"Wow! Radical wheels!" "Radical moves!" "That is just soooo radical!"
Sad to say I never owned one of these "Radical" icons myself, asking instead on my eleventh birthday for a silver Raleigh Grifter. On the morning of my birthday it was standing in the hall of my house like something out of a Yellow Pages advert. I remember it was a school day so the bike stayed there until I got home. As soon as I was in the door, and still in my school uniform, I straddled it. As I did so the Blakey on my shoe scratched the paintwork on the hefty central bar leaving a scar which would forever be there to remind me of my bike's arrival.
I somehow equate that bike with taking a step towards manhood. This was no toy but rather a solid and study steed with a twist-grip-handle-gear-change-thingy (with three gears!) With it I made my first solo cycle trips around the streets and paths of Thundersly. I even went as far as taking it to the wooded playground of my youth - The Glen. It would have been there that I discovered the first big drawback of the Grifter. Its rugged frame and big, thick tyres gave it the look of an off-road vehicle but unlike the BMX a Grifter was much, much heavier. It was therefore "Radical" going down hill and "Reasonable" on the flat but "Ruddy Ridiculous" trying to go back up again!
Most of my friends at the time lived at the bottom of Bread and Cheese Hill or beyond (see 'Intervention'). Therefore I wouldn't normally take the Grifter with me when I went round to play as the trip back would no doubt have killed me. However, I did have one friend who lived near by who was a couple of years younger me and one day he told me to come round and bring my bike. When I got there I found that he and some other younger kids from his school were all cycling around the driveway of his house, being a large concrete affair, as well as in and out of the road, which being off the main drag was always relatively quiet.
A game of two wheeled Follow-My-Leader began with each of us trailing along in a line copying the route of the person in front. The bikes in use by the others were either small kiddie bikes with one or two BMXs thrown in. Finally someone in front swung out into the road, turned back to the footpath and pulling up their front wheel bumped back over the curb. The trail of bikes duly followed with myself currently towards the rear. As I approached the curb at speed I lifted my body and pulled up hard on the handle-bars to raise the front wheel but the Grifter refused to move even a millimetre. My front tyre hit the curbstone and my body, already standing on the pedals and off the seat, was thrown violently forward!
Luckily the Grifter was designed with a soft foam rubber cover between the handlebars which my chest bounced off harmlessly. Unluckily the two inch diameter bar between my legs had no such padding to cushion the similar blow to my testicles! My younger, prepubescent biker pals stared in confusion as to why a little 'knock' had somehow left me with a stunned, red face and open mouth from which issued a note to make Aled Jones proud. This was in no way "Radical" but rather a word previously heard but not yet endured - "Rupture!"
I can remember carefully dismounting before laying down in the garden. Eventually, when I had recovered sufficiently, I made my apologies and walked my bike homeward with watering eyes and a stilted gait. In retrospect I wonder if the Grifter wasn't looking to get a little payback for the time I'd scarred it. It certainly marked a change in the relationship between us. It may not have been a "radical" change but where manhood was concerned it was certainly less of a "step towards..." and more of a "swift kick in the..."
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