‘It’s probably the last time I cried. I lay there, not having the strength to lift myself up, thinking, “What are you doing?”’
AFTER THE 2010 TT, I spent a week in Noble’s Hospital on the Isle of Man, and Kate stayed out there with me. The amount of get-well-soon cards and messages of support was amazing. When I got back to Kirmington I had another week off work while I limped around the farm, getting looked after by the Lancasters.
I had been prescribed some strong painkillers and after a couple of weeks I was really struggling to get off them. In the past I’d watched Trainspotting, looked at the stories of heroin addicts not being able to kick their habits and thought, ‘You weak-kneed bastards. It’s only drugs, what’s up with you?’ And now I was addicted to these tramadol painkillers. When I needed one I would be shaking and had no energy. I had to have them. As soon as I took them I just felt normal, 100 per cent. Not high or feeling any kind of altered state, just normal, with a little bit of pain.
At that point, so soon after breaking my back, I could hardly lift my arms up and I was constipated. I hadn’t had a shit for over a week and I was tearing myself another arsehole trying to move something. Nobody ever put more effort into having a dump, but all that would come out was a pea, or less. It wasn’t a good time.
I was straight back on the fitness trail and borrowed a turbo trainer from my brother just to do something, to try to keep active. You bolt your bicycle to the turbo trainer rig, so when you pedal, the back wheel spins a roller, and you can increase or decrease its resistance. I couldn’t bend down to hold the bars, so I’d have it set up outside the farm and I would grip onto a drainpipe while I pedalled – just to be doing something. Anything. I was struggling mentally and physically.
Once, during this week off work, I slipped over in the shower and started crying to myself. It’s probably the last time I cried. I lay there, not having the strength to lift myself up, thinking, ‘Fucking hell, Martin, what are you doing? Man up!’ I managed to get up before Mrs Lancaster had to come and help me.
I went back to work, or at least trying to work, at Dad’s truck yard, but I was still not managing to get off the prescription painkillers.
It got to the stage where my doctor wouldn’t give me any more of them, but I had some left. They came in little capsules and I had to open them, take some of the grains of painkiller out and mix some aspirin in. It took me a month of this to get off them.
Around the same time it came out that I’d been seeing another woman behind Kate’s back. When I first met Steph she was a salesperson for a pharmaceutical drug company. She was doing an Open University course and, in 2009, she came to my dad’s to interview me for some part of it. She kept popping in and I eventually fell for her, then it all got messy. One hundred per cent my fault …
It would lead to me splitting with Kate, leaving the Lancasters’ farm in Kirmington, where I’d lived for years, and moving in with a mate in Caistor.
During this very low time, when I felt not much was going to plan, a mysterious and unusual character came onto the scene. I didn’t want to change any names in this book if I had a choice, but I had to alter this one. Mr X is a very serious bloke. He is deeply involved with a specific charity and had trucks to transport donations around. He approached my dad to fix one of his trucks and I ended up doing the job.
My dad had met Mr X before I had, and told me he was very religious. The first time I met him he said, ‘I’ve been sent to see you. He’s not ready for you yet. He has big plans for you.’
Perhaps it was because I was still coming off those painkillers, but I felt vulnerable. I must’ve done, because I took it all in.
Mr X would regularly turn up at my work. He would arrive in Bentleys, Aston Martins, other sports cars and a very rare five-cylinder Transit that I thought was the best of the lot. I didn’t even know they existed. It sounded like he had fingers in a lot of pies, but he reckoned he spent a million quid a year keeping his name off the internet. It must have worked. When his real name is typed into Google nothing comes up. That’s bloody unusual on its own. He said he was involved with the SAS, but I had a strong feeling he had a shady past. He made me think he had links with the underworld, yet his charity now had contracts with the UK government.
He knew my dad was into World War II and military history and he would bring him presents like random bits of Spitfires and Lancaster bombers.
Eventually, it came out that Mr X wanted me to work for him, indirectly. He wanted my earnings to go to him and then he’d distribute some of it to me. It became clear, from the things he said – he even admitted it – that he was having private investigators do background checks on the people I trusted, like my accountant and Andy Spellman.
I don’t know if he was running some kind of cult, but it seemed like he had followers giving him a lot of money, perhaps for religious reasons. I’m not saying there wasn’t a lot of good being done with the money, but Mr X had a lot of very nice stuff too.
I went to stay at his house for a night. He had loads of servants. One of them would follow him with a glass ashtray as Mr X walked around smoking a huge cigar. When he got in his Jacuzzi, someone would appear with his slippers and put them by the side of it.
It sounds ridiculous, writing about it now, because normally I’d run a mile, but he had a way about him that somehow sucked me in. And it wasn’t just me. It seemed like he worked on people in a psychological way. He told me that he saw me the racer and me the truck fitter as being both in awe of each other and looking down on each other and in conflict. It struck a chord. I didn’t feel brainwashed at the time, but with hindsight I think I was.
I was certainly coming around to his way of thinking, starting to believe that maybe everything I earned should go to him. Mr X knew I was mad about the Britten, the extremely rare New Zealand-built, V-twin race bike – my favourite motorcycle of all time – and told me he knew where one might be for sale. He was flicking all my switches. Making me think, ‘He’s not a messer.’
He’d helped a lot of people through his international charity work, but there were a couple of things that put doubts in my mind about him. He was rude to the people around him, the servants he would have following in his wake with a glass ashtray or slippers or whatever, and I didn’t like that rudeness.
He said stuff like, ‘I hate myself for buying new cars, but I can’t help myself because I love them so much. I see such poverty, but I buy these cars, so the only way I can get around it is to give them away.’
Andy got on well with Mr X at first, and they seemed to talk regularly. Andy has told me since that he was given some good advice on how to deal with me when I was acting like an arsehole towards him. Mr X offered Andy an Aston Martin V8 Vantage, but he turned it down. Wisely.
Mr X was good to talk to. He is very intelligent in lots of ways. You could have a yarn about all sorts of things and he’d know about them. I like people like that.
During this time Mr X was getting more and more interested in my finances. He was requesting copies of contracts I had with sponsors.
Meanwhile, I’d been doing any kind of exercise I could from the time I got out of hospital, my injuries were healing and I was feeling much stronger. I missed the Southern 100 in July, but I was fit for August’s Ulster GP. I did all right in my first race back. I got on the podium in one of the Superbike races and it showed I could still race at fast road circuits – the Dundrod is the fastest, with lots of man’s corners. I wasn’t in any doubt, but the proof of the pudding is always in the eating, and I proved I still had the balls for it, even after the crash I’d had. I wasn’t scared of dying at a road race. I was more scared of running out of teabags.
Then came the Gold Cup meeting at Scarborough. It had been a terrible year, but a win at Oliver’s Mount would be a good way to end the season. The bikes had been back to PTR, Buckmaster’s lot in Louth, and to me they were unrideable in the wet due to the way the ignition and fuelling had been mapped, and apparently no one could, or would, do anything about it. It felt terrible off the throttle, jerky, not allowing me to feed the power in with the finesse you need on a circuit like that in those wet conditions. The weather was miserable. Any dreams of winning at Scarborough, just three and a half months after breaking my back, were knackered. I felt doomed.
For that Gold Cup, and other meetings in 2010, a friend of mine, Shaun the Sheep, would drive his camper van to the races and zip on the awning, and that would be our base in the pits. The bikes would arrive in the back of a van and Shaun would look after me, Danny and whoever else was spannering that weekend, keeping us fed and watered.
I’d known Shaun from the SMR days and got on well with him. He is an older bloke, in his fifties at the time and blunt, blunt as you like, but you knew where you stood with him. Mr X must have thought Shaun was the hired help, because he was being rude to him – when we were basically guests of Shaun, in his private camper van, and good friends beyond that.
Shaun had a rule: if you were going into the motorhome itself you had to take your shoes off. I did it, everyone did it. Prince Philip could have come by for a brew and he’d have been told, politely, ‘Shoes off, your Highness.’
When Shaun told Mr X this he flipped his lid. The very calm and calculated exterior fell away and he started shouting, ‘Next year we’re not going to be with you! We’ve got plans!’ The mask had dropped.
While I was watching this all develop I was in the corner of the awning cutting my slicks, slicing extra grooves into tyres with a special tool, to go out in the wet conditions. Then Shaun got Mr X by the scruff of his neck and shoved him out. I had a race to try and win, so I just kept my head down. I didn’t need to be dragged into a fight on a race day. They seemed to be dealing with it themselves.
Meanwhile, this was far from the only relationship going to shit. I wasn’t getting along with Andy Spellman, having shut him out when he’d put some kind of F1 driver’s contract under my nose. I realise now he was just trying to help me and move the whole job forward, but it all seemed too formal. Mr X had done a bit to muddy the water, but it was my decision. Mr X wanted to take over all the dealings that Andy had helped set up and was keeping on track. Being under the spell of Mr X meant I was messing Andy about. And I was messing the North One people about. I was all over the place. I had all these opportunities, but, back then, I would probably have been happier just getting up at 5.30am, as usual, and doing five and a half days’ graft at the truck yard.
Before the set-to with Shaun, the whole scene at Oliver’s Mount had become even more weird when Mr X explained to Andy Spellman that he’d been under surveillance since he’d appeared in Scarborough. Mr X even went as far as to introduce Andy to the two huge, ex-military blokes who were spying on him. He was basically saying,’I’m the man, don’t mess about with me.’
Seeing the way he treated Shaun made my mind up, and I’ve never had anything to do with Mr X again since, though he still tries to get in touch with me. It didn’t take long for it all to feel like a lucky escape.
I left a disappointing and disturbing Scarborough without talking to Andy. I hadn’t spoken to him all day. I got it into my head that filming Closer to the Edge and getting involved with a TV company had turned my life to shit. I’d lost my girlfriend, which was my fault. Lost my home, because I had been living with her at her parents’ farm. My racing had gone to shit. I wouldn’t go home and mope and cry, I just got on with it, but I was being an arsehole to Andy.
The next day, right after the Sunday of the Gold Cup, was to be the first day of location shooting for The Boat That Guy Built. I’d done some bits in Kirmington, but this was the start, proper. Andy met me in the reception of the hotel, in the north of Manchester, where the film crew and Mark Davis had stayed, and I was telling him I could take or leave the whole TV programme. I was being selfish. I hadn’t thought how much work had gone into the pre-production of the show, the research, buying the bloody boat – I was just down on it all.
I was about to start six weeks of filming, working on my first-ever TV show. The Boat That Guy Built was a six-part BBC TV show with my name in the title, but I was feeling so negative about the whole job, I wasn’t bothered if it happened or not. I still wasn’t in a good place mentally.