Eric Newby - Round Ireland in Low Gear

My next purchase was something called a Citadel Lock which had a half-inch metal shackle said to be proof against a pair of 42″ bolt cutters and big enough to lock both bikes to a parking meter or a set of railings at the same time. However it was so heavy that we left it at home and took with us instead a couple of pre-coiled 5ft steel cable locks which would last about ten seconds against bolt cutters.

By this time I began to feel myself in a state of euphoria, like a character in a Fitzgerald novel going shopping – Gatsby stocking up on shirts, or Nicole Diver buying an army of toy soldiers in Paris in 1925: ‘It was fun spending money in the sunlight of the foreign city, with healthy bodies … that sent streams of colour up to their faces; with arms and hands, legs and ankles that stretched out confidently, reaching or stepping with the confidence of women lovely to men.’ Although it was a bit different in Bristol in deep December for a senior citizen with all the confidence of a man unlovely to women – well, most women.

Then we shopped for clothes. The most difficult to find on the spur of the moment, because they were very expensive, were the long zip jackets with baggy trousers to match made from Gore-Tex, a wind and waterproof material which allows perspiration to evaporate. Shoes were another problem. Cycling shoes designed for riding lightweight bikes on the road would be hopeless anywhere off it in waterlogged old Ireland. In the end we both took climbing boots and short, wool-lined wellingtons which were warm and could be accommodated on the big mountain bike pedals but soon lost their linings. And we bought long wool and nylon stockings with elasticated tops that came up over the knee and waterproof over-mitts with warm inner linings.

We also spent a gruesome hour in company with other senior citizens stocking up for the winter, buying thermal underwear, which everyone said we must have: long johns to sleep in and underwear to ride in. Some of it looked terrible, especially a particular brand of men’s underpants which came down to the knees and gave the wearer, in this case myself, an air of geriatric instability. It also, when it warmed up, gave off an awful pong. ‘I wonder,’ Wanda said, emerging from the fitting room in which she had given the thumbs-down to the underpants, and surveying the milling throng, ‘if they are all going to Ireland, too, on bicycles. If they are we shall look pretty silly.’

As I had promised myself, I took with me a huge cap that had belonged to my father – almost a dead ringer of that worn by the now dead and gone Jackie Coogan, which Wanda from now on referred to as my ‘Jackie Hooghly’.

The bikes were delivered to us by van from Bristol the following Tuesday at what was literally the eleventh hour. Together with the optional and non-optional extras, all done up in protective wadding, they made an impressive pair of packages, and the bikes themselves, which had been wrapped like Egyptian mummies in the equivalent of cerements, were so scintillating when finally exposed to the light of day that it seemed a pity to foul them up by riding them. If there really was such a concept as state-of-the-art, this was it.

‘We can put it all down to expenses,’ I said to Wanda.

‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ she said. ‘I can just see the expression on the Inspector of Taxes’ face. He’ll laugh all the way to your funeral.’

‘Well, why did you let me buy all this stuff if that’s what you think?’ I asked.

‘I was going to stop you,’ she said, ‘but when I saw how much you were enjoying yourself, somehow I couldn’t. You looked like a small boy in a sweet shop.’

We set off to negotiate some of the network of lanes in the Isle of Purbeck, the majority of which involve ascents of unnatural steepness. The first part included a fairly hard climb along the flanks of Smedmore Hill. This time I rode behind Wanda in order to be able to tell her when to operate the front and rear gear shift mechanisms. This worked all right until she suddenly pulled the left-hand lever back and at the same time pushed the right-hand one forward, while still riding on the flat, which transferred her instantly to the lowest gear available to her, 23.6″, leaving her with her legs whirring round until she fell off.

In spite of this setback, she did succeed in climbing the hill, from the top of which we roared downhill towards the hamlet of Steeple, which consists of a manor, a vicarage, a very old church which houses a giant eighteenth-century version of a pianola and a plaque displaying the stars and stripes of the Lawrences, a family who were collateral ancestors of George Washington. From here a hill climbs to the summit of West Creech Hill, a rise of about 295 feet in 1000 yards, which may not seem much, and certainly doesn’t look much, but is in fact excruciating. If any of the Alpine passes I rode over on my way to Italy in 1971 had been as difficult as parts of this hill, I would never have ridden a bike over the Alps at all.

‘You go on,’ said Wanda, when the time came to tackle it. ‘Don’t watch me.’

From the top, completely breathless, I watched the little figure gallantly toiling up, very slowly, very wobbly at times, but she made it.

‘I did it,’ she said. ‘Not bad for a grandmother, am I?’

I felt so proud of her I wanted to cry; but privately I prayed that there wouldn’t be many similar hills in Ireland.

When we got back to the house Wanda allowed me a fleeting glimpse of what her hand-finished, calf leather, high-density, memory-retentive foam Desmoplan base saddle had done to her in the course of about six miles and I knew that unless a better alternative could be found she would be a non-starter in the Irish Cycling Stakes, 1985. So I got on the telephone to Enid in Bristol and the following morning a large carton full of saddles arrived by special delivery.

I had solved the saddle problem on my mountain bike by ordering a Brooks B66 leather saddle which had big springs at the back. Most mountain bike saddles seem to have been designed by men who don’t realize that on a mountain bike the rider sits more or less upright, as on a roadster, so that the whole weight of the body, divided on a bicycle with dropped handlebars between the saddle and the bars, falls on the saddle. It is even worse for women. Women have wider hips and, as the Buyer’s Bible delicately put it, having presumably taken female advice, ‘the pubic arch between the legs is shallower, making the genital area very vulnerable to pressure’.

The saddles we now received were mostly similar in construction to the one that had originally come with Wanda’s bike. Some had been injected with silicon fluid, to make them more bouncy beneath the layer of ‘high-density memory-retentive foam’ already referred to. With all these lying around in the hall, it resembled a saddle fetishist’s den. Eventually, Wanda chose a Brooks B72 leather touring saddle, ‘specially designed for women cyclists and those wanting a broader support’.

I now spent the time, when not engaged in packing my pannier bags (we were leaving the next day), in bashing her saddle with a lump of wood, and rubbing it with Brooks Proofhide and something called Neatsfoot Oil in order to take some of the sting out of it for Wanda’s inaugural Irish ride, which I was planning with my customary inefficiency.

There lay the green shore of Ireland, like some coast of plenty. We could see towns, towers, churches, harvests; but the curse of eight hundred years we could not discern.