trying to go too slowly; I was labouring and stalling the thing everywhere. But on my third attempt, which only lasted for 15 minutes, I drove perfectly in snowy and icy conditions and passed so I went out and bought an old Mark 1 Ford Escort.
It wasn’t even a week before I put the bloody thing straight through a hedge by driving like a twat and that really was the start of my downward slide: in the months and years following my father’s death I went completely off the rails. I couldn’t come to terms with my loss and started drinking a lot; it just seemed the norm. On top of that, I seemed to be crashing cars every other week almost as if I had a death wish. I didn’t even stay at home much on weekends, I’d just go out with friends, get pissed and end up sleeping on a sofa or the floor. It was a case of doing whatever I could to numb the pain; I would go out and crash out. But I always made sure I went to work during the week and I always stayed with mum on week-nights. Even if I was going to pieces, I wanted to try to be strong for my mum because she never wavered in her support for both Garry and me.
I bought an old Mini after the Escort and managed to crash that twice in the same night. The first time I spun it on icy roads and went through a fence backwards, then later on I put it into a ditch. Looking back on it, I don’t know how I survived that period. I could so easily have ended up dead in a car wreck or have ended up a drunken bum with no prospects in life at all.
No matter how many times I crashed, I didn’t slow down. After the Mini, it was onto a Ford Escort 1600 Sport and I ended up wrecking that twice as well. I had no sooner fixed it up from the first accident when I rolled the bastard thing again while trying to race somebody on slippery wet roads. Every farmer in the Borders must have had a hole in his hedge at one time or another caused by me smashing through it in a car.
Eventually I did get myself together enough to do a couple of bike race meetings but, to be honest, my memory of racing in those years is very hazy because I was more interested in drinking, driving cars and getting off with girls. In fact, if it weren’t for the result sheets that were compiled for me by a guy named Les Boultwood, I’d probably have forgotten all about those races. Those results show that I entered a few races in 1980 and 1981 with a best finish of second at East Fortune in 1980. However, I certainly couldn’t afford to race often and since I can hardly remember any of the events now it’s almost as if it never happened, which is generally why I’ve told people I started racing in 1983 because that’s when I began to take it seriously.
When I did race, it was more of a lark than anything else – just a chance to play on bikes and another way to fill in a weekend. Garry, however, was taking a big interest in road racing at this point and with a wage of around £60 a week from helping run dad’s joinery business, he could afford it. He started entering races on my little 125 Honda and I sometimes went along to help with the spannering. We didn’t have a van, just an old car with a trailer attached and even they were both borrowed from a mate.
Wullie Simson and Jim Oliver became almost substitute fathers to Garry and I after my dad died. They even ended up buying us 125cc bikes to race to stop us going off the rails so in a way, I think those guys salvaged my life from going to the dogs. I dread to think where I’d be now if it weren’t for them. My dad would have been so proud of all they did for his boys and I’ll never be able to thank them enough.
Garry seemed to cope with our dad’s death a bit better than I did. Maybe he just wasn’t as daft as I was, but he certainly never seemed to go over the top with the drinking and stuff as I did. Apart from losing a father, I think I lost a really good mentor when dad passed away. He knew his stuff about bikes, he knew lots of people connected with racing and was just a lot more worldly than I was in general. I’m sure my career would have worked out very differently had he still been around. Carl Fogarty’s a good example: his dad George used to race and he guided Carl through his early career in a way that really benefited him.
Despite my reservations, my mum married a guy called Jim Thompson in the winter of 1980–81 and they decided to pool their resources and buy a pub called The Horse and Hounds Inn at Bonchester Bridge, so we all moved in there. Mum never really had a problem with Garry and I racing or riding bikes; if my dad had been killed on one it would probably have been different but he died of natural causes so there was no reason to hate bikes. On the contrary, she felt the racing gave us something to focus on so we weren’t just getting drunk all the time and Garry actually started getting some decent results and even a couple of wins at Knockhill.
The two of us went for a holiday to the Manx Grand Prix in 1981 and Garry got so into the whole thing that he decided he was going to race there the following year. Then the month after we got back from the Manx, we had to deal with another tragedy when my friend Eric Glendinning was murdered in Hawick. He was standing outside the local chip shop eating chicken and chips when he was attacked and beaten to death by a group of yobs, one of whom was charged with murder and sent to jail. All for a fucking bag of chips! Hawick is a tiny little town and you’d never expect anything like that to happen in such a sleepy place but it just goes to show there’s evil everywhere.
As it turned out, 1982 was the year when my brother really began to prove himself as a rider. He bought a brand new Yamaha TZ125 and did quite a lot of races that year and had some very good results. But the big one came in September when he won the 350cc Newcomers’ race at the Manx GP on Jim Oliver’s TZ350 Yamaha – exactly one year after he’d vowed to give it a go when we were on holiday. It was an amazing win because he’d only done 14 laps of the course before the race started. These days, many riders do hundreds of laps in cars or on bikes before they actually race for the first time so they know the course intimately. Everyone commented on how smooth Garry looked and he lapped at over 102mph on that little four-year-old bike. He didn’t think he had any chance of even being on the leader board when he went there, never mind winning the race, so it was a fantastic achievement and I was really proud of him even though I couldn’t be there with him. I simply couldn’t afford to go, so I tuned into Manx Radio and listened to the commentary at home instead which was nerve-wracking stuff.
After the Manx, Garry met Ray Cowles, who was a madly keen racing sponsor, and Ray offered him a ride on his RG500 Suzuki at the Macau Grand Prix, which is an annual race held in China not far from Hong Kong. For a kid who had never been out of the country, it was an amazing opportunity and Garry was really excited about going; it would have been his first big step towards becoming a full-time professional rider but it was a trip he was destined never to make.
Because he wanted to stay sharp for Macau, Garry entered a club race at Silloth in October despite me saying he was daft because it was already winter and it was not the weather to go racing in. Besides, Silloth was a bumpy old shit-hole and I said as much but he was determined to go and that was that. He asked me if I wanted to go with him but I refused as I didn’t like the place and I had to respray my car because I’d rolled the fucker again. I just said, ‘I’ll see you when you get back tonight,’ and off he went. Those were the last words I ever spoke to him.
I went into Hawick and resprayed my car as planned, then drove back to mum’s pub at about 6pm. As I was driving down the hill into Bonchester, I could see the silhouette of a transit van heading the other way. As it passed me, I realized it was Jim Oliver’s van and thought, ‘Garry’s home early’, as I didn’t expect him to be back for another couple of hours. I didn’t think much more of it and walked into the pub as normal. But when I went into the kitchen my mum was sitting there crying her eyes out. I asked what was wrong and she told me that Garry had had a bad accident. That didn’t alarm me because racers were always having accidents; it was nothing unusual and at least it explained why the van was home so early. Garry had been taken to Carlisle Royal Infirmary and Wullie Simson had brought the van back.
Mum told me he had serious head injuries but I still thought he’d be okay so I didn’t worry in the slightest. Even as we were walking into the hospital the following day I was still being cocky and cracking jokes, getting ready to say to Garry, ‘You daft bugger, what happened to you?’ We spoke to a doctor who told us Garry was in the intensive care ward and warned us that he was very ill. I remembered doctors telling me I might never walk again just because I’d busted my knee up, so I always took what they said with a pinch of salt. It was only when we walked into intensive care that the severity of the