The chapter entitled ‘The Road’ in T. E. Lawrence’s book The Mint (published posthumously in 1955), is famous amongst motorcyclists.
Lawrence
evokes brilliantly the thrill of riding along a fast, straight road,
until he eases his Brough Superior down a hill and into Lincoln.
Arriving at Lincoln Cathedral, he stables the ‘steel magnificence of
strength and speed at his west door’, and describes having a ‘cup of
real chocolate and a muffin at the teashop’.
Lawrence wrote that it was a journey he undertook ‘nightly’.
Nightly
I’d run up from the hangar, upon the last stroke of work, spurring my
tired feet to be nimble. The very movement refreshed them, after the
day-long restraint of service. In five minutes my bed would be down,
ready for the night: in four more I was in breeches and puttees, pulling
on my gauntlets as I walked over to my bike, which lived in a
garage-hut, opposite. Its tyres never wanted air, its engine had a habit
of starting at second kick: a good habit, for only by frantic plunges
upon the starting pedal could my puny weight force the engine over the
seven atmospheres of its compression.
This
escape from ‘the day-long restraint of service’ was from his posting as
Aircraftman T. E. Shaw at the RAF Cadet College in Cranwell,
Lincolnshire, between 1925 and 1926. Famously seeking to escape the
alter ego of Lawrence of Arabia, he had enlisted pseudonymously.
Lawrence
bought a new Brough Superior motorcycle to celebrate his return to the
RAF and it is this 1925 SS 100 that appears as the mighty Boanerges* in
Lawrence’s thrilling evocation of the flat-out ride in The Mint.
The stretch of road where he claims to have raced – and beaten – a Bristol Fighter was the A15 between Sleaford and Lincoln.
Another
bend: and I have the honour of one of England’s straightest and fastest
roads. The burble of my exhaust unwound like a long cord behind me.
Soon my speed snapped it, and I heard only the cry of the wind which my
battering head split and fended aside. The cry rose with my speed to a
shriek: while the air’s coldness streamed like two jets of iced water
into my dissolving eyes. I screwed them to slits, and focused my sight
two hundred yards ahead of me on the empty mosaic of the tar’s gravelled
undulations.
I followed Lawrence’s A15 route from Cranwell
to Lincoln on my own motorcycle and, yes indeed, after a short sequence
of sweeping bends, the road does straighten out for mile after mile, to
reach a crescendo of strait line speed potential where it passes RAF
Waddington, which was but a tiny aerodrome in Lawrence’s day.
But
oh how things have changed in the speed department. The sheer amount of
traffic (mid-afternoon on a sunny August day), combined with speeding
traps, made any hope of replicating Lawrence’s epic ride nothing more
than a flight of fancy. Perhaps 'nightly' offers a better chance.
Perhaps I'll try a late-evening ride one day.
Nevertheless, it was good to have motorcycled along the road of which Lawrence and his roaring Boanerges made a legend.
*Lawrence
called his first motorcycle “Boanerges,” a name given to the apostles
John and James by Jesus. It means: Sons of Thunder.
© John Dunn.
The Road by T. E. Lawrence
The extravagance in which my surplus emotion expressed itself lay on
the road. So long as roads were tarred blue and straight; not hedged;
and empty and dry, so long I was rich.
Nightly I’d run up from the hangar, upon the last stroke of work,
spurring my tired feet to be nimble. The very movement refreshed them,
after the day-long restraint of service. In five minutes my bed would be
down, ready for the night: in four more I was in breeches and puttees,
pulling on my gauntlets as I walked over to my bike, which lived in a
garage-hut, opposite. Its tyres never wanted air, its engine had a habit
of starting at second kick: a good habit, for only by frantic plunges
upon the starting pedal could my puny weight force the engine over the
seven atmospheres of its compression.
Boanerges’ first glad roar at being alive again nightly jarred the
huts of Cadet College into life. ‘There he goes, the noisy bugger,’
someone would say enviously in every flight. It is part of an airman’s
profession to be knowing with engines: and a thoroughbred engine is our
undying satisfaction. The camp wore the virtue of my Brough like a
flower in its cap. Tonight Tug and Dusty came to the step of our hut to
see me off. ‘Running down to Smoke, perhaps?’ jeered Dusty; hitting at
my regular game of London and back for tea on fine Wednesday afternoons.
Boa is a top-gear machine, as sweet in that as most single-cylinders
in middle. I chug lordlily past the guard-room and through the speed
limit at no more than sixteen. Round the bend, past the farm, and the
way straightens. Now for it. The engine’s final development is fifty-two
horse-power. A miracle that all this docile strength waits behind one
tiny lever for the pleasure of my hand.
Another bend: and I have the honour of one of England’ straightest
and fastest roads. The burble of my exhaust unwound like a long cord
behind me. Soon my speed snapped it, and I heard only the cry of the
wind which my battering head split and fended aside. The cry rose with
my speed to a shriek: while the air’s coldness streamed like two jets of
iced water into my dissolving eyes. I screwed them to slits, and
focused my sight two hundred yards ahead of me on the empty mosaic of
the tar’s gravelled undulations.
Like arrows the tiny flies pricked my cheeks: and sometimes a heavier
body, some house-fly or beetle, would crash into face or lips like a
spent bullet. A glance at the speedometer: seventy-eight. Boanerges is
warming up. I pull the throttle right open, on the top of the slope, and
we swoop flying across the dip, and up-down up-down the switchback
beyond: the weighty machine launching itself like a projectile with a
whirr of wheels into the air at the take-off of each rise, to land
lurchingly with such a snatch of the driving chain as jerks my spine
like a rictus.
Once we so fled across the evening light, with the yellow sun on my
left, when a huge shadow roared just overhead. A Bristol Fighter, from
Whitewash Villas, our neighbour aerodrome, was banking sharply round. I
checked speed an instant to wave: and the slip-stream of my impetus
snapped my arm and elbow astern, like a raised flail. The pilot pointed
down the road towards Lincoln. I sat hard in the saddle, folded back my
ears and went away after him, like a dog after a hare. Quickly we drew
abreast, as the impulse of his dive to my level exhausted itself.
The next mile of road was rough. I braced my feet into the rests,
thrust with my arms, and clenched my knees on the tank till its rubber
grips goggled under my thighs. Over the first pot-hole Boanerges
screamed in surprise, its mud-guard bottoming with a yawp upon the tyre.
Through the plunges of the next ten seconds I clung on, wedging my
gloved hand in the throttle lever so that no bump should close it and
spoil our speed. Then the bicycle wrenched sideways into three long
ruts: it swayed dizzily, wagging its tail for thirty awful yards. Out
came the clutch, the engine raced freely: Boa checked and straightened
his head with a shake, as a Brough should.
The bad ground was passed and on the new road our flight became
birdlike. My head was blown out with air so that my ears had failed and
we seemed to whirl soundlessly between the sun-gilt stubble fields. I
dared, on a rise, to slow imperceptibly and glance sideways into the
sky. There the Bif was, two hundred yards and more back. Play with the
fellow? Why not? I slowed to ninety: signalled with my hand for him to
overtake. Slowed ten more: sat up. Over he rattled. His passenger, a
helmeted and goggled grin, hung out of the cock-pit to pass me the ‘Up
yer’ Raf randy greeting.
They were hoping I was a flash in the pan, giving them best. Open
went my throttle again. Boa crept level, fifty feet below: held them:
sailed ahead into the clean and lonely country. An approaching car
pulled nearly into its ditch at the sight of our race. The Bif was
zooming among the trees and telegraph poles, with my scurrying spot only
eighty yards ahead. I gained though, gained steadily: was perhaps five
miles an hour the faster. Down went my left hand to give the engine two
extra dollops of oil, for fear that something was running hot: but an
overhead Jap twin, super-tuned like this one, would carry on to the moon
and back, unfaltering.
We drew near the settlement. A long mile before the first houses I
closed down and coasted to the cross-roads by the hospital. Bif caught
up, banked, climbed and turned for home, waving to me as long as he was
in sight. Fourteen miles from camp, we are, here: and fifteen minutes
since I left Tug and Dusty at the hut door.
I let in the clutch again, and eased Boanerges down the hill along
the tram-lines through the dirty streets and up-hill to the aloof
cathedral, where it stood in frigid perfection above the cowering close.
No message of mercy in Lincoln. Our God is a jealous God: and man’s
very best offering will fall disdainfully short of worthiness, in the
sight of Saint Hugh and his angels.
Remigius, earthy old Remigius, looks with more charity on and
Boanerges. I stabled the steel magnificence of strength and speed at his
west door and went in: to find the organist practising something slow
and rhythmical, like a multiplication table in notes on the organ. The
fretted, unsatisfying and unsatisfied lace-work of choir screen and
spandrels drank in the main sound. Its surplus spilled thoughtfully into
my ears.
By then my belly had forgotten its lunch, my eyes smarted and
streamed. Out again, to sluice my head under the White Hart’s yard-pump.
A cup of real chocolate and a muffin at the teashop: and Boa and I took
the Newark road for the last hour of daylight. He ambles at forty-five
and when roaring his utmost, surpasses the hundred. A skittish
motor-bike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding
animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and
the hint, the provocation, to excess conferred by its honeyed untiring
smoothness. Because Boa loves me, he gives me five more miles of speed
than a stranger would get from him.
At Nottingham I added sausages from my wholesaler to the bacon which
I’d bought at Lincoln: bacon so nicely sliced that each rasher meant a
penny. The solid pannier-bags behind the saddle took all this and at my
next stop a (farm) took also a felt-hammocked box of fifteen eggs. Home
by Sleaford, our squalid, purse-proud, local village. Its butcher had
six penn’orth of dripping ready for me. For months have I been making my
evening round a marketing, twice a week, riding a hundred miles for the
joy of it and picking up the best food cheapest, over half the country
side.
