Every Split Second Counts - My Life with Fast Carts, Fast Women and F1 Superstars. Martin Hines
for the grammar school. Instead, I ended up at Alder School, a secondary modern in Finchley, and started to hang out with the wrong set. The whole area was full of gangs and I tacked myself on to one of them. I’d been at the school only about nine months when kids from a rival gang attacked me and split my head open with a steel ruler. I was lucky: three months before another boy had been stabbed and died from his wounds.
A split head was quite enough for Mum and Dad. They took me away from Alders and paid for me to go to Clark’s College in Ballards Lane, Finchley. But money can’t buy you love, and it can’t buy you a love of books. I was already behind the other kids, so they put me in a class a year younger than I was. Some would have seen that as humiliating, but not me. It was brilliant. It meant I was bigger than the rest of my group and, together with John Golding, another lad who was older than the others, I found I could wield power.
John and I worked our way through school, always the biggest in the class and always able to get menial jobs such as homework and lines done for us. The only person who got the better of us was a rather attractive French teacher who caught us writing notes about what we would like to do to her. In a novel, of course, she would have been the flattered older woman who introduced us to the delights of sex. But this is non-fiction – and she put us in detention.
All in all, school took up valuable time I would rather have spent on other things, such as my pigeons or going speedway racing. I haven’t a clue where my interest in pigeons came from, but, around the age of nine or ten, I suddenly decided there was nothing I would rather do than race pigeons. I persuaded my friend Geoff Barker to give me a hand building a small loft in the bottom left-hand corner of our garden.
Geoff and I were good mates and got up to all the normal things that small boys do, such as scrumping apples and hiding in the bushes on the golf course and nicking the balls ready to sell them back to the club shop. But this was a much grander project. Before long our pigeon loft stretched right across the bottom of the garden and was filled with birds. There was a corner of Petticoat Lane set aside for pets and we used to go up on a Sunday morning, using our ‘expertise’ to pick out what we thought looked like the quickest birds in the group. We didn’t realise they had probably been rounded up from Trafalgar Square the day before and were as likely to end a race on top of Nelson’s Column as back in my loft.
Even at that age I liked to win, and I gradually built up a reasonably competitive group of birds. I joined a local club and bought all the equipment you needed to clock the birds in at the end of races. I can still remember the thrill of taking the baskets to the station to send the pigeons on their way, then sitting impatiently with Geoff, scouring the skies for the first dot that signalled a bird returning from up North or across in France. But it wasn’t all fun. Geoff read in a magazine that we had to check regularly for canker because if one bird went down it could spread throughout the loft. The article had some vivid pictures of what the symptoms looked like and, sure enough, after a few weeks I realised that one of my best birds had been struck down.
‘You know you have to wring its neck, don’t you?’ Geoff said.
I was horrified. I mumbled, ‘I’ve never done anything like that. I don’t know if I can.’
‘You have to or all of them will die.’
I knew he was right. I grabbed the sick bird with one hand, put my other on its neck, looked away, swallowed, squeezed its body and twisted and pulled on its neck as hard as I could. The pigeon’s head came off in my hand. I felt sick but at least it wasn’t going to spread canker in the loft.
Just as I can’t recall how my interest in pigeon racing started, I can’t remember when it came to an end or what happened to the loft and the birds. It’s a puzzle, because you can’t just open the door and let them fly away – they would just come back again! Possibly I passed them on to Geoff, because about a year ago out of the blue I received an email from him with an attachment containing an article from a pigeon-racing magazine. He’s still picking up prizes for his birds and, asked in the article how he’d started, Geoff replied, ‘I got into it through a school friend, Martin Hines. I went on to become a fireman and still race pigeons; he went into motorsport and became a millionaire.’ Well, he was right about the motorsport.
My love of speedway is easier to explain. It was a family thing. Wally was a top rider for West Ham and England and runner-up in the 1950 World Championships. All the Hines family were fans. Of course, Dad couldn’t be content with just watching: he had to be down in the pits helping Wally with his bikes, and he even began to sell some mopeds and motorbikes from the shop. Eventually he started to organise events for the ACU, motorcycle racing’s governing body in the UK, and at one stage ran the High Beech track near Loughton, Essex, where speedway started in this country back in 1928. My memories tend to be of watching races with Mum, then going down to the pits with Dad and Wally.
Speedway is a fantastic family sport, as important to petrolheads as football is to deadheads. The setup is much the same, with clubs around the country competing against each other. Back then, the obligatory kit for followers of sport wasn’t overpriced replica shirts but a home-knitted scarf, a bobble hat and a wooden rattle to cheer your team on. I’ve still got mine at home.
As a kid I loved everything about speedway: the great atmosphere under the floodlights that seemed to shut the rest of the world out in the darkness beyond, the courage of the riders, the thrill of the races and the shower of cinders that sandblasted you if you stood too close to a bend. Above all I was hooked on the night air laced with the unforgettable smell of burning Castrol R in those old Jap engines. As far as I’m concerned, you can keep snorting cocaine, just give me that distinctive Castrol R scent and I’m high. If Chanel could find a way of bottling that perfume, women would find it much easier to keep their men at home.
The highlight of the speedway year was always the world championships at Wembley, where the crowd’s singing of ‘We’ll Meet Again’ – as traditional as ‘Abide with Me’ at the FA Cup final – always made me tingle with anticipation. But that was nothing to the feeling I had when my first sporting hero, Jack Young, took me round the track on his bike.
Jack was an Australian superstar who came to this country in 1949 and, having won all six races in his first meeting, stayed on for ten years. In 1951 he became the first rider from a Second Division British club to win the World Championship and then became the first rider to retain the title. It was traditional for the World Champion to do a lap of honour before racing started the following year, and you can imagine the feelings of a seven-year-old when Jack lifted me up on to the kidney tank and took me round in the dazzling glare of the spotlight. I can remember looking out into the semi-darkness and glimpsing the crowd as they stood and applauded. It blew me away and I guess I’ve loved being the centre of attention every since.
Speedway was the inspiration for one of the great ideas to come out of Dad’s shop, one of many examples of his ability to think outside the box in a way that made people sit up and take notice. On my way home from school one day I smoked a surreptitious ‘joystick’ – a double-length cigarette you could buy individually – then went down to the basement, where Wally and Pete were trying to bend some piping in a vice. It was a shape that seemed somehow familiar but not the kind of thing they usually did.
‘What’re you making?’ I asked.
‘Can’t tell you,’ Wally said with a smile. ‘It’s top secret. Maybe we’ll show you next week.’
It was worth the wait. They’d stripped down an old bike to its bare frame and fitted new, stronger wheels with knobbly tyres. The mudguards had been chopped back so they were only about 15 cm long. And, most dramatic of all, they had replaced the traditional handlebars with cow-horn bars just like a speedway bike. I was looking at a prototype skid kid’s bike. It looked the business and, to our delight, Wally’s son David and I were going