Ruminations from the father part deux

Chapter 2-Bert’s Club and where things started to go bad.

Sunday morning was a slow time in the fifties. Sunday activity was restricted by the Sabbath Day Observance Act and most things were closed. The cafes stayed open but they could only sell certain things considered to be “essentials” by the Act. However, by some trick, Bert’s Snooker Club managed to open on Sunday morning until 12 noon so that’s where we headed. Outside, 50cc Itoms, Mosquitos and my Pegaso rubbed side covers with Nortons, BSAs, Triumphs and even the odd car.
Inside we mixed with real men, 19 year old guys who worked and smoked Texans. We were almost the same age but they were light years ahead of us. Here, in the smoky gloom, filled with the sharp “clack” of snooker balls and Little Richard belting out “Wop bop a lubop ba lop bam boom, Tutti frutti-oh rootie”, we took the first steps on the long downhill path to a mis-spent youth.
Not that I was a rebel in the real sense. I was doing OK at school, I was rowing at the local Rowing Club, playing rugby and running at school and got on well with my parents. I didn’t even drink or smoke. But mixing with these guys, ducktails in leather jackets, opened up a view of the world that promised uncertainty and a touch of danger. The attraction was almost impossible to resist.
One of these ducktails lived in a house on the corner near our mine house. His name was Spike Evert and for some reason, we struck up a friendship. Spike looked perfect. He was small and slightly built with a sharp featured face and a thick, black ducktail hairstyle. He wore black shirts, black or blue jeans and a black leather lummie with a fur collar. His trademark was a white scarf which he wore while riding. The girls couldn’t stay away from him for one main reason, he looked and was dangerous.
Spike’s current mount was a BSA Golden Flash over which he’d breathed and it could do a genuine hundred miles per hour with relative ease. He was an apprentice at Timken Roller Bearings and had access to the machine shop where he did his tuning at lunchtime. He’d fitted rear-set footrests and clip-on handlebars and the bike was a forerunner of the Café Racer craze of the sixties. Of course the baffles had been donnered out of the silencers and the whole bike looked and went very well.
One Saturday afternoon, Spike took me to meet his mates and, crouched on the pillion of the BSA, we headed for the La Conga Roadhouse in Elandsfontein. After the power of the Pegaso, The BSA gave me a new perspective on speed. Doing 90 miles per hour in a 1948 Dodge, my dad’s car, was exciting enough. Perched on a hot 650 behind a slightly crazy breker was something else again. We got to La Conga in about a quarter of the time it took me on the Pegaso. We got off the bike blinking away the tears, no-one wore helmets or goggles, the only compulsory headgear being a liberal coating of Brylcreme, and Spike introduced me to the manne.
I met Kenny Hinkman with his 350 Gold Star, Malcolm Quagley, Triumph, Eddy on a twin cylinder Matchless (I never found out what his surname was), Johnny Robards on a 200cc Ducati and George Phillis on another BSA. They were gathered in a group at the back of the parking area, drinking Cokes and smoking strange smelling cigarettes that looked like loosely packed Texans. Well, they came out of a Texan packet anyway.
After a few minutes of idle chat, they finished their smokes and mounted up. The thing to do was to get to the St Moritz Roadhouse three miles away over the hill near the Airport Star Drive-in. This meant leaving the La Conga, around the La Conga circle, over the railway bridge, up the ridge to a quite sharp left hand sweep and flat out down the hill to the St Moritz. As this was Saturday, the traffic was quite light but the route went through three robots. Well ek se, these okes didn’t care about robots! We blasted off into the main drag, either way around the circle, straight through both robots, red or green, and hammered down the hill to the last robot, which seemed to be the finish. All five bonies, modified pipes bellowing, thundered down the hill in a tight bunch seemingly intent on self annihilation. What Johnny had done to that Ducati, I can’t imagine. He was in the middle of the bunch, pushing the Matchless. I guess his weighing in at about 120 pounds had something to do with it. Spike was in front, level with Kenny’s Goldie, my added weight holding him back a bit, with Malcolm, who was a bit heavy, at the back of the bunch with George.
The noise and wind were unbelievable with no helmet to protect ears or face. I was wearing a white shirt which filled with air to balloon out behind me, threatening to choke me. My eyes were streaming and I could see nothing ahead, perhaps that was just as well. I had to turn my head sideways to open my eyes and saw the grove of pines where a Harvard Trainer had crashed, whip past. Kenny was next to us, flat on the tank. He suddenly sat up and I was thrust into Spike’s back, struggling to retain my sweaty grip on the back of the seat as we shot through the last robot to pull up at the St Moritz Roadhouse.
My legs were shaking and my ears buzzing as we cut the motors and climbed off the bikes. Man, I couldn’t believe I was still alive! It seemed to me that these guys were living on the edge of a very unstable cliff. Wow, three robots and no cars, no well lekker, ek se. Crazy as it was, and stupid and irresponsible, I really knew I was alive. It took about three hours for my eyes to close down from saucer size to normal and my pulse rate to drop below 100. My rather sheltered existence had taken a major knock and I realized that there were some really wild okes in this world.
They bought me a Coke and we spent an hour or so sitting on the bikes, tuning the girls who came in cars or on bikes with other guys, attracting some hard looks. However, no-one was going to tune these guys skeef, that was for sure.
Just sitting and talking I began to realize that despite being brekers, they were basically really nice guys. Spike had a razor sharp sense of humour and was much more intelligent then his behaviour would seem to indicate. They had some strange habits and ideas but I was enjoying their company more then I had expected. We rode back to Boksburg surprisingly sedately as dusk fell. We rode slowly enough to shout across the gaps between the bikes and they dropped me off at home at 7 o-clock, in time for supper. I was back to normal.