There are
nearly 100 posts here and they are all fact-based. I suppose it’s about time I took
a little diversion and used my blog to post my first fictional piece. A blog
can be many things, including a way to publish your own short story for free.
Happy reading!
Great bike, no brakes!
At first
the slope was gentle and it made pedaling easy and then unnecessary, then the
gradient became more pronounced and it made the ride exciting, and then the
hill became a steep descent and I felt the bike was just going too fast and it
was time to slow down and it was then that I realized the difference between
English and German bikes.
My German
hosts were charming, caring and generous. My exchange partner and I got on well
and we enjoyed a relaxing summer as 17 year olds do. When he suggested we use
his and his sister´s bikes to go to spend the day out in the countryside I
readily agreed. Could I ride a bike, they asked, of course I could, I replied,
have been riding since I was five. I did take a quick look over the bike as
they brought it out of the garage and it struck me that there was something
different between this German bike and the bikes I had ridden in England but I
didn’t work out what it was at that moment: obviously it wasn’t important.
Obviously
yes it was important: the difference between English and German bikes was that
the second kind had no brakes on the handlebars. Yes it was important and yes I
was hurtling down an increasingly steep gradient and it was the second kind
that I was riding and why why oh why were there no brakes on the handlebars?
There had to be brakes, all the bikes I had ridden in England had brakes on the
handlebars, my bike my brother’s bike, even my friend David’s bike, a very
fancy one which I had managed to scratch by riding it across the school sports
field. Anyway, they all had brakes, expect this bike I was riding now. Because
it was German. I could hear my friend, he was shouting something very loud in a
very concerned voice a few feet behind me. Yes, I suppose he would have
calculated the distance in metres not in feet and yes, safely was the word. But
not me, I was feeling increasingly less safe and yes I could hear the words but no I could not understand
the meaning because I was only working towards my A level, I had not actually
taken it yet. Maybe if we had got past chapter 1 of Thomas Mann’s Death in
Venice I would have had the necessary vocabulary to solve this ever nearer
Death In Small town in Germany.
Down I
went, faster and faster and closer to the bottom of the hill. This should have
been a relief, but getting closer meant I could see the STOP sign at the T junction
where one road was a minor one and the other was a major one with very fast
traffic, cars and lorries which were not required to, and which had no
intention of stopping. Faster and faster I went and closer and closer I got to
the T junction and its STOP sign and its fast cars and louder and more
insistent became my friend’s exhortations to stop, or whatever it was he was
saying, I guessed it by the context, which is what our excellent, expert and
kindly German teacher had taught us, if you’re not 100% sure take a guess by
the context. But she was back in Liverpool, or maybe in Ibiza or wherever it
was she spent her summer holiday and I was on a bike bound for Hell.
Whoooooosh,
I passed the STOP sign at the side of the road, I crossed the thick white line
with STOP in large letters on the ground and I whisked past in front of a car
coming at me from the right and I just missed the rear end of a car which had
just gone by on the left and I rode on until I came to a stop in a ploughed
field on the far side of the road. Stop, I stopped. I can still see the face,
and above the scared wide eyes of the driver in the first car, an innocent
German, minding his own business one sunny summer afternoon driving in an
orderly way along a major highway, only to be stunned by the sight of a
Liverpool youth on a girl’s bike flashing past his windscreen. A German girl’s
bike, and that is the point. Had it been an English bike, boy’s or girl’s I
would have stopped. But most certainly it was not an English bike, it was a German
bike, and on German bikes, at least that bike that day in that German small
town, you slowed down not by squeezing anything on the handlebars but by back
pedaling.
How could I
know that? I thought. How could I not know that? He thought, as he looked on
ashen face, still safely and obediently stopped at the STOP sign on the other
side of the road. And how could he know that I did not know?
We cannot always ask the questions we need to
ask because sometimes we don’t know that we don’t know something. I know that I
learnt a lot from this experience and I am grateful that my bike ride stopped
short in a ploughed field, before getting to you know where…
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