On the Road Bike (18 page)

‘Bring your cycling shoes,' he'd insisted. ‘You're going to ride up a bloody mountain.'

In
Orpington?
I thought. But I didn't say anything. I just made sure I had my cycling shoes. If Ron told you to do something, then you were normally well advised to do it.

The day had begun forbiddingly. I rode the ten or so miles from my place to his, misjudged the severity of the ride, and collapsed from sugar-depleted exhaustion at a Bromley petrol station on the way. One flapjack and twenty minutes later he answered his door, to find me and my (very humble) bike looking like something undesirable smeared across his doormat. He gingerly picked up my bike and stuck it in his shed, eyeing up the rust patches on the chain, and the worn out tyres with a simmering discontent he did well to contain. A neurotic intolerance of poorly maintained equipment is perhaps the only thing that unites every rider I have ever met.

‘It's not about the bike, Ron,' I quipped, merrily.

‘Yes it bloody is.' We went inside.

Ron and Gill had bought the house in the early 1970s. He led me through to the pleasant sunny kitchen while Gill left us to it. We could see through the French windows that autumn had just started to blow into the garden. We drank tea, and Ron doodled with a black biro as he listened to my questions. Very carefully, and with great attention paid to the shading, he wrote the word ‘Cyclist' in a homespun, ornate font. That single word was it, really, that was the sole line of inquiry.

Listening to him was like an immersion in an exotic language. The flora and fauna of the domestic cycling scene informed all his memories, a mystifying landscape of names and dormant institutions long forgotten. They tripped off his tongue: the Golden Wheel, the William Tell, the White Hope and something that sounded like the Wally Gimber, and probably was the Wally Gimber. And name after name of towering figures of yesteryear from a track scene so central to Ron's life that he could barely conceive of a world in which they held little or no currency, men of the decimalisation era with names like Norman, Roy and Don. I could have stopped him and asked who they were and what the hell they were all doing in Kirkby that Tuesday night, but that would have got us nowhere. Ron's narrative allowed for little deviation.

He spoke in a code, even when asked the most superficially comprehensible question.

‘Where did you meet Gill, Ron?'

‘Ah.' He looked up from his doodling towards the kitchen door behind which Gill was playing with one of their four grandchildren.

‘Well,' he started, with great portent. ‘We was down Gillotts, and it had the Thirty-Four Nomads.'

A Dictaphone, placed between us, recorded that sentence. I have listened back to it seven times, now, hoping to understand it. But there it is, in all its naked, impenetrable glory. Gillotts. Nomads. Thirty-four of them. You know.

Ronald James Keeble was born just over the water from the Houses of Parliament, less than a year after the end of the Second World War. He grew up in the Elephant and Castle, an area that has consistently failed to acquire a satisfactory identity in the landscape of South London's town planning.

Some years after Ron came into the world, they turned the area into a vast network of dual carriageways and roundabouts, with subterranean passages and brutal shopping precincts that would define the location for half a century. Only now has the Elephant's extraordinary proximity to Westminster been reflected in the potential of its real estate value, and the developers have started to land grab en masse. Gone is the archetypal Heygate Estate that flanked the arterial New Kent Road with its endlessly long, endlessly forbidding façade. Going is the pink-clad Elephant Shopping Centre, complete with indoor market and best remembered for housing the public enquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

But, in Ron's childhood, in those years of austerity and making do, Elephant and Castle remained, at least in part, resolutely flattened; scarcely a priority for the Greater London Council. Besides, the Luftwaffe had left its calling card in the shape of a series of burnt-out shells and buildings reduced to crumbling collapse. So it came as no surprise to me when Ron, nursing another cup of tea into which Gill had slopped one healthy teaspoon of sugar, suddenly remembered where he'd got his first bike from.

‘In a bomb crater, it was. The forks were bent, but I got that sorted.'

It's not quite true, of course. By now I was beginning to establish that such childhood memories often required visiting and re-visiting before the layers of obfuscation and fabrication are eventually peeled away. Before Ron had found that bike in a bomb crater, he'd already written off another one. A friend had lent him his, so that he could ride over to Millwall and visit a girlfriend who went by the appropriately post-war name of Sheila Mellish. On his way back from his liaison with Miss Mellish, he lost control of his mate's bike. ‘I was coming down Blackheath Hill and I went under a lorry.'

Blackheath Hill is very steep.

I am struck, not for the first time, by the casual way in which riders recall life-threatening accidents. A few years later, and by this time he had become a proper rider, fate picked up where the lorry left off. Ron was lucky not to have been killed. ‘I smashed my back up. I was told that I wouldn't walk again.'

He was at the front end of a hotly contested points race at a track meeting at Earls Court.

‘I was going round Graham Webb for a point, and he lost it. And he took me up into the banking.' The track at Earls Court was a temporary structure, installed just for the meetings and then dismantled. Health and Safety wasn't a priority.

‘Well, I went over the top of the banking, fell down into the stalls that they'd made, and then fell through them down to the floor.' When he opened his eyes and looked up, all he saw was the criss-cross geometry of the wooden scaffolding that supported the seating. In his concussed state, he assumed that he was lying at the bottom of a gas holder, looking up at the sky.

A hard man, then. That's what I think he is. But, it appears I am wrong. Ron Keeble smiles self-deprecatingly back at me.

‘I was soft. I don't mind admitting it. I was a soft southerner. I never ever went abroad [to live]. I was a mummy's boy. If, like now, they'd said you've got to go and live in Manchester, I wouldn't have liked it.'

And so Ron Keeble, unlike others more discontent with their lot back at home and dreaming of adventure, never really chanced his arm in the big bad world. Unlike so many who went before, he remained resolutely wedded to the British scene, the world of the Six-Day track meetings (sponsored for many years by Britain's worst ever lager: Skol) and domestic honours. Not for him the privations of life on the road, he wanted his home comforts too keenly.

The only really big adventure away from home left a lasting impression. He went to Munich in 1972. He was part of the Team Pursuit quartet who came home with the Olympic bronze medal. The other three men were Ian Hallam, Mick Bennett and Willi Moore, who blew a tyre in the semi-final, allowing West Germany to gain a fatal, and decisive, advantage. They went on to win gold. But Great Britain can feel with some justification, that it could have been, perhaps should have been, them. Such things change lives.

Ron, people tell me, took a long time to come to terms with that, if he ever did at all.

The 1972 Games, as they are remembered by Ron Keeble, sound like a terrific
Boy's Own
adventure. ‘Hi-jinks' and ‘capers' spring to mind. Listening to him relive those two weeks of competition, it's hard not to feel deeply envious of such an experience, the shared joie de vivre, the camaraderie. Bound together by the sheer effort of getting yourself to the start line, fit and with a functioning bike, the team were held together despite, not because of, their circumstances. They had to supply their own bikes, and their own tyres, for example, and you suspect that if the authorities had found a way of getting them to fork out for their own train tickets to Germany, they'd probably have done that, too.

The preparation, needless to say, was homespun and eccentric. Mick Bennett had been entered to ride the kilometre time trial (the others had all ridden deliberately slowly in the Olympic trials to avoid being picked) as well as the Team Pursuit. He therefore could justifiably claim to have worked harder than the others and needed more pampering in recovery. He developed his own techniques, and used to borrow Gill's Novocaine cream, which she was using as a topical anaesthetic during breast-feeding. He used to smother his legs in his friend's wife's medicine, and go for a lie down in his room after a training block.

‘He loved it,' remembers Ron, with a wistful smile. Knowing that their teammate would be nodding off, his legs smothered in breast-feeding ointment, Ron, Ian and Willi would sneak up to his room, and then rap at the door, pretending to be race starters.

‘
Attention, messieurs les coureurs
!' they bellowed through the door (which roughly translates as On Your Marks!)

There'd be a brief silence during which the trio of athletes held their noses to prevent their giggles from snorting out. And then, from behind the door, ‘Fuck off and leave me alone.' They'd run off hooting with mirth, like a scene in
Carry On Cycling
. A young Sid James would have played Keeble. Bennett would have been Charles Hawtrey.

And in the athletes' village, they devised a cyclists' decathlon. This comprised Peach Lobbing (lobbing peaches), Restaurant Racing (a bunch sprint to the canteen), Sauna Sitting (sweating stamina), as well as more conventional disciplines, like the Swimathon. This involved swimming lengths of the pool, having to reach out of the water to touch the wall before splashing back in and turning for another length. It was all well and good, before Willi, reaching for the wall, dislocated his shoulder and locked solid, his outstretched arm trapped in mid-air. He couldn't move.

‘Willi! Touch the fucking wall!' they yelled at him.

‘Fuck off, Ian. Help!'

‘Ian was a doctor,' Ron recalls. ‘He was the only one with medical training. He had to pop his arm back in the socket.' This was just days before their competition started.

Mischief. Everything about Ron Keeble implies mischief. To say that his eyes twinkle would be the second cliché in this chapter, but another one that I am prepared to indulge. He twinkles with the delight of it all. Mick Bennett once told me that Ron had found life after Munich very difficult. This may be true. But the man sitting opposite me, scribbling away and chuckling, shows no signs of anything other than rude health, and mischief.

Occasionally, he reminds me that I still have a mountain to climb. I swiftly change the subject back again. Back to Munich.

When horror visited the athletes' village, with the hostage taking of the Israeli Olympic team, the GB Pursuit Team were evacuated from their rooms that overlooked the infamous balcony on which the terrorists were, from time to time, visible.

The intervening years have given Ron plenty of time to feel the true outrage of this tragedy. But at the time, and with their own race programme interrupted and indefinitely suspended, their self-absorption made them brood.

‘The whole time you were thinking about the ride, the ride, the ride. You were still thinking selfishly, “Shit. I've got enough on my plate.”'

Besides, as the siege went into a second day, Ron thought they could have been of use to the authorities. One of their ‘cyclists' decathlon' events had involved tossing cartons of the sponsor's chocolate drink Sour Milo onto the exact balcony they now saw on their TV screens.

‘We could have taken then out. If they'd left it to us, me and Willi could have taken them out, whack! No problem.'

Appallingly, no amount of improvised British bravado would have had the slightest effect. The siege ended in bloodshed. Eleven members of the Israeli Olympic Team were murdered.

Ron shows me his Munich medal. It's not kept anywhere special; today he leaves it curled around a statuette next to the telly. Tomorrow it might be slung round the door handle of the fridge. But, if Munich and 1972 represent certain things to most of us, they mean much more to Ron Keeble. Of that you can be sure.

Now, suddenly, there is another cyclist in the kitchen. Brian Smith is a retired Scottish pro, a two-time British National Road Race Champion, no less, and once, briefly, a teammate of Lance Armstrong on Motorola. He was a tough rider, racing clean in an era when not that many others were. He's still a prodigiously tough man, with fingers in many pies: a team manager, a commentator, a fund-raiser, a fixer. He is also married to Ron Keeble's daughter, and the grandchild with whom Gill has been preoccupied is his oldest boy.

My otherness has just been made flesh and blood. I am no longer merely ‘not a cyclist', I am also ‘not family'.

Brian had got wind of my visit, complete with my vaguely promised intention to ride up this mythical mountain. It transpires that the mountain in question is Alpe d'Huez. Ron Keeble has a virtual trainer, complete with a video display, in his gym. This, it seems, Brian Smith cannot miss.

‘My record's thirty-four minutes,' he claims, with not the slightest flicker to give away the fact that this is utter bollocks.

‘But Pantani's record is thirty-seven something!' I protest. ‘And he was doped.'

‘Well, I did thirty-four.' There is no trace of self-doubt. I later find out that his record is in fact forty-six, but at the time I believed him. Ron, meanwhile, has got up to boil the kettle.

It's good to see them together, the archetypal cockney and the deadpan Scot. They should have little in common, being two alpha males from opposing ends of the country and a generation apart. But here they are, cutting each other to ribbons with their barbed comments, completing each other's sentences, clearly utterly comfortable in each other's company, two peas in a pod. Or, as Brian later confesses, like father and son. They are both, after all, cyclists. I listen as their conversation weaves in and out of the sport.