rod brakes, retro chrome and leather saddle, came to me and has never looked back. It doesn’t mind the rain, the puddles I splash it through (on purpose sometimes just for the juvenile thrill), never groans under the weight of Spar bags and butcher’s bags, hasn’t even complained about the recent addition of a small toddler seat just behind the handlebars. A loyal friend.

Like all good friends though, it isn’t what she does for me but how she makes me feel that matters. With her I am weightless, I am winged. It’s how my daughter feels on her scooter. I see it in the gleam of her eyes, freedom snapping in the tips of her flown back hair. We travel like this to her music lessons. Her on the scooter, me on the bike.
“I’ll wait for you at the corner” I shout when we get to the traffic lights, even though she knows the routine perfectly well. I signal and turn, wait for her with one foot balanced like a ballerina in toe shoes. She hunches down watching for the pedestrian signal then flies like a greyhound let loose. No idea how amazing she looks, or that it has taken her brain twenty-three thousand signals to her body to get her from one side of the road to the other. No idea at all that at the speed she is going one bit of brick in the path could catapult her headfirst into tomorrow.

Last summer my husband and I tried out our deeply low-tech bikes on a new cycle path along the river. River to the right of us, miles and miles of fertile farmland on the left in large rectangular blankets of green and brown stretched out to dry. Purple stripes of lettuces, limy green romaine. At the market gardener’s plot you could have mistaken the farmer for his scarecrow, but he moved. We took a sudden turning that looked like the main one, dipped steeply down a rutted bank and found ourselves on dirt track to somewhere. Side by side now we talked. Effortless, the whole thing. There is no cost to cycling here in this flattest part of England, other than the bike on ebay. No pay for it tomorrow in your legs, no huffing up the hill. The dirt track discovered a road that seemed to say left, the next one right. By accident we passed the enormous new hostel built for migrant workers where huge signs delineated private land, ingress and egress in the kind of Gestapo speak that put a burst of power in your pedal. Then open roads, two cars wide with not a car in sight. The sheer delight of it. For the best of five miles we saw only swallows and hedges, trees and sky. The cage of my heart flung wide.

There were rooflines then. A road sign. Two suburban planters like an obscenity scrawled at the drive of a mean faced bungalow. A distant windmill dark brown above the tall grasses its white sails welcoming us beyond. Hot and thirsty, we started to dream of drinking. A long thirst quenching glass first, then stout slow pints of rich brown ale under the umbrellas at the Maid’s Head.

We entered the village abruptly at the side of the village green. It is the village’s best side I think. All timber frame and thatch,a pond with ducks. We always wonder which house we would live in, though we both know we prefer our slightly less postcard perfect village that still has its shops, its school, its vicar, and an old-fashioned garage with overhead petrol pumps – a particular delight to my husband (must be a boy thing). Like my husband’s Saturday morning cycle ride with Lycra Rob. A boy thing if ever there was one. Rob rolls up at quarter to eight clad in go faster skin tight black, and shoes whose heels do not touch the ground. My husband, in cut off trousers and chewed old trainers gives him a friendly run for his money. (Lycra Rob and his Italian/American wife Corrine deserve a blog in their own right. Generous and hospitable, they know cocktails betteren Pa Larkin and share their parties with a whole host of darling buds of May.)

Men dressed like Lycra Rob had colonised the last table in the garden of the Maid’s Head. They were folding up their maps as we clattered in on our boneshakers, screeched the brakes and flung our bikes against the stone wall, eager for a drink. They had the good grace to offer us their outgoing table and not to laugh when we said we had cycled all the way ‘on those’. (the bikes they meant, but my legs would have aroused as much incredulity I am sure). A few raised eyebrows, a nod towards the Pash with its basket the size of Scotland. My husband went in to order and I sat down and tried to figure out on their map exactly how it was we had got there. These men plan their routes in advance. Months by the look of it.
“Short run today” one of them said “only twenty miles”.
One by one they boarded their bikes like chargers. “Two and a half thousand” one of them confided in me against his chum with a swagger in his voice and pound signs for eyes. My husband returned with the glorious drinks as the last of them was wobbling, his ballerina shoes not clicking in properly to the pedals. He did this jiggly little dance with the handlebars, struggling to keep the bike upright till his foot could find its place. Then there, right on the lush green grass he fell, in slow motion, like an eight-year old. Unhurt, but deflated. I had the good grace not to laugh. But I couldn’t resist shouting, with a friendly wave, “My bike never does that to me”. My bike is a beauty. It’s the way she makes me feel, the cage flung wide.