I don’t so much tick as move. I was always moving, not house or home just going, pushing trying to go faster chasing speed.
Growing up in the 80s was a life of adventure. I was born in a small village called Whalley in the Ribble Valley – still pleasant but an ever growing town of exec houses, swish restaurants and northern country money. Close enough to Manchester to commute but far enough to be in the fields and hills.
My childhood home of Langho just up the road from Whalley through the 70s and 80s was a relative newbuild for the time and estate on one side of a lane with a slightly more salubrious estate built on the other side. Rogersfield was for posher kids but we certainly weren’t poor. At the time it didn’t even cross my mind but it was a beautiful area and the where we lived must also have been virgin fields of sheep and cows and woods right up to moment it was our home.
Crucially it wasn’t flat – they are hills and gradients and therefore gravity to support my ever growing need for speed.
In the days of the “a”team, knightrider, magnum PI and having to watch tv when it was on and a number of cinematic defining moments built our lives.
A fairly standard “kids save the day movie” called BMX Bandits, the film that first exposed 12 year old boys to Nicole Kidman and how cool doing stunts on BMXs appeared to be. There was a dreadful car chase movie Condorman and of course ET – with that jump – ET in the basket of Elliot’s bike – although personally the aesthetics and weight distribution (assuming ET doesn’t generate some sort of invisible counter balance) ETs weight in the basket on the front slightly ruin the moment – we tried it with teddies and virtually wore through the seats of our pants trying to counter balance the weight over the front wheel………..the “do not try this at home – trained stuntmen blah blah” being routinely ignored of course – after all is a 12 year old not a trained stuntman?
Clitheroe a nearby town had a cinema unlike anything modern, it was run by a group of ladies who served tea in china cups to the patrons and the highly decorated playhouse was cleaned to a mirror like shine.
I wasn’t interested in tea………….kids on BMX’s doing jumps and crucially bunny hops (jumping the bike without a ramp – leaping into the sky from nothing) where were my heart lay (and maybe a little with Nicole Kidman)
Jumping and stunting bikes and fixing the constant breakages was normal – my parents (and none of my friends) would / could afford to pay for bike shops constantly and as I’ve grown up realising there isn’t much that can’t be fixed with zip ties and duct tape, if only to get you home.
Danger was never really a consideration – especially not for me and those long evenings after school were spent as hordes of kids roaming the streets and a small park showing off and constantly pushing for bigger and faster stunts.
Rogersfield was the thunderdome though, the estate lay on the side of a small hill and the access looped down, across and back up to the main road as a huge rectangle with detatched 70s exec houses on either side. The down was steep and long enough to hit speed and that equated to greater distance in the air.
On one of the many endless summer evenings that fill my childhood the air was split by a murderous scream just as I started the flip flop of the handlebars to build momentum and drive my Raleigh burner on. A mother had seen through the large plate glass window of her house her child lying prone – one of a record breaking 16 I bun-hopped in one go.
On reflection and driving back round the estate many years later I must have been jumping at something close to 30mph and I did cheat slightly using a couple of broken house bricks just before the first person – placed as “protection” just in case I was a little off with take off but in reality providing much needed initial lift.
Life was lucky, fast and happy – I state of mind I still have to this day.