The Mapmaker's Tale

I am putting the finishing touches to a novel about a biker who moves to France and, by riding down the slower, smaller roads that he has never ridden before, he discovers a different world; one obscured to all of those who race around locked in their steel boxes - who don't bother or care, to see.

It's a very personal novel (but then again, aren't they all?) and it pretty much sums up my attitude of finding a different road, one that I've not travelled down before, and slowly exploring it...

At my own pace; in my own time.

I'll be publishing this novel as soon as it's finished or is to my liking or, preferably, both.

The Mapmaker’s Tale – Chapter 1

I am the second son and the third oldest of us siblings.

Like a good Germanic family my parents decided to have four children; boy, girl, boy, girl and in that order. I often wonder how they arranged that.

Not that we were Krauts; we were fourth generation Cornish country bumpkins with more Polish heritage than anything else. And a taste for academia; there were plenty of surgeons and doctors in our family tree.

I suppose that I was always slightly jealous of Mike, my older brother and first born. Not that I noticed at the time; it just seemed normal that Mike should get more attention and that I should receive his cast off’s. In a way it helped me to work harder in order to make my own way in life. I got a good degree and have ended up as a respected and rather well paid IT consultant; for a long time my BMW sat next to my Audi convertible in the driveway of my five bedroomed mock Georgian detached house.

My sisters worked hard as well. Marie, the second born, has gone on to become a hot shot solicitor and her Mercedes convertible sits next to her Land Rover and her horsebox in the drive of her farmhouse in the Yorkshire dales. Yes, Marie has horses and showjumps to a pretty high standard.

And Jane, the youngest of the four of us, the only one of us to have children, had those children quite young and then went on to become a mature student and end up with a PhD in statistical sociology or some such thing. She has, in a way, become the most successful of all of us; often appearing on TV talk shows and with an occasional article in the Sunday Times.

And that was the thing, you see; Mike never really worked at anything. Or, at least, he never seemed to. Yes, he took his motorbikes very seriously; they were always perfectly maintained and spotlessly clean. Fishing as well; he always caught more fish than any of his mates, purely because he put more effort in – often walking the beach at low tide so that he would know what it would look like when the tide came in, bringing the bass and the flounder in its wake.

So it was really no surprise when, halfway through his second year, Mike flunked out of university; Cambridge, no less.

I was doing my A levels at the time and for a while there was a very unpleasant atmosphere in the family home. Father, an academic himself, was bitterly disappointed; Mother, having discovered the joys of daytime Johnny Walker, seemed to be less concerned but, then again, she had been less concerned about anything for a few years by then.

Don’t get me wrong, she had been a good mother when we had needed her to be a good mother; playing with us, cooking for us, encouraging us and, of course, knitting for us.

Mother stopped knitting when she started drinking. Or, perhaps, she started drinking when she stopped knitting. And, in our house, the gentle click, click of needle against needle was replaced by the far more ominous chick of bottle against glass.

And, whereas a knitting needle can, in the right hands, be a dangerous weapon, a glass of whiskey in my mother’s hands was always lethal.

Mike lasted two weeks of the poisoned atmosphere and then, early one morning, he got on Bessie, his black BMW R80, and left for France.

We got a postcard a week later; he was living in a mobile home on a camp site in Brittany, doing some odd jobs to pay his rent and, also, working in a fish processing plant to keep himself fed and keep Bessie, the one true love of his life, maintained.

Of course, my sisters and I discussed Mike’s escape, as we referred to it.

Part of us were critical; after all, he had rebelled against everything that we had been brought up to believe in.

However, I suspect that we also admired him a bit, for having the guts to go his own way.

And so things went on for years and years; at family gatherings my sisters and I learned not to mention Mike and, to all extent and purposes, we became a three child family.

There were occasional postcards letting us know that Mike was still alive, moving around and paying his way.

Eventually it seemed that Mike had settled down in the town of Huelgoat in the Finisterre (which literally means End of the World) region of Brittany.

During this period our lives went on. My sisters and I went to university, got good degrees, got good jobs and so forth.

Along the way we each got married and Jane started having kids.

Although I had never been into bikes like Mike, I did have a Honda CG125 whilst at sixth form college and upgraded that to a CX500 when I went to university. I suspect that if Mike had been around he would have said something about that; something along the lines of... “Why don’t just bung on a couple more wheels and then you’ll have a fully motorised armchair?”

I sold that bike when I got my first job. Not only wouldn’t it have seemed right to my employers for me to turn up for work on a bike rather than in my company car, it was at work that I met Angela, the woman I was to marry.

She didn’t think much about bikes.

It was the classic young professional romance and we had a classic young professional wedding.

I think that Mike was invited but, if he was, he didn’t come.

We lasted all of five years.

It’s not really relevant here but...

The company that Angela and I both worked for was going through hard times. I was offered voluntary redundancy with the implied threat that, if I didn’t accept, I would be made redundant anyway, but with a far lower payout.

This was during the credit crunch and jobs were hard to find. Especially for IT consultants who specialised in the financial services that had caused the credit crunch in the first place.

People like me, in other words.

Angela took on the mortgage and kept the house. I ended up in a sterile flat on the other side of town.

I took the divorce well. Or, at least, I took it in the same sterile, unemotional way that categorised the way that I lived back then. The same way, to be honest, that had probably laid the groundwork for the eventual divorce.

I think that I realised that I was at a turning point in my life; perhaps not a very important one (although, that did actually turn out to be true) but a turning point, none the less.

Finding work was far more difficult than I had ever thought that it would be. The only jobs that seemed to be available to were junior management jobs in those call centre type IT help desks.

So, I decided to take a few weeks off from job hunting and take a trip to France; to visit my older brother – to see how Mike was getting on.

And for that I needed a bike.

It had been a few years since I’d sold the CX and, during those years, an awful lot seemed to have changed. Bikes, apparently, had got faster and even the small six hundred super sports were now faster and more manoeuvrable than even the highest tuned exotic superbikes of my day.

I settled for an Enfield three fifty. Not the sexiest of bikes and, to be honest, no faster than the Honda 125 that I had learned to ride on, all those years before.

But I liked her dumpy looks. I liked her air of being slightly old for her age, of her fatness and comfort – in a way, she reminded me of me.

I called her Daphne – somehow that name suits her – in any case, it’s the name that has stuck.

Knowing that I’d never carry a passenger I changed her seat from a double to a single and added a chromed rack where the pillion had once had sat. God bless me, I even added a pair of panniers; I wondered what Mike would think about that.

I needn’t have worried.

I wrote to Mike to let him know that I was coming over and, was there a chance that he could put me up for a few days?

He replied sooner than I thought he would. His letter was sparse; full of detail but not emotion.

Of course I could stay - he had a spare room and I could stay as long as I liked. He was working in a Boulangerie these days – early mornings, which he liked - plenty of daylight hours with which to do his own thing. I wasn’t sure what his own thing was but I did get the sense that he had some sort of project on the go. That, as it turned out, was a good sense, I just didn’t, at the time, know how good a sense or how much of a project it was.

He had bought a small cottage near the bakery where he worked. He had had a couple of long term girlfriends but was currently single.

All of this was reported in a dry humourless form that was more suited to filling out a tax return. The only elements of Mike, my brother Mike, came in the paragraph where he explained that he still rode Bessie. That she was getting on a bit but was still a game old bird.

And then again, in the sentence where he congratulated me on my choice of bike.

“If ever there was a bike that’s perfectly suited to you, Carey,” he wrote, “it’s an Enfield 350.”

Do you know how many times I’ve since read and re-read that sentence trying to work out if it was a compliment or otherwise?

I made the arrangements, emptied and switched off the fridge and freezer and, one June morning, got on a fully loaded Daphne and headed west and south to Portsmouth.

The overnight ferry was comfortable; the sea was calm, I had a good meal in the restaurant – steak and chips, garlic mushrooms to start with and a sort of Black Forest Gateau for desert. And then a few drinks in the bar. There was a cabaret in the evening, an actor who had once been in East Enders or Coronation Street but, as I never watched the soaps, I didn’t recognise him.

It seemed that he had re-invented himself as a magician but he really wasn’t very good. It can’t have helped that he was drunk. He was drunk when he started and took a fair few drinks during his act. I realised, all of a sudden, that when the seasoned travellers, mainly lorry drivers I thought, laughed at him, it was his mumbling, his magic tricks that didn’t quite work, the slight stagger as he walked across the stage, the secret sips from a coffee cup that held, I assumed, as much whisky as coffee, that they were laughing at.

In other words, they were laughing at him, not with him. They were laughing at the failed actor working for a pittance on an overnight cross channel ferry and probably living in a grotty bedsit in Plymouth – still dreaming of stage success and using cheap whisky to blot out the realisation that it never would happen. Maybe he had a few friends down his local pub; friends who were probably bored by the stories of his glory days when he had a minor part on East Enders or Coronation Street. A few friends, maybe, but almost certainly no wife or girlfriend.

All of a sudden I felt sorry for the poor guy and, when he finally staggered off stage, to be replaced by gentle muzak, I went up and put a tenner in the beer glass left on the table for contributions. The only other contributions in the glass were a few coins and, from some joker, a couple of condoms that he’d almost certainly never need to use.

In my cabin I slept well that night and woke early enough to have breakfast before we docked. The private vehicles were allowed off before the lorries so I didn’t have to hang around for long. At passport control a pale spotty youth reminded me that France was an hour ahead so I should adjust my watch. I did and got on Daphne. I pointed her in the right direction and, together, we headed south, the fifty or so miles to Huelgoat and my brother Mike.

I decided to take the estuary road rather than the dual carriageway that ran down the centre of the peninsula. It would be slower but I was still running Daphne in and didn’t want to be trapped travelling at a speed that either I wasn’t happy with or Daphne, God bless her, couldn’t achieve.

It turned out, as it happens, to have been a good decision. In fact, if there was to be an epitaph to my first visit to Mike and Brittany (and all the subsequent ones) it would be that it is always better to take the slower and longer route, wherever one could.

But that was something that I’d only learn in the weeks and years to come.

I arrived at Huelgoat at about 11 am. I had stopped once for a coffee and to check that Daphne was OK. There were another few stops just to take in the view. Taking the estuary route was definitely the right thing to do.

It only took me two trips around the market square and a few dead ends before I found Mike’s cottage - it was exactly where he said it would be. Bessie, Mike’s old BMW R80, was parked in the front yard. I parked Daphne next to her. Together, I thought, they looked like two horses, like a mare and her foal.

Mike must have heard me arrive because the door to the cottage opened and there he was, looking older than I remembered but with the same sardonic smile on his face. It was the same old smile; the one that sort of said... “I’m happy, I’m content and, I know something that you don’t know.” Sometimes, growing up we’d see a different smile but that one was just as guarded. That one only occurred if he’d caught a decent sized bass off the beach or his football team had won. As bass are difficult to catch and he supported Spurs, that smile didn’t come out that much.

“Carey, you made it.” He said as if surprised I’d turned up. “Which route did you take?”

I told him that I’d taken the slower estuary route. He nodded his head slightly and smiled again; this time it was his special smile.

“Come on in,” he said.

I grabbed my bag and followed him into the cottage.

I’m not sure what I was expecting to see but what I saw all made sense. The ground floor of the cottage was all one room; part served as a kitchen, there was a dining table with six chairs and, the other half of the ground floor was arranged as a living space. Bookshelves lined the walls and there were books on the two coffee tables. It was clean and tidy but still had that lived in look.

Then again, even as a kid, Mike was always tidy. His fishing tackle box was always perfectly tidy; floats arranged in a certain order, hooks in little boxes according to their size. To be honest, when he was young, Mike probably spent more time tidying his tackle box than he spend actually fishing but then...

That additional effort probably made him a better fisherman.

“After that ride you must be thirsty - a glass of wine?” He asked.

I nodded and he wandered off into what I later learned was his pantry and wine cellar. Whilst he was gone I checked out the bookcases. Lots of French books but also about five yards of motorbike magazines – about two of those yards were dedicated to what looked like every copy of Back Street Heroes ever published.

I picked one at random and sat down to await my brother. A couple of minutes later he returned with a bottle of red wine and two glasses.

We drank and we talked and, when the bottle was empty, Mike suggested that we could be sensible or we could open another bottle and aim to be pissed by tea time. This was not the Mike that I’d grown up with but it was the sort of Mike that I could get used to.

He went off to get another bottle and, as he opened it, I couldn’t help but say... “You’ve mellowed or at least you’ve changed.”

He smiled, his special smile and replied “I’ve found my place at last. It’s not just this town or this house but everything; my job, my desires, pretty much everything. I’ve got mates, I’ve got enough money. It’d be nice if Rennes won an occassional football match but, even when they don’t, I have a heck of a good time drowning my sorrows.”

He smiled again, once again, his special smile, and then said “And I’ve got my project.”

Now, I suppose if I’ve been more on the ball; had I not just had three glasses of wine before lunch, had I not spent the previous evening in a bar on a cross channel ferry then perhaps I might have asked about Mike’s project but, the fact is, I didn’t.

And, to be honest, I suspect that if I had I wouldn’t have got much of an answer and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have understood it. Anyway, I just smiled and held out my glass to be topped up with more wine.

Mike rustled up some pizzas for lunch and we spent the afternoon in the back garden talking, drinking and, in a way, becoming brothers again. It was nice and, I have to say, totally unexpected.

The Mapmaker’s Tale – Chapter 2

The rest of the week continued in a simple routine and I wasn’t surprised to find myself asking Mike if I could extend my stay to two weeks. He agreed without thinking about it and we settled into a rhythm that wasn’t forced, that wasn’t planned but just a natural way for two brothers to pass their time.

Mike would go off to work at about three thirty in the morning; I would sometimes hear him and roll over and go back to sleep. I would get up when the first church bells of the day rang at seven o’clock. A quick shower and I’d dress and then grab a couple of Mike’s motorbike magazines and head off to a bar to have a coffee followed by an apricot juice.

Somehow I’d manage to make breakfast last for a couple of hours and then I’d go off and have a walk around the lake or have a wander in the forest. Sometimes I’d even go back to the cottage and do a bit of housework; just to pass the time until 11 O’Clock when Mike came home from work.

I’d also pop into the village shop, or walk up to the supermarket, and buy a few things for lunch; bread, cheese, ham and salad. I took on that role and was happy to do so.

The two Thursdays that I was there were, of course, different. Thursday mornings were market days. I’d sit on the terrace outside La Pailotte bar and watch the stall holders set up and then, when they were done, try not to evesdrop on their conversations as they came over for a coffee and a gossip.

“Did you do much at Morlaix, yesterday?”

“No, dead as a dodo. How about you; did you make Quimper?”

“Yes, OK I suppose. I’ve seen better. Let’s hope today is good.”

“At least it’s not raining.”

And so forth.

And then, from about eight O’Clock, the market starts to come to life and I can spend the whole morning just wandering around, watching the people, watching the commerce, watching the village becoming more than the sum of its parts.

And this was how I spent my two weeks at Mike’s. Breakfast at a bar, then occupying myself with a walk and a visit to the village shop or the local supermarket. Slowly making lunch and waiting for Mike to finish work. And, after lunch, Mike and I would head off on our bikes to one of Mike’s special places. He had lots of these.

Sometimes it would be a hump backed bridge; he seemed to like these.

“I remember stories that mad Uncle Jack used to tell use, of goblins living under bridges just waiting for a juicy young child to come stumbling along.” He would say.

Other times it would be a bar that we’d end up at. But always an interesting bar.

One day, and this stands out in my memory, for good reason as it turns out, just before I was due to return home we were taking an afternoon ride along the old road to Poulauan. Just past the humpbacked bridge there was a road, more of a track really, off to the left. Or, at least, that day there was. I must have ridden past that humpbacked bridge a dozen times without noticing the road; in fact, if asked, I would have swore that there was no such road but, this day there was and I was following Mike’s BMW up it.

The road came to an end after about four hundred yards. There was a semi circular parking area and, behind that, a bar. Mike parked up and I parked beside him. There were other bikes already parked there and a few cars. Each and every one of which looked as though they belonged to a different age, one long since past.

A Suzuki 250, with a ram jet cowling shielding the top of its twin cylinder cooled engine stood next to a far more attractive Minelli with a 200cc air cooled single cylinder two stroke engine. The Suzuki looked like a science fiction experiment gone wrong but the Minelli looked fast, light and, well, just sexy. Next to the pair of two strokes a BSA C15 stood on its own; it had been hand painted eggshell blue and looked every day of its age. There were other bikes as well; all similar. Some of which I recognised but some I had never even seen pictures of. My modern version of a nineteen fifties go to work bike and Mike’s cut down nineteen eighties touring bike looked positively modern amongst this company.

Mike dismounted and walked towards the bar. I was still looking at the strange collection of bikes when Mike called out...

“Carey, you coming in for a drink?”

I nodded, unsure what to say, and followed him into the bar.

The bar was exactly what I would have expected had I expected to find a bar where there shouldn’t have been one, at the end of a road that didn’t exist. There was a fug of cigarette smoke which presumed that the smoking ban, in place for at least five years in France, hadn’t reached here yet. Neither had fancy trainers or synthetic clothing. There were no fruit machines and the lone jukebox looked as though it had come out of an Elvis Presly film, an early one.

Mike sat at the bar and guestered for me to join him. I sat on the vacant stool and suddenly realised who the other customers reminded me of.

“Grandpa,” I said. “They all look like Grandpa did in that photo of him after he got demobbed.”

Mike looked at me with one of his deep inquisitive looks.

“A German philosopher once said that if you look at something hard enough, it starts looking back at you. Perhaps photos, and life even, work both ways. Perhaps what you see isn’t what is really there but what you want to be really there and only appears if you want or need it enough.”

At the time this was the most profound thing that Mike had ever said to me. I didn’t really understand what he was saying; in fact, it’s only recently that I’ve started to begin to understand.

There’s a lot that I didn’t understand at the time, that I’m only beginning to understand now.

We finished our drinks and left. Mike was quiet that night but then, so was I.

I got a feeling that Mike had let me into something, a part of his life that he normally strove to keep private.

I wanted to ask questions but I didn’t know what questions to ask.

A few days later it was time for me to leave. I’d enjoyed my holiday and told Mike so. I tried to explain that it seemed like we were brothers again, but for the first time.

Mike, being Mike, wasn’t having any of that.

“I wouldn’t go that far matey.” He used to call me matey when we were teenagers. “You’re still a muppet in my books.” He also called me muppet when I was young. “And as for that Daphne Mobile that you turned up on; well, no brother of mine would ever ride a bike like that.”

I’d been waiting, for the last two weeks, for a comment about the bike. As it was, it was better that I had expected, expecially when he followed it up with the words...

“But I’d be glad to call anyone a brother if he had the guts to buy and actually ride a bike like that, in public, where other people could see him.” And then he smiled to let me know he was only joking.

And then he hugged me.

It was, I think, the first time he had ever done so. In fact, apart from little childhood fights or mis-timed football tackles, it was the first time he had ever touched me.

I have to admit that I was affected by this guesture; almost to the point of tears. I put my helmet on and fired up Daphne and, with a wave, rode off before I could embarass myself.

It was only later, on the road to Roscoff that I remembered the drawer. One morning I’d been doing some tidying up whilst Mike was at work. Not that there was much to do, Mike’s place was always pretty tidy. Underneath one of the bookcases was a chest of drawers. One of the drawers was slightly open. As I closed it I noticed that it contained hand drawn maps, and little piles of notes stapled to them. I took no notice at the time and, even if I had, I probably wouldn’t have understood. One the road back to the ferry I wondered if Mike had left that drawer open for me, on purpose. I wondered a lot of things on that ferry journey back home and vowed to return to visit my newly found brother again as soon as I could.

The Mapmaker’s Tale – Chapter 3

I didn’t get the chance to visit Mike again until the following year. I’d found a job working as head of IT for a London based charity and, whilst it wasn’t as well paid as some of the jobs I’d gone for, that atmosphere was good, the staff were nice and there was never any threat of hostile takeover bids or so forth. After all, we were just a charity.

One day, just after Christmas, I came into work to find an email from Mike waiting for me. He wasn’t much of a writer, one email every couple of weeks, no real news but almost always with a photo of Bessie; sometimes by a stream, sometimes by a humpbacked bridge, sometimes outside a bar but always the star of the show.

“How are you doing?” he wanted to know.

He told me about a Sunday run to the coast with some mates of his, and of the meal that he’d eaten at the restaurant there. He said that the weather had been good recently, which meant, in Mike’s mind, that it was due for a reversal.

Did I have any plans for this year? And, with that one question, Mike set in place the events that would go on to change my life. And, also, and to a greater extent, Mike’s too, as well.

It was while I was thinking about how to reply to Mike that Sonja came over. Sonja is our head of HR and takes great pleasure in teasing me about my quiet little life. She’s convinced, or at least she tries to convince me that she’s convinced that my life revolves around stamp collecting and pub quizes. She seemed quiet surprised and excited when I told her that I spend a lot of my spare time riding my motorbike. I think that she assumed that it was a Harley or a Ducati and seemed a little bit disappointed when I told her it was a three fifty Enfield India. However, the next day she bounded up to my desk to inform me that her husband approved of my choice of bike and that it was a bike that he would consider buying, assuming, that is, that his wife would ever allow him to do such a thing.

On this day though, Sonja came over to tell me that I had three weeks holiday due and needed to book it by the end of the week. Easter would be a good time.

It seemed fortuitous and I immediately emailed Mike to ask if I could pop over for two or three weeks at Easter.

It took a few hours but I got a reply.

“Three weeks sounds great. Have to work the week before Easter as it’s our busiest time of the year but I can get the next two weeks off, no problem. I’ve got something to show you; well, you’ve sort of seen it before but it goes deeper. Anyway, I’ll explain when you’re over. Let me know what day you’re coming and I’ll get Valerie to sort out the spare room. Did I tell you about Valerie? Probably not; she’s new although I’ve known her for what seems like forever. Anyway, you’ll meet her when you come over. You’ll like her, I do.”

I spent the rest of the day wondering about Mike and his new girlfriend and thinking about what it was he had to show me. Without admitting it, I think I sort of already knew. As soon a I got home I went down to the small garage that came with the flat to tell Daphne the good news, that we were going back to France. I like to think that she was happy but it’s kind of difficult to tell with an inanimate object such as a Three Fifty Enfield India. Before I left her to go for a celebratory pint I adjusted the thermostatic heater that kept the garage warm. Once again I wondered to myself if I was the only bike owner who took the care to keep his garage warm; to keep his bike warm. From speaking to other bikers that I meet on the road, I suspect that I’m not.

The weeks passed, and then the months too and, before I knew it, I was packing bags and loading them onto Daphne. I’d promised postcards to my new colleagues in the office and, on the Saturday a week before Easter, I fired up Daphne and headed south.

When the novel is finished (and readable), I'll let you know...

---

©2026 Copyright by Roadside-Tales.com - All rights reserved