From: dab@vuse.vanderbilt.edu (The Nashville Flash)
Subject: "Literature" (excerpt)
Summary: Spagthorpe in Literature
Originator: dab@space3
Organization: Vanderbilt University School of Engineering, Nashville, TN, USA
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 17:31:11 GMT

From _The Mint_ by 352087 A/c Ross
(Excerpted and slightly edited with apologies to the late Mr. Ross who
later lost his life whilst riding a Brough Superior.)

"16: The Road

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 hanger, 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 @#$%#$,' 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 Spagthorpe 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 lordily 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 
horsepower.  A miracle for 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'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 ram 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 
at an instant to wave: and the slipstream 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 rear 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 Spag 
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 level 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 the 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 the 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 me 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 rythmical, 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 them my belly had forgotten its lunch, my eyes smarted and steamed.  Out 
again, to sluice my head under 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 I have 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."
============================================================================
 "No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle." - Winston Churchill
    The Nashville Flash	  -   dab@vuse.vanderbilt.edu   -   DoD # 412 
Reiteration: I DID NOT WRITE THIS.  IT IS EXCERPTED FROM THE BOOK (edited).


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