After Midnight Read online

  Perhaps the old man was worried about the impact that seeing the course would have on me—the place where I had started out as a bright shining star and fizzled out as a damp squib. Or perhaps he thought I would be rusty—it was a decade since I had ridden a bike in anger. Maybe he was just getting old, and I hadn’t noticed. Then I caught his wink and he chortled as he gripped the worn rail and filled his lungs with salty air, as if trying to catch the whiff of motorcycle exhaust that would soon blanket the island.

  I punched him on the shoulder. ‘Okey-dokey. And I’ll make the Horlicks, eh?’

  An hour after docking we went across to the pits to have the bikes scrutineered. We weren’t here for competition—my father had entered his last works bike thirteen years ago in 1951, the year after I’d quit racing—but any ‘specials’ which took to the mountain course were still subject to a safety check, apart from those on the free-for-all known as Mad Sunday, when the public got to ride the course. Dad had pulled strings to get us a place on one of the extra official practice days, even though we wouldn’t be competing. When I asked how, he came out with some mangled aphorism about packdrills and blind horses. In other words: mind your own business.

  It was the usual chaos in the pits, only more so since my day. There were trailers for the star riders, shiny portable workshops, legions of mechanics swarming over bikes, and plenty of banners bearing names unfamiliar back in the early 1950s—Suzuki, Yamaha, Honda. Unfamiliar and, to be honest, unthinkable back then.

  While my father went off to sort out the passes and paperwork, I leaned against my bike, arms crossed, trying to take it all in. There were many new faces, people who had grown into legends in my absence—like Hailwood, who had started here in 1958 when he was just eighteen, before blasting a name for himself three years later, and McIntyre, Hocking and Read. The sights and sounds were much the same, I thought, except for one pungent odour, stronger than the reek of Castrol or REDeX. Money. The quirky little British outfits, once the character of the TT, were few and far between. It was a fierce battle between the big boys and their wallets now.

  Some things might have changed but a few go on for ever, I thought, as a mustachioed figure strode towards me, clipboard in one hand, pipe clamped firmly between his teeth, trailing a cloud of Condor.

  ‘Jack Kirby,’ the voice cracked out smartly, dragging the facts from the Rolodex that was his brain. ‘First competed in 1939 on a single-cylinder Kirby, when you had a little, uh, trouble as I recall.’ I nodded. He knew damn well I had been disqualified and banned for two years, by which time there were no more TTs because of the war. ‘Raced forty-nine and fifty, RTD in the first, seventh in the second. Gearbox trouble, as I recall. Not been seen here since.’ He stuffed the clipboard under his arm and held out a hand which I took. He looked frailer than I remembered but the enthusiasm in his eyes, the sheer pleasure of being among bikes and racers, was undimmed. ‘What kept you?’

  Geoff Davison was a legend on the island—he’d won TTs back in the 1920s and had since become its unofficial chronicler, writing and editing the TT Special.

  I smiled. ‘You kidding? Geoff Duke. Wasn’t worth racing any more, with him around.’

  ‘The Duke?’ He plucked the pipe from his mouth. ‘I’ve heard people say you showed more promise than him in thirty-nine.’

  I laughed. ‘I heard that too.’ Of course he neglected to say that the promise was no longer there after the war.

  ‘Course I don’t believe it.’ He waved his pipe, embers flying from the bowl. ‘You were good, but …’ He let the rest die. ‘I also heard you promised your mother you’d stop?’

  It wasn’t true. The reality was, the spark had gone. I looked at people like Duke and Bell and Cromie and could see they still had the fire in the belly. For me, something was missing. In 1939, motorcycles were what I lived for. But once the war was over, bike racing seemed nothing much more than going round in circles very fast. Yes, it was dangerous, a test of man and machine, and I respected anyone who went out on that TT course, but hell, I’d attacked flak ships with rockets while skimming the waves at twenty feet, and done Red Stocking missions at thirty thousand. I wasn’t the eager boy I’d been in 1939. The thrill had gone. Still, instead of trying to explain this I said: ‘Have you met my mother?’

  Davison grinned as he recalled the small, dark, fearsome bundle of energy that at one time accompanied my father to the island. She had two pet hates: flying and motorbikes. It was a wonder my parents ever got together, let alone stayed apparently happily married. And she certainly disapproved of my career choices, the unspoken rift between us. ‘Fair point. So what are you doing now? Back to Kirby Motorcycles?’

  We—well, my father—had a bike dealership just outside Brighton. An excellent location, because it was on the classic bike run to the South Coast, with plenty of passing trade and weekend tyre-kickers who could be converted into paying customers. He sold Triumphs next to Kirby bikes, although not quite enough of them to cover the cost of making his own models. So in a series of sheds out the back, he also produced invalid carriages for the Ministry of Pensions, those flimsy light blue three-wheelers that were given to the disabled. Except Kirby ones weren’t flimsy. Dad’s were re-engineered so they were safer, more stable, and marginally faster, too. Anyone who was allocated a Kirby-produced carriage was a lucky invalid indeed.

  ‘And maybe race again?’ concluded Davison.

  I shook my head. ‘I’m more of a flyer these days. You know, airplanes.’

  ‘Ah. Shame.’

  ‘Davy.’ It was my father, clutching sheaves of paperwork, his face creased with pleasure once more, using the older man’s diminutive. ‘How are you?’ Before Davison could answer, Dad spun round to me and said, ‘Over to the scrutineers now. We’ve got a slot in forty minutes. Pairs at twenty.’ Two bikes let onto the course, followed by two others at twenty-second intervals, as opposed to ten seconds in an actual race.

  It was then I felt the first flash of fear.

  In 1949, I had crashed just after Mountain Mile—which Davison had politely referred to as an RTD, for retired—coming down through the gears for the right-hand sweeps known as the Verandah. I had pranged a valuable fighter-bomber once, a Mosquito, but I could blame that on mechanical failure. The bike crash was all down to me. Trying to take a bend too fast, I caught a wall with the left-hand footrest. I don’t remember the actual moment of the bike collapsing beneath me, but my right leg had been trapped under it, dragging me along towards the bridge, where the pair of us smacked into the stonework. I had a long, detailed list at home of the damage that was done. I didn’t come out of it too well, either. I spent a few weeks in Nobles Hospital, but I was back the next year. An RTD wasn’t the way to bow out, and although seventh place in a field of sixty wasn’t glory, it was far from ignominy.

  I expected some kind of unease at the memory of the smash fifteen years ago, but on the first lap I flashed by the place of my foul-up, having hit 115 mph on the Mountain Mile, without so much as a shudder. I pushed back up into third as I took the bridge, gave the implacable stone wall a quick glance and brought the revs up before dropping back to second for the Bungalow Bend, cresting the highest point of the course, nudging over 1400 feet, and began the descent down through Windy Corner, ready to take the bike very nearly flat out for the long approach to Keppel Gate.

  There, gone, you’ve passed it. As I crouched low over the bulbous tank—the CrossCountry was not an ideal road-racing bike, but we both knew that—and felt the wind blast press the goggles against my face and sensed my father sucking at my tailpipe behind me, I wondered why I had never come back.

  I heard a gear drop and a big Honda flashed by, then Hocking’s MV, a Norton and another Honda, leaving me rocking in their wake. Stay sharp, Kirby, I scolded myself. You did this all wrong once before.

  Yes, sir. Brandish Corner, second gear, maximum revs, then third to go through the Cronk-ny-Mona bends, a beautiful sweep, and I began to wish I could do this on som
ething lower and sleeker and faster with better ratios than the hybrid CrossCountry, something I could throw about more. The substantial ground clearance of the frame required for ‘trials’ riding meant a high centre of gravity.

  I gritted my teeth for the jarring ripples of Bedstead Corner which I took at low revs in third, then the sharp right hand of Nook and Governor’s Bridge and the first lap was almost over. No record breaker—Hailwood and Duke would be clocking in around twenty-two minutes, while I reckoned we’d be lucky to have done it in twenty-seven or eight—but it was good to be back.

  After three laps, my father and I pulled into the pits, both sweating hard in the late afternoon sun, and parked up. Neither of us said anything for a while, just pushed our goggles up and stared at each other. I guessed I looked as much like a panda from all the road grit and oil as he did.

  ‘Well?’ he finally asked.

  ‘The seat is too hard, the suspension jars every bone in your body, my neck aches like hell and it handles like a pig,’ I said. I thought the Kirby CrossCountry, which was conceived along the same lines as some of the Triumph TR models, was too much of a compromise, likely to excel at neither road races nor trials, although I couldn’t argue with its robustness and I had to admit it had done better than I expected. ‘Albeit a Gloucester Old Spot.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about the bike.’

  I shrugged and told him the truth. ‘It felt good. I’ve missed it.’

  He nodded and the grin faded, to be replaced by something more serious, as if the dark cloud of a bad memory had just floated across his clear blue sky. ‘Listen, there’s something I meant to tell you on the boat over—’

  ‘Jack Kirby, Jack Kirby!’ I turned to see a barrel-shaped man dressed in crisp Moto Guzzi team overalls threading through the ranks of bikes towards me. I tried to place him and he must have seen my confusion. He patted his stomach as he cleared the nearby Nortons. ‘Jack, so I got fat. But you must remember. It’s me. Etienne—Ragno.’

  Ragno. Spider. Strip away twenty years and about four stone and there was the skinny kid who got his nickname from the way he scuttled over the mountains, arms and legs going as if he had eight of them. I took off my helmet and goggles and grabbed his hand, pumping it with pleasure. I felt happy to see him. Which was odd, because the last time we’d been together he had been holding a shiny new Sten gun to my head and was threatening to blow my brains out.

  The Man of Manx was the nearest pub to the pits, and the bar resembled one of those how-many-people-can-you-get-in-a-Mini stunts that the newspapers liked to do in the summer, except every person, man or woman, seemed dressed identically in black leather. However, the respect shown to a pair of Moto Guzzi overalls, and Ragno’s bulk and elbows, meant the crush quickly parted and he managed to secure us drinks. It was beer for me, whisky for him, but there was a moment of confusion with his change.

  ‘So if this is half a crown,’ Ragno asked, holding up a silver coin, ‘what is a whole crown?’

  ‘Five bob. A dollar, as it is sometimes called.’

  ‘Dollar?’

  ‘That’s what a dollar used to be worth. Five bob. Four to the pound.’

  Ragno took a fistful of money from his overall pocket and examined it as we worked our way through the crowd. ‘I have never had a crown.’

  ‘You don’t get many of them,’ I said.

  ‘What about this?’

  ‘A florin. Two shillings.’

  Ragno shook his head in bafflement. ‘And people complain about the lira.’

  We took our places on the outside wall. While we drank I ticked off the British marques among the herd parked up in the pub car park: Matchless, Ariel, Greaves, Sunbeam, Douglas, Velocette, AJS, Vincent, Excelsior, DMW, Triumph, Royal Enfield. Some were long gone as viable companies, others, as we all knew, were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. All the machines looked in rude health here, though, their polished tanks and pipes shining proudly in the late afternoon sun.

  I’d left my father talking with Geoff Davison and Harold Daniell, a charming, unassuming man with thick spectacles who, if you didn’t know, you’d be hard put to guess had been the first man to lap the 37¾-mile mountain course in under twenty-five minutes, at a speed of 91 mph, back in 1938, on an unsupercharged Norton single.

  Over our drinks, we gave each other a quick five-minute catch-up, Ragno skipping over the immediate post-war years, simply saying he’d managed to get a job with the Moto Guzzi people on Lake Como and had worked his way up to becoming one of the senior event organisers, helped by his decent English.

  ‘All this is your fault, of course,’ he told me. ‘That time when we stripped the old bike … hooked, I was.’

  ‘I thought Guzzi ditched racing back in fifty-seven. Left it all to MV.’ MV was MV Agusta, one of the other great Italian bike companies.

  He shrugged. ‘Officially, yes. But if a privateer wants to enter a bike we are keen to test and they ask for our help … it’s pretty low profile. But there is nowhere in the world quite like here to see what a bike can do.’

  ‘You’re thinking of coming back officially?’

  ‘Guzzi?’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘We’ll see. Not for a while, I think. So what about you?’

  I kept my synopsis tight, told him about the ‘shuftikite’ (recce) missions I was sent on after I got back from Italy after the war, didn’t even mention the seasons of clear air turbulence chasing, just the few years of racing, and then ferry work on the Sicily-Tunis route and, finally, once I was thrown off the island, my return back north to Malpensa, and the scrag end of flying. It didn’t sound like much of a life when you compressed it into three minutes. Maybe because it wasn’t.

  ‘So now you are back here, in England?’

  ‘Just a visit. I have some business in London with a young lady.’ He started to grin so I added, ‘Real business, Ragno. Not that kind.’

  ‘Do you have that kind? Are you married?’

  I shook my head. ‘Couple of near misses I walked away from, that’s all. You?’

  He nodded. ‘And two kids.’

  ‘Ragno the father? Christ, I still remember when you were a snotty brat with a Sten gun.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry about …’ He mimed holding a pistol to his own head. ‘It was for your own good.’

  ‘I wanted to stay.’

  ‘They’d have shot you. For once, they were OK with the Italians, but English and Americans they thought of as spies. Showed them no mercy.’ He pulled the invisible trigger and made a ‘boom’ noise. ‘You know about the anniversary?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘The celebrations?’

  Again, I had to shrug. ‘I’ve not been counting anniversaries. Not those ones anyway.’

  ‘It’s twenty years in September since Domodossola.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, taking a gulp of beer. ‘Of course, it’s the twenty-year anniversary of D-day.’ That had been hard to miss, even for me—ceremonies, parades, recreations of the landings, museums opening, Hollywood versions of events in the cinemas.

  ‘D-day. Always D-day,’ said Ragno. ‘It made a sideshow of us, of Italy. They forgot about us after Normandy.’

  I was surprised by the bitterness in his voice after all this time, but I couldn’t argue. The day the men and tanks rolled up Juno and Sword beaches and the GIs died in droves at Omaha, what happened on the Italian peninsula was simply a supporting feature. It tied up some German divisions, which was a bonus. Later, it seemed the Allies were more concerned with events in Yugoslavia and Greece than Northern Italy. That’s certainly where most of the weapons went. Weapons that could have saved Ragno and his friends. Perhaps.

  ‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing,’ I said to both of us.

  There was a sharp whistle, and Ragno looked across to the pit entrance. A mechanic in a similar Moto Guzzi outfit to his was waving him over. He slugged back his Scotch. ‘There will be a ceremony. Food, drink. You should be there. You played your part.’

>   As he stood, I shook my head. ‘I’ll think about it. This job I am going for is in September, so I might be flying.’

  Ragno smiled. ‘OK. I’ll be there. Pavel will make it, I am sure. Rosario for sure. Ennio will also come.’ There was a long pause, not quite a silence because the air was quivering with the howl of over-revved engines. There was a name missing, we both knew. Fausto. The best of us. We’d both seen him die the wrong kind of death, out on the streets of a little town called Domodossola.

  Perhaps it was just the rays of the lowering sun catching his pupils, but I swear something twinkled in his eye as he finally added: ‘Francesca will be there.’

  I felt the wound in my chest open. Twenty years and it still hurt like hell. She had been my lover—just once—and men had died because of it.

  ‘I’m not sure, Ragno,’ I said gruffly. ‘I’m not one for, you know, dwelling on the past.’

  He stood and smiled, shook my hand and said, ‘Ah, Jack. Men who lived through those times. What else do we have?’

  Well, some of us have an appointment in London, I thought, but I just returned the grin and nodded and we both knew I’d be back in Domodossola. How could I stay away? Francesca was going to be there.

  Four

  FROM THE STERN OF the Isle of Man steamer back to the Mersey I watched the Dakota climb, imagining the frame juddering as the old girl pulled herself into the sky one more time, a tired old trooper who knew the show had to go on. The youngest Dak flying was getting on for twenty now. I’d flown one for a few brief weeks in Berlin in 1948, when it was all hands to the pumps for the airlift. The one I’d had was creaking arthritically at the joints even back then.