Story 1. The Daisy Bell Summers

Claire Allan

I don’t know how old it actually was. It seemed ancient. “A boneshaker,” my granddad called it as he wheeled it in to show me.

“A Daisy Bell!” the children on the street laughed and teased – I didn’t understand the local nick-name, but it didn’t sound as though a “Daisy Bell” was a good thing.

But there it was – and it was mine: this bike which my daddy and my granddad had lovingly restored and sprayed silver and handed to me.

I’d never had my very own bike before – I just had a few hand-me-downs over the years: my aunt’s old bike and a marvellously massive trike that we (all four of us) loved and fought over. The Silver Daisy Bell, as it will always be known, felt like mine – all mine – in that no one in my family had ever owned her before or was allowed to ride her.

It was tall, thin – the tyres skinny and the wheels maybe a little bit shaky – the brakes were pretty suspect too – but that Daisy Bell was the key to my freedom. When I sat on my bike I felt as if I was towering above everyone else on a penny-farthing – but it didn’t matter. I loved that bike from the minute it was rolled into our garden and presented to me.

This was 1980s Derry – where no one had much but, as the song says, we saw it through without complaining.

It feels like a different world – a hazy, sepia-toned world of long sunny days and sun-blistered pavements, and the Daisy Bell that everyone else laughed at but I loved as if it was a top-of-the-range Raleigh with a basket and bell.

In my childhood I would pretend the Daisy Bell was a car – my car. And every time I sat on that hard saddle, I would imagine I was driving.

We covered some serious miles together – when I think of it now, I couldn’t imagine letting my children away with the same sense of freedom we had. But although Northern Ireland in the eighties was less than ideal in a lot of ways, it was still a different world and there existed an innocence of childhood that we lapped up as we explored the world around us.

Every weekend, and each day of the summer holidays, my sister (just one year older), my aunt (just three years older) and I would set off on an adventure. With a tinny transistor radio in the basket of my aunt’s bike, and a bottle of well-diluted Kia-Ora we would head out the “back roads” – the country lanes which led from Derry to Donegal. If we were particularly lucky we would have managed to scramble together a few pence to buy a packet of Custard Creams in the Spar shop, which would be our picnic once we reached our destination.

We pushed our bikes up impossibly steep hills, and freewheeled back down them – passing fields in a flurry of childhood excitement. The sun would beat down – but of course you didn’t wear sun-cream in those days. I don’t think we’d ever heard of it. And as for safety helmets and knee-pads, and any sense of real road awareness, none seemed to exist.

When you were on the back roads, you rarely if ever came across a car. The roads were our own.

Halfway on our journey we reached “The Dragon’s Teeth” – large concrete blocks that separated the North from the South. As army checkpoints could not exist on every road, the simple way to deal with controlling the flow of traffic was to erect these concrete bollards that jutted from the road. They didn’t really look like teeth but often I would allow myself to imagine that they were just that. It added to the mystique of the adventure – winding roads and a dragon’s teeth.

And the Banshee. Darby O’Gill and the Little People has an awful lot to answer for. It’s a film we watched as children – and harmless and all as it seemed, once the notion of the Banshee was put in your head it was hard to shift.

There was this one stretch, on the road to our destination, where the trees overgrew and no matter how sunny the day it always felt cold. And if you listened hard enough you could make out the howl of the wind. I’m not ashamed to say it would on occasion give me the bad fear and I would speed up the peddling on my bike to get through that dark recess as quickly as possible while promising to the Lord our God, with all the piousness typical of a ten-year-old, that I would never steal another biscuit out of the jar if He kept every one of my family safe from harm.

In this life, they say, we all have mountains to climb. In my childhood, on my silver Daisy Bell, this was more than accurate. The destination of our jaunts out each day was always Grianán of Aileach – an ancient Irish ring fort at the top of an exceptionally steep hill, which watches over the four corners of Inishowen and Derry. We never even attempted to cycle up that hill, which winds its way around the mountain for more than a mile. Cars struggled on that hill on a good day – so instead, switching off the transistor radio, we would gird our loins, take a deep breath and set off pushing our bikes up that hill singing “I Have Confidence” from TheSound of Music as loud as we could as we went.

I’m not sure we knew all the words but we gave it the best shot we could, feeling our confidence growing with each step we took closer to the top. And when we reached that summit – what a sight would we behold! It felt as if we were looking out over the whole of Ireland.

There was quiet calm inside the ring fort at Grianán. If you stood in the one spot for long enough, closed your eyes and listened intently, you could almost hear the echoes of every person who had stood there over hundreds of years. I felt that, even as a child. It was there in our bones: the feel of the place, the calmness – broken only then by the rattling of the Custard Cream packet and the pouring of the Kia-Ora into plastic tumblers or the sounds of tourists chatting and marvelling at the ancient structure.

We would climb the steps, which felt perilously high, and sit on the edge of the wall – aware that one false move could send us tumbling to the ground. We were never scared of it. We thrived on it.

And when we climbed back down, we would crouch and climb into the tiny tunnels – remembering distant stories about fairy keeps and wishing chairs.

Still fresh in my mind is the time we saw baby mice, reminiscent of baked beans – bald, pink, small, wriggling – in the gateway. I’m not sure I was ever as keen on crawling through the tunnels after that. Our trips gave me confidence but they never quite took away my fear of mice!

Our return journeys were mighty craic. Not least because the biggest pay-off for pushing our bikes up that blasted mountainside was the ride, freewheeling, back down it. This was exhilarating, terrifying and hilarious. With every return journey I prayed the ancient brakes on the Daisy Bell would save me from oblivion – at the same time enjoying the rush of the wind through my hair and the screams of joy as we let go and enjoyed the ride.

The hills were faster on the way back. The sun shone brighter. The corner where I was sure the Banshee lived was still very much there and very frightening – but I peddled fast past it and tried not to think of that scene in Darby O’Gill where the coachman bids him to “Get in”.

We would pass the Dragon’s Teeth and the Spar shop and cross the reservoir over to home and then once there we would stop, maybe grab a sandwich and let our parents know we were okay and ponder what to do with the rest of our day.

The answer was simple. We would head out again. We would refill the Kia-Ora and check how many Custard Creams we had left and on we would cycle – back out to Grianán all over again.

We never seemed to get tired. Our legs never ached. We never got bored with the journey. We found magic and good craic every time we went. I always imagined the dragons laying low beneath the roads, the fairies dancing at the ring fort and the Banshee in waiting.

And the Daisy Bell – painted silver and old and rattley – never did let me down.

It wasn’t the fanciest bike on the street. It was far from cool. It didn’t make anyone jealous. No one admired it. No one envied me. But that bike was my most prized possession bar none and in the company of my sister and aunt we enjoyed so many happy adventures together.

Would I do it again if I could? Relive those hazy moments on my precious bike, with my precious friends? Yes. I would. I can almost taste the Kia-Ora if I think about it long enough.

Claire Allan is a Derry-based journalist and author of seven novels, including Rainy Days and Tuesdays, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? and The First Time I Said Goodbye. She is a mother of two (one of each) and is a Twitter addict. Her childhood was made particularly special by her wonderful parents Peter and Karen, her grandparents, sisters and brother, auntie Marie-Louise and cousins from England, Denis and Tracey. She would really like to own another bike one day – but she’s not brave enough after a spin class made her cry.