Sacks Oliver - On the move : a life

W hen I was at boarding school, sent away during the war as a little boy, I had a sense of imprisonment and powerlessness, and I longed for movement and power, ease of movement and superhuman powers. I enjoyed these, briefly, in dreams of flying and, in a different way, when I went horse riding in the village near school. I loved the power and suppleness of my horse, and I can still evoke its easy and joyous movement, its warmth and sweet, hayey smell.

Most of all, I loved motorbikes. My father had had one before the war, a Scott Flying Squirrel with a big water-cooled engine and an exhaust like a scream, and I wanted a powerful bike, too. Images of bikes and planes and horses merged for me, as did images of bikers and cowboys and pilots, whom I imagined to be in precarious but jubilant control of their powerful mounts. My boyish imagination was fed by Westerns and films of heroic air combat, seeing pilots risking their lives in Hurricanes and Spitfires but lent protection by their thick flying jackets, as motorcyclists were by their leather jackets and helmets.

When I returned to London as a ten-year-old in 1943, I enjoyed sitting in the window seat of our front room, watching and trying to identify motorbikes as they sped by (after the war, when petrol was easier to get, they became much commoner). I could identify a dozen or more marquesAJS, Triumph, BSA, Norton, Matchless, Vincent, Velocette, Ariel, and Sunbeam, as well as rare foreign bikes like BMWs and Indians.

As a teenager, I would go regularly to Crystal Palace with a like-minded cousin to see the motorbike racing there. I often hitchhiked to Snowdonia to climb or to the Lake District to swim and sometimes got a lift on a motorbike. Riding pillion thrilled me and stimulated daydreams of the sleek, powerful bike I would get one day.

My first motorbike, when I was eighteen, was a secondhand BSA Bantam with a little two-stroke engine and, as it turned out, faulty brakes. I took it to Regents Park on its maiden ride, which turned out to be fortunate, possibly lifesaving, because the throttle jammed when I was going flat out and the brakes were not strong enough to stop the bike or even slow it more than a little. Regents Park is encircled by a road, and I found myself going round and round it, perched on a motorbike I had no way of stopping. I hooted or yelled to warn pedestrians out of my way, but after I had made two or three circuits, everyone gave me a free path and shouted encouragement as I passed by again and again. I knew the bike would have to stop eventually, when it ran out of gas, and finally, after dozens of involuntary circuits of the park, the engine sputtered and died.

My mother had been very much against my getting a bike in the first place. That I expected, but I was surprised by my fathers opposition, since he had ridden a bike himself. They had tried to dissuade me from getting a bike by buying me a little car, a 1934 Standard that could barely do forty miles per hour. I had grown to hate the little car, and one day, impulsively, I sold it and used the proceeds to buy the Bantam. Now I had to explain to my parents that a feeble little car or bike was dangerous because one lacked the power to pull out of trouble and that I would be much safer with a larger, more powerful bike. They acceded to this reluctantly and funded me for a Norton.

On my first Norton, a 250 cc machine, I had a couple of near accidents. The first came when I approached a red traffic light too fast and, realizing that I could not safely brake or turn, drove straight on and somehowmiraculouslypassed between two lines of cars going in opposite directions. Reaction came a minute later: I rode another block, parked the bike in a side roadand fainted.

The second accident occurred at night in heavy rain on a winding country road. A car coming in the opposite direction did not dim its headlights, and I was blinded. I thought there would be a head-on collision, but at the last moment I stepped off the bike (an expression of ridiculous mildness for a potentially lifesaving but potentially fatal maneuver). I let the bike go in one direction (it missed the car but was totaled) and myself in another. Fortunately, I was wearing a helmet, boots, and gloves, as well as full leathers, and though I slid twenty yards or so on the rain-slicked road, I was so well protected by my clothing that I did not get a scratch.

My parents were shocked, but very glad I was in one piece, and raised strangely little objection to my getting another, more powerful bikea 600 cc Norton Dominator. At this point, I had finished at Oxford, and I was about to go to Birmingham, where I had a job as a house surgeon for the first six months of 1960, and I was careful to say that with the newly opened M1 motorway between Birmingham and London and a fast bike, I would be able to come home every weekend. The motorway in those days had no speed limit, so I could be back in a little over an hour.