Blood In The Streets

Until I joined the sixth form, I used to walk home for lunch every day and then walk back in for my afternoon lessons. This meant I could eat a much more pleasant sandwich than was available in the school canteen, as well as watch Puddle Lane on the television. The walk home was quite a slog, however, as my parents live at the top of an extremely long and steep hill. By the time I got to the top, I was in desperate need of that sandwich.

Walking back down the hill to school in 1989, I heard a bunch of teenage cyclists laughing as they free-wheeled down the hill on the neighbouring A-road at high-speed. The road runs parallel to my parent's street, and through a tree-lined snicket I could see them as they whizzed past me. "Look, no hands!" one was shouting proudly, with his hands in the air.

"I hope he fucking crashes and dies," I whispered hoarsely to myself (the observant reader might correctly deduct that I was a misanthope in my teens).

Well, the funny thing is that there was then a very loud bang, a portentous silence and lots of screaming and shouting. I ambled down to the bottom of the hill and turned the corner to see that this poor cyclist had ridden straight into a parked car at the bottom of the hill, and huge amounts of blood were pumping out of what remained of his face.

This was the first time I'd watched a person die. I arrived late at school that afternoon feeling a little shell-shocked. I could sense something had changed inside me, and looking back I realise that this was probably the day when I first gained a genuine insight into my own mortality. I'd learned that death comes suddenly and unannounced, and that one day I too would die. Although this was not a lesson I was likely to forget, I was reminded of it every day as I walked to school: for several weeks after his body had been cleared away, the spot where he had died was marked by the stain of his blood on the asphalt.

I swore off bicycling there and then, and didn't return to the saddle until six years later when I was a student in Cambridge, and even then I stayed off the main roads. I didn't return to cycling properly until my mid-20s, cycling to work from Peckham. That too came to an abrupt halt when an extremely old and frail woman was disoriented by my passing bicycle, and put a hand on my shoulder to steady herself. The above-mentioned observant reader will recall that a moving bicyclist is not a steady object and the poor woman tumbled into the road and started bleeding over her cardigan. I called an ambulance, cycled to work and that evening took my bicycle home on the train. And that was that for cycling in central London.

This is the second in a series of memories regarding horrific, fatal or disfiguring accidents which I wished for seconds before they occured. See also The Tar Pits of Otley.

[Time: around 1989]