‘The Martin children were bred to work.’
THE OUTBUILDING WHERE I spent so much of my childhood was an old chicken shed my dad had converted to be more of a workshop. The shed was in the garden when we moved to Kirmington, and it’s where Dad built and maintained his bikes. There were small panels in the corners, to allow the birds to walk to their outside run, which Dad boarded up. He also fitted an eight-track stereo that hung down from the roof. Next to it on a shelf was a stack of the massive plastic tape cartridges, from the 1960s, before the C90-style cassette was invented. There were tapes of Elvis, the Beatles, the Shadows, Roy Orbison …
Just by looking at my dad’s work-bench in the chicken shed you could see how much he’d used it. There was a vice bolted to it and a small shelf above, with jars of nuts and bolts on it, everything in order. His toolbox, a black Talco, was in the back corner, and a single neon strip light hung from the middle of the ceiling. The whole shed was about a motorbike-and-a-half long, perhaps 12 foot, and six foot wide. You could get one motorbike in there and no more.
Dad only built his current shed in 2003, long after he’d packed in racing, but when he was still riding motorcycles on the road, so I ended up getting much more use out of it than him. This one is massive, 20 foot by 16 foot. I’ve built, and rebuilt, plenty of my race bikes there, right up until I signed with TAS to race the Relentless Suzukis in 2011. It’s a great shed.
When I was a nipper, even before I was old enough to start school, I would sit on the end of the work-bench in the chicken shed and watch my dad work on his race bike engines. He’d normally work in overalls, but if there was anything particularly technical to tackle, like cam timing, he would put on what I’d call a smock – it was like a long blue storeman’s jacket, made of fabric. The wearing of the smock didn’t alter the way Dad worked, but it was a ritual. Dressing this way signified he meant business. He could’ve worn his overalls, the same way a judge could deliver a verdict in a vest and jogging bottoms, but it wouldn’t be the same. Whenever he wore it I’d think, ‘Oh, we’re in business tonight.’ I was dead keen, and he knew that, so he was happy to have me in there, but I couldn’t bring any mates in.
I remember once, when I was seven years old, Dad’s race bike had its petrol tank and the top of the airbox removed. The mouths of the carbs were all open, to reveal the inside of the cylinder head. I was told, ‘Don’t put stones in there.’ But, for some reason that is still a mystery, I did, even after being told not to. As a result I was banned from the garage for a while.
My dad wouldn’t be in the shed every night, like I am. After work he’s always been happy to sit in front of the telly. Now he’s got the best shed in the world, and he never goes in it.
Being in the shed didn’t feel like it was about spending time with my dad. He’d point to stuff and ask me to tell him what it was called, components like a valve or a camshaft, but he wouldn’t explain much to me. For me, it was all about being around engines. I’ve always been fascinated by mechanical stuff. I want to know how it works and what makes it tick. I’m interested in the history, too. For example, it was the Romans who originally came up with the idea of a piston, con-rod and crank to turn linear motion into rotary movement (or vice versa). You think of Watt and the condensing steam engine, and Stephenson and Brunel and then the birth of the internal combustion engine, but the original idea was from Roman times. For cutting wood, they used waterwheels to spin a crank with a con-rod attached to a saw. And all that fascinates me.
I worked out how a four-stroke internal combustion engine worked when I was about 15 or 16. I’d stripped and reassembled dozens of engines by that time, knowing how they were supposed to go together. They would work when I finished with them, start right up and run properly, but I didn’t grasp the real concept of suck-squeeze-bang-blow till about the time I was leaving school.
I started spannering at a very early age. I had spent years watching my dad and working on the scrap he had lying around the chicken shed. He had a few old, good-for-nothing Briggs & Stratton 3.5 lawn-mower engines, but they weren’t the best to work on, not for someone still at infant school, anyway. My first proper engineering project was a Suffolk Punch engine. A neighbour, Mr Cassidy, gave it to me. It was an old knackered lawn-mower motor. I wasn’t even ten, but he must’ve known I was into engines.
Mr Cassidy lived opposite some derelict Kirmington farm buildings we’d play in. Our gang would climb up and jump off the ramshackle roof and he would always be coming over to give us a bollocking for making a racket. Then one evening he said, ‘I’ve got something for you.’ It was a Suffolk Punch engine and it was mega. The early Suffolk Punches, like this, were cast, side-valve 200-cc engines, but basically this one was scrap.
When word got around that people could off-load their old scrap lawn-mowers without even having to take to them to the tip, folks would give me all sorts of Suffolk Punches and Briggs & Stratton engines. I’d take these engines and literally rev them to death. I wanted to blow them up. The neighbours must have loved it. My dad eventually made me a really trick exhaust for my tenth birthday to help keep me quiet. It was a straight bit of pipe, with holes drilled all around it, then wrapped in wire wool, before another, length of pipe, of a larger diameter, was slid over the top and brazed to collars at either end. The noise of me murdering those engines, running them flat-out till they went bang, must have been horrendous, but I loved it.
Before I was even ten I would strip engines and put them back together. I didn’t have specialist tools, like a puller to take the flywheel off, but I could take the cylinder and the piston off and the valves out. The valves didn’t have a collet, they had a pin that went through the stem. I couldn’t replace this pin. I knew what to do, but my fingers weren’t strong enough to compress the spring, so I had to wait for my dad to come home from work to do that.
That Suffolk Punch was the first engine I tuned too. I’d seen pictures of a famous racing bike, like a Manx Norton or something similar, with drilled pistons and con-rods, in one of my dad’s classic race bike magazines, so I start drilling the pistons and con-rods of my lawn-mower engine. I’ve still got the scars from it now. I didn’t know anything about centre-punching or drilling a pilot hole. I just tried to drill big holes through the skirt of the piston to lighten it. My dad’s Black & Decker drill was bigger than me, so it used to jump off and get me on the back of the hand. Scarred hands are all part of being a mechanic, though. I always wanted hands like my dad’s, so I wasn’t bothered if I cut them or blackened my fingernails. I wanted my hands to be like shovels. Nowadays I look after them a bit more. I still don’t wear gloves to work in, I’m not into them, but I wear barrier cream. I realised my hands are what earn me my money and it’s no good for them to look like they’ve been to Afghanistan and back every minute of every day.
As a boy I used to cut my hands and stuff, but no one died. I’m sure, now, if anyone saw a primary school pupil with a power drill, trying to bore holes through an aluminium piston on the driveway of his house, they’d report it to the social services, but no one seemed bothered in Kirmington – or at least not in our corner of it. Mum didn’t stop me. She may have thought it was strange that I would rather be in the shed on my own than out with my mates some days, but her dad was very hands-on, and her husband worked with his hands, so it can’t have seemed that unusual that her eldest son wanted to as well.
It wasn’t all lawn-mowers. The Yamaha TY80 and my dad’s racing bikes had sparked my lifelong obsession with motorcycles.
One day, when I was a few years older, Aaron Ash brought round a Maico 490. This was a huge German air-cooled motocrosser with what I already knew was a very fancy and exotic Öhlins shock absorber. This wasn’t the kind of bike to gently ride around the fields and lanes. It was a fire-breathing dirt bike, built to win races. They don’t make anything like it any more. What a weapon! I was 12 or 13 at the most, and Aaron was three years older. The Maico had come out of someone’s shed, but wasn’t running. Aaron knew I’d have a chance of getting it going. It had a big Bing carburettor on it, so I cleaned that out. Then I took the plug out and cleaned that. I drained the dregs of the old fuel out of it and poured some fresh petrol in the tank. We couldn’t kickstart it. I was only a pup at the time, so we ended up bumping it off down Gravel Pit Lane. Somehow, we got it going, then took it out on Kirmington playing fields, two kids on this vicious motocross bike. It revved like mad. It shouldn’t have been allowed. In fact, thinking about it, it wasn’t allowed. That bike had enough power to put some manners in you.
Not long after that, my mum talked my dad into getting me a helmet.
By the time I was 14, I had a paper round. After I’d done that, on Friday nights, my mum would take me to work at my dad’s truck yard. During school holidays, I’d cycle the seven miles to his work on my purple Claud Butler mountain bike. On the way I’d sometimes time it just right to be overtaken by a tractor going to the Cherry Valley Ducks factory. I would then pedal like hell to get in the slipstream, where I could stay, going faster but not pedalling so hard, all the way to the truck yard.
At my dad’s work I’d fill windscreen washer bottles, check wheel nuts and tyre pressures, sweep up, sort out the scrap heap, clean oily and greasy components in the parts washer – all kinds of odd jobs that an apprentice would do.
Friday nights are always busy, getting trucks ready at the end of the working week, so they were serviced and ready to go back on the road, either the next morning or the following Monday. I’d work there and get a lift home with him in the van at 10 o’clock. We’d be back there at six the next morning. Graft. It’s all I’ve known.
One day we were out on a job. Dad used to do repairs for C & J Haughton, a local firm. We were in their yard on a breakdown and I spotted this bike around the back of the warehouse and thought, ‘Bloody hell!’ It was a Kawasaki KX125, a 1986 model, the first year the 125 had disc brakes front and rear. It was a full-on motocrosser, a real racer, not a road bike styled to look like one. The bloke we dealt with said it had been there for years, but it ran. I was desperate to have it.
On the way back home in the van I told my dad I thought it was mega and asked him if he thought they’d sell it. He told me he would find out. It turned out they were happy to get rid of it, but it was over a month before my dad picked it up for me. Four weeks, but at that age it felt like a lifetime. Every night he came home and I would ask if he had got it, but he’d tell me he hadn’t had a chance. Eventually, my dad did buy it, but I paid for it by working weekends.
I’d ride the KX every chance I could. I’d often go in the gravel pit at the top of the street, but I preferred to ride it through Mr Lancaster’s farm. I’d get bollocked for riding on the farmer’s field every week. It wasn’t that I didn’t respect him, I just wanted to ride my bike.
I grew up with parents who were out at work a lot. I remember walking home from primary school and seeing Mum picking potatoes in the fields. That was her job for a while. She is a serious grafter, just like my dad. She has quite old-fashioned views. To her, men having paternity leave is a load of rubbish. The breadwinner should be back at work, earning. The Martin children were bred to work.
After Kate, my youngest sister, started school, my mum studied to become a nurse. Now she’s a District Nurse Sister, band seven, the highest you can get. She did it without any wittering or moaning, she just got on with it. Four kids and a career as well.
My mum and dad didn’t row. One or the other would just go deathly silent for a week and not talk to their other half. Now I do that a bit myself, but I try not to. There’s so much about my parents that I respect, but there’s also a few parts of their character and habits I don’t like. I’ve often thought, I don’t want to be like that when I’m older. So I fight against it. I worked with my dad for years. Right back to when I was 12 years old. I loved it, most of it anyway. The only things that really began to get on my nerves were to do with Dad being the world’s worst for routines.
I worked with him at weekends and during school holidays until I left school. Later, when I was 19, I went back to work with him full-time, after I finished my apprenticeship at Volvo. It was then that I really started noticing he’d eat breakfast the same way, while reading his magazine the same way, always back to front. On the drive to work, me sat next to him, he’d change gear in exactly the same place. Every. Single. Day. It did my head in.
At work every day was different. Yes, I was fixing trucks every day, but each had a different problem, and the drivers were all characters. One of these drivers would inadvertently change the course of my life.