Wild Motorcycle Tales

Wild Motorcycle Tales

Here's a great story from Dyna. Got your own story? Send it to me.

First Kick

Things happen in life that have a defining influence on the path that you are on. They can sneak up on you and have such a profound effect that they can knock you out of your standing quite literally.

Growing up, I was lucky enough to have an old biker who lived directly across the road from me, who put up with me pestering him about how to fix this and fix that. Old Jack was an amazing bloke, grey beard and nearly white pony tail, pale blue eyes that would cut you in half with a single glance.

Now Old Jack was a law unto himself, rough and a man who lived life his way without any apology to anybody. He did not suffer fools and could be mean as a bulldog chewing nettles when crossed.

My father was killed when I was just four years old and fortunately for me Old Jack decided to fill the role after I got into a little trouble. I guess he felt sorry for me and for my mother when I kept getting brought home in a squad car time after time before I reached the age of ten.

Jack had left Ireland in '39 at the age of nineteen and gone to England to fight the just war against the Nazis. He joined the British Army and became a dispatch rider and so started a lifelong love affair with motorcycles.

He served in several campaigns during the war, from North Africa up through Italy and eventually the Normandy invasion and on to Hitler's Berlin where he remained in the army as a dispatch rider until he returned to England in '51 where he left the forces to work in a bike shop in London. It was there he was thrown into the heady world of the new rock-n-roll and the world of the ton-up boys, the Ace Cafe and Brighton beach.

Because of his genius with the combustion engine, his talents were forever in demand. As a kid I would listen to stories of the beauty of the Norton featherbed frame or the first Tritons or Tri-BSAs.

When Jack was in the mood, with the aid of a little Jameson and a bottle of stout, he would talk for hours about all the things he had seen, and that would be a whole different story.

In Jack's garage, he had his runner, an old Triumph Bonnie from 1968, a little rough to look at but mechanically sound and a selection of bikes that were kept under a tarp that even I was never allowed to look under. I did try to once and he sent me away for a week and told me not to come back until I was able to conduct myself with self discipline and to be able to follow instruction.

For that whole week I would watch him come and go on his trusted Triumph and seethe with anger for him sending me away, but I got over myself and went back to listen, to learn and without realizing it, be given something that I would end up carrying with me for the rest of my life -- a code of ethics for life and the necessary tools to make my way in this crazy world.

Back in the spring of 1985, I was just a young lad with just a little over two years riding bikes. I had own two bikes that were bought for patience and had to be worked on before they could even dream to be road worthy. The first was a Honda 50 and the second a Kawasaki KE125.

The 50 was reliable enough but had no street cred. The traillie was respectable enough but would not go in the rain and would overheat in the summer. It was similar to a 3TA Triumph chop I had later in life that I really tried my utmost to get on with but I ended shooting at with a shotgun in a drunken haze of temper one night -- the less said about that the better.

So there I was, sitting in my mother's garage working on that poor traillie, unaware that something was about to transpire that would alter my life forever.

Old Jack was 65 at this stage and getting on. Time had taken its toll and he had had to stop riding two years beforehand due to severe arthritis and had just started to use a walking stick.

As I sat on the ground looking into the semi-dismantled carburetor of my Kwak, I saw Old Jack across the road waving me over and I struggled off the garage floor and limped over with a leg that was half asleep.

I must have looked like some sort of freaky zombie making my way to him because his face lit up with that wide old toothless grin that always meant he had some quick quip or remark ready to throw out.

"Oh look, it is Douglas Barder," he teased.

"Fuck off!" I replied, grinning like a demented fool trying to stay upright.

"I need you to do me a favour."

"Sure," I nodded. "Anything you want. What's up?"

He pointed to his shed door and asked me to open it. After pulling back the large sliding door, I looked in at the old Triumph sitting there, the spotless workshop and the tarp covered bikes I was never allowed to look at, but burned me with intense curiosity every time I saw them.

"I need you to get these running again," he said as he stroked his beard with his scrunched up arthritic hand, smiling at me because he knew he had just made my day, decade and millennium with just one statement.

I was on the way to the promised land. I was about to see what was under the tarp. But being a teenager and trying to be cool, I simply and dumbly replied, "No sweat."

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