Everyone starts Somewhere

A few years after my Raleigh Chopper bike, I phoned my mum from Romford and told her that I was going to buy a car. There was silence at the other end of the phone and she said that under no circumstances should I buy a car.

So I bought a motorbike....


It was early November 1974 and I really did not know how to ride a motorbike, the Yamaha YCS1, 180cc bike was below the "legal" 250cc level, so I could ride on a provisional licence, obtained a few weeks before, just after my seventeenth birthday.

The number plate was WUW339G according to my diary.

At the time I was living with a family called the Wilsons, the father actually secured my loan, which, if memory serves me, was over one hundred and twenty pounds, a fair old debt for someone who was earning about fourteen pounds a week (before about nine pounds of expenses).

It was soon to prove a lot more expensive.