I was never lost on boyhood bike rides, until I got home
Sunday, March 2, 2025
As a child, I never got lost when I was out. That only happened once I got home.
Famously in the family, as a three year old found wandering alone in a department store in Norwich, a shop assistant had asked me if I was lost, and I’d told her I wasn’t. Which, I wasn’t. I knew where I was. That my mother didn’t know, was her problem.
I especially didn’t get lost with my friend Chris on a bike ride in Norfolk country lanes in the 1970s.
Bike riding was a staple of the passing the holidays, mostly up and down the two hundred yards or so of suburban pavement outside our street 1970s bungalows, up as far as the cul de sac, where we could safely loop round and return.
It was in a network of suburban detached houses, quiet streets segmented with radial spokes of very slightly less quiet roads. We’d been riding up and down that pavement remorselessly for weeks and now we wanted to go further afield.
There was a creased Ordnance Survey map blutacked to the back of the door of my father’s study, laying out the villages around the ours, at two and a half inches to the mile. The map showed places called plantations and old airfields, left over from the war. To the naked eye from the back of a car they looked like woods and fields, but the map labels surely implied they were far less mundane than that. We pored over the maps like staff officers planning a daring raid across enemy territory, crossing the spokes between villages, and negotiated permission for an afternoon’s ride with doubtful parents, as long as I was back in time for tea.
The joke about crossing the border into Norfolk was about putting your calendar back 20 years. My mother went twenty years better. If she didn’t understand it to be a normal part of life in the 1950s in Norfolk, then it was morally wrong. If this sounds like a sepia-warmed “gawd bless ‘er” fond exaggeration for nostalgic effect, it’s not. It’s the literal truth, backed up by hours of furious screaming damnation-wielding rows. She wasn’t religious, just a psychopath who hated everything that happened after her own puberty.
By the time I was 12, I’d worked out that the path of least screaming damnation for me was to emotionally hunker down in the 1950s too, with books by Enid Blyton and Anthony Buckeridge, set if not in the literal than spiritual 1950s.
They had freedom and warmth and safeness. They were an escape into a world where things were clear. You knew there would be outings where people wouldn’t have to give up and come home again because one of the adults was screaming and shouting.
You knew the children would break the rules, but the rules would be consistent and have some kind of logic to them.
You knew the punishments would be something simple and finite and understandable. The muffled shouting of adults while you lay in bed listening wasn’t the parents, it was the bad guys, who would be caught and the world put to rights.
The children in those books would disappear off for the day with no objections. That’s why I expected the whole bike ride expedition not to be a problem. By the standards of Enid Blyton this was no kind of adventure at all. hazy field with a path
It wasn’t even an adventure by my father’s standards. He regularly talked about how he cycle twelve miles each way to school at my age, with its implications of freedom and unmonitored time. You could, I supposed, get up to a lot in the window of time someone would reasonable assume you’d been pedalling home from Norwich.
The day of the ride was bright and summery 1950s-ish days. At least, it was in my head, because that’s where I wanted to be.
The first spoke to cross was the biggest and most dangerous. It separated us from other villages to the north, and this is the one we crossed and cycled to the next village, the one that was just out of the commuter belt of villages mostly made up of streets built by builders when they built houses. These were roads that had existed for hundreds of years. We went to the next village, and the one after that, and it seemed to take hours.
I just measured it Google Maps, now. Five miles and three villages away. It would have been nothing to the Famous Five. But in rural Norfolk, when you’re 11 in the 1970s with no Google and virtually no payphones, five miles away was a whole other world.
It turned out in fact woods and plantations were the same thing. The old airfields were planted with the cabbage and sugarbeet now, just the occasional pillbox and concrete loading ramp surrounded by hedgerows.
Chris and I faffed around, in the vain hope that some Enid Blyton style ne’er do wells would appear, but they didn’t, so we turned our bikes round and headed back. The return journey felt faster than the outward trip and we made good time, were back for tea. We split up at the end of our drives, which faced each other across the suburban street.
In the back garden, I flicked the bike stand down and went inside.
Which was when I discovered that I’d been lost. Lost had been the least of it, in fact, possibly because I was demonstrably no longer lost. The episode had revealed, according to my mother’s onslaught, the full depth of my selfishness, thoughtlessness, evil, and eccentricity. Any deviation from normality was a moral failing.
My father joined the inquest as barrister for the prosecution and the hearing went on for some hours.
I have no idea why, I almost never had any real idea why.
I hadn’t been lost. I known where I’d been. I’d had a few hours of not being answerable or checked up on.
The cycling trip was never repeated. I didn’t dare suggest it. I huddled up with more of the Enid Blyton books, and moved on to a book the neighbour leant me, The Day Of The Jackal, which had sex in it.