Two wheels good,four wheels bad

Publisher: Mainstream Publishing

Pages: 272 pages

Price: Rs 384

“Have faith,” exhorts the travel writer Mark Carter in Uneasy Rider. “Look where you want to go. The bike will follow. It has to.” But hair-raising tales from elsewhere in this burbling little anthology suggest that the sons of thunder are not always so tractable. Quite often,the bike leads the way and maps the journey. The rider just hangs on.

What journeys the sons of thunder take the easy rider on! Thousands of miles. Tens of thousands of miles. Riders speak of intercontinental distances on bad roads,or even no roads,in the tone appropriate for a stroll down to the grocer’s on the corner. In Lois on the Loose (2007),retired record shop assistant Lois Pryce clocks 20,000 miles solo from northern Alaska to Tierra del Fuego,and retains her sense of humour all the way.

This anthology foregrounds a badly-kept secret about the history of motorcycling: some of the most daring journeys have been undertaken by women. Women with something to prove. Women with nothing to lose. Women who just want to go someplace,are not sure why,but expect to find out.

In December 1934,the acerbic Lady Astor (remembered chiefly as Winston Churchill’s verbal sparring partner),flagged off an unusual contraption on an extraordinary journey,declaring that she was “an unrepentant feminist and convinced that whatever a man can do,a women can do as well.” The women being sent off were Theresa Wallach and Florence Blenkiron,their machine was a monstrous 600cc single-cylinder Panther with a sidecar and a trailer the size of a Godrej almirah,and it would take them from London through France,Algeria and the Sahara to the Cape of Good Hope. The journey was billed as impossible and still sounds improbable in the GPS era.

But motorcycling is generally regarded as a man thing,and the big masculine names are all here: Ted Hughes (yes,it’s a poem,so what,you want to start something?),Roald Dahl (bought a second-hand 500cc Ariel at 16 while at boarding school,a proscribed activity) and lifetime award-winning crazy man Hunter S. Thomson,who had his face stomped in by the Hell’s Angels for authoring The Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (Random House,1966). Here,he is invited to gonzo review a Harley Roadking but bargains his way to a Ducati superbike,riding which is “a bloodcurdling kind of fun”.

But the big bylines read rather tame in comparison with the astonishing bikers who were not writers,but wrote nevertheless. Like Don Whillans,the infamously pugnacious mountaineer who first scaled the south face of Annapurna in 1970,as part of Sir Chris Bonington’s expedition. Here,he recounts the journey home from Rawalpindi in 1960,after the conquest of Mt Tivor in the Karakoram. After six months on the road,he got off his 500cc Triumph,chucked some pebbles at the windows of his house in Lancashire,was let in by his wife and got a pot of hot tea for his trouble.

The finest motorcyclist ever who should have been a full-time writer was Lawrence of Arabia. After resigning from Military Intelligence after the Great War,T.E. Lawrence collected a stable of Brough Superiors which he christened ‘Boanerges’ — the Greek rendering of a Galilean word used by Jesus,roughly meaning Sons of Thunder. Under the pseudonym ‘308527Aircraftman Ross’,he wrote in the press of his journeys through rural Dorset on the ‘Boas’,sometimes driving 100 miles in search of farm-fresh produce. And experiencing the fierce joy of overtaking low-flying fighters and blowing past Morris Oxfords chugging at 30 mph,at four times their speed. Lawrence died on a Boa in 1935,when he crashed and sustained head injuries while trying to avoid children on bicycles. His death was mourned nationally and spurred the development of the crash helmet.

The weakness of this anthology is that it is almost completely monolingual. The only non-English excerpt is from Alberto Granado’s Travelling with Che Guevara (1978),one of the sources of the movie The Motorcycle Diaries (2004),the other being Che’s own account. Don’t Italians ride Moto Guzzis,Aprilias and Terra Modenas? Do the Japanese mislike Kawasakis and Hondas? Don’t Germans ever sing the praises of BMW Motorrad? It’s hard to believe that all worthwhile motorcycle writing is in English,when some of the world’s most beautiful bikes talk to the wind in other tongues.

However,this anthology beautifully evokes the joy of travelling as one with the elements,and the invisible but palpable bond that connects bikers the world over. It can’t be expressed better than the mystical opening of Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s The Perfect Vehicle: “At precisely this moment someone,somewhere,is getting ready to ride…”