tractor tyre.
As kids, our other passion was for bogeys, or fun karts, as people call them now. You know the type, a wooden base with four pram wheels and a rope for steering. We got really good at building them and even made one with a cab once. There was a steep downhill corner in the field next to our house which was good for learning to slide the bogeys on but we decided a bit of mud would help make it even slippier. I don’t know why we didn’t just soak it with water but instead we had the bright idea of pissing on that corner for all we were worth to make it muddy so we could get better slides! If we didn’t need to pee, we’d simply drink bottles and bottles of juice until we did – the more piss the better as far as we were concerned. We would eventually get the corner so wet that we had out of control slides and Garry once had a huge crash and ended up lying in that huge puddle of piss with several broken fingers.
It was a happy time for Garry and I, and it may have seemed idealistic at the time but in later years I realized the more negative effects my upbringing had on me. Because I was so isolated, I was very shy with other people. I still am today, to a certain extent, so I’m trying to encourage my kids to be confident and to mix freely with people so that they’re better equipped to deal with the big bad world than I was. Even now, I hate calling travel agents and bank managers or dealing with any ‘official’ phone calls like that, so if I can, I ask someone else to do it for me! I know that sounds pathetic, but it’s just the way I am.
There was another couple of kids, called Alistair and Norman Glendinning, with whom Garry and I sometimes played. They lived on a nearby farm called Doorpool. At the time, we were renting a cottage within the farm grounds which cost seven shillings a week (35 pence in today’s money), if my mum agreed to top up the water trough for the cows every day, which she did.
Once I remember having a big argument with Alistair Glendinning and I ended up throwing a garden rake at him. It split his face open and cut his head – he was in a right mess. I got a terrible bollocking for that but a few days later we were all playing happily together again. Kids don’t hold grudges, shame adults aren’t the same.
When I was nine years old, in 1973, my dad, as a former competitor, was invited to the Golden Jubilee of the Manx Grand Prix. When he got there he met up with Jim Oliver who owned Thomas B. Oliver’s garage in Denholm, just a few miles from where we lived. Jim was partly sponsoring a rider called Wullie Simson, who also lived near our home and my dad got to know him on that trip. It turned out that Wullie was a joiner like my dad but he’d quit his job when his boss wouldn’t give him time off to go to the Manx! My dad was getting a lot of work in so he offered Wullie a job, which was gladly accepted. Garry and I helped out at my dad’s workshop for pocket money and we liked Wullie straight away when he started there and we were always asking him about the racing.
Some two weeks after Wullie started his job at the workshop, my dad asked Garry and I if we’d like to go and watch some bike racing at Silloth, an airfield circuit just south of Carlisle. Too right we did! We were so excited at the prospect that we could hardly sleep. When Garry and I had been about five or six years old, we went with our nana and papa to stay in a caravan at Silloth. I remember hearing motorbikes howling away in the background and my grandma explained it was the bike racing over on the airfield. I ranted and begged her for so long to take us to see them that the poor woman ended up trudging with us for about six miles on the round trip to the airfield just so we could watch the bikes. There was a big delay in the racing because a rider was killed and my nana wanted to take Garry and I away from the track at that point, but I was having none of it. Apparently, I refused to leave the circuit until I’d seen the last bike in the last race go past. I obviously loved bike racing even way back then. That must have been in the late 1960s.
But I was 11 and old enough to really appreciate it properly by the time dad took me back to Silloth to watch another race and my most vivid memory of that meeting is of a guy in purple leathers, because everyone else was wearing black. Every lap he came out of the hairpin and pulled a big wheelie and I thought he was amazing. He was called Steve Machin and I’m now very friendly with his brother Jack though sadly later, Steve himself was killed on a race bike.
It was great to watch my dad’s mate Wullie Simson racing and he must have enjoyed our support because soon after that race, he turned up at our house in his van and pulled out a Honda ST50. It must have been an MOT failure or something because the engine was in pieces but my dad soon put it back together, got it fired up and that was it. From that moment on, Garry and I spent every spare moment riding that bike in the field surrounding the house. My motorcycling career had begun.
‘All I seemed to do was get pissed and crash cars.’
Getting a little motorbike changed everything for Garry and I – it became the most important thing in our lives. We couldn’t even concentrate at school any more because all we wanted to do was get home and ride that bike.
Around the same time as we got the ST50 my dad finally got back into racing, now that he had provided a solid backing for his family. He bought a 350cc Aermacchi and started racing it in single-cylinder events, which today would be called classic races. He was pretty good and won a couple of races here and there but it was more like a hobby to him rather than his whole life. So with dad racing again and Garry and I riding too, bikes were suddenly everywhere and were the main topic of conversation in the Hislop household. Looking back, it’s really no surprise I turned out to be a racer.
There was corn growing in the fields around our house in the summer and at other times there were horses grazing there too so Garry and I had to make sure we rode round everything but that certainly never stopped us. Pretty soon, the little Honda was joined by a Suzuki A50 with a five-speed gearbox and a clutch (the Honda was a three-speed semi-automatic). It was a great bit of kit and it was allocated to Garry while I got the Honda, which I felt was fair enough, because it meant we could finally race each other.
About this time, my nana took ill and the doctors soon discovered she was riddled with cancer. She lasted another year-and-a-half but died in October 1975. I was very close to my nana and missed her terribly but I was to lose even more close family members before too long. To take my mind off my sadness I just rode round and round those fields, day in day out, rain, sun or shine. It was my only release. When I was on that little bike I didn’t think about anything else. I just wanted to learn how to go faster, how to control my slides better, how to ride more smoothly. I was totally self-contained; all I needed was my bike and my brother. Mum would call us in for tea and we’d scrub up a bit, wolf down our food and head straight back out into the field to ride again. Those were such happy times for me.
Cookie – who was the third ‘amigo’ in our little gang – got hold of his dad’s old Triumph Tiger Cub round about this time and started riding with us. The whole village used to complain about the noise we made from morning to night but we didn’t care. We had mock races for hours on end and at the end of the day, we all looked like we’d fallen down somebody’s chimney. All you could see were our little white eyes peering out of dirty, dusty faces like something from The Black and White Minstrel Show. We got filthy beyond belief but we didn’t fall off much and if we did we fixed the bikes ourselves.
When we got bored with the field we pushed the bikes into the village where there was a spare bit of common land and rode round there until we’d messed the whole place up. In fact, we sometimes rode the bikes down the road, which was totally illegal but my dad never got to hear about that!
When we weren’t racing each other, we’d try to imitate Evel Knievel whom we’d seen on TV. We made ramps out of old doors or whatever we found in my dad’s joiner’s yard. One day, I propped a panelled door up on two straw bales to act as a ramp. But when I hit it with the bike my front wheel went straight through the door and dug into the bales and I was sent flying over the handlebars in true Knievel style. Didn’t clear any buses though.
Although Garry and I had bikes, there was never any spare money in the family. The bikes