Worms to Catch Read online

  The Germans started conscripting Latvians to fight against Britain and its allies. The family already knew Walter had been conscripted into the Waffen-SS, but we found out more during a visit to the Latvian War Museum. Military history expert Jānis Tomaševskis told me that if anyone said they wouldn’t fight for the Germans not only would they be punished, but they risked their family being sent to the labour camps too. Walter was trained as a gunner in the 19th Artillery Division, but then his name showed up as being part of the infantry, the cannon fodder. It took a while to train a gunner, so it sounds like he was transferred to the infantry as a punishment, probably for deserting. We went to see a war re-enactment – Germans versus the Russians – and I was nervous when the bombs started going off, with tanks and half-tracks churning up the countryside and dummy rounds being fired.

  Uncle John knew a few bits that his dad had told him about his time in the army – seeing his mate being taken out by a sniper, and marching along roads lined with people crucified at the side of the road. So we knew, or had a good idea, he had deserted and been captured by the Germans and sent to the front line, where he was lucky not to have been killed. Then he was captured by the Americans and sent to a camp in Belgium as a prisoner of war. Many Latvians were only fighting for the Germans because the alternative was execution. They used to say that they’d deal with the Russians first, then turn on the Germans. But the Americans only saw soldiers in Nazi uniforms. They didn’t know, or care, about the story of the Latvian conscripts, so it wasn’t until 1947, two years after the end of the war, that Walter was released and was no longer a prisoner of war. He was put on a boat set for Canada, but when it stopped in England he didn’t go any further. He met my grandma, Double-Decker Lil, in October 1951, and they married the following March.

  We saw a lot of Latvia as we travelled from one location to the next, and I liked the place. It was quiet, no hustle and bustle – a bit backwards. Like Lincolnshire. It’s not known for much. It’s over the Baltic Sea from Sweden and has Lithuania below and Estonia above, with Russia on the eastern border. We drove around an area north of a city called Liepāja, the third biggest in Latvia, on the coast. Every building seemed to be one of those dead square Soviet blocks of flats, and all of them looked like they were slowly dropping to bits. It wasn’t a shithole, but it had seen better days, and even those days might not have been that good. On the beach were concrete bunkers that we did some filming around.

  One night in Liepāja, I was taken to a hotel that used to be an old prison. Built in 1905, Karosta Prison dates back to the days of the tsars, before the revolution and communist rule, and was originally a naval prison. In the Soviet days the KGB – the secret police – took over. Now the prison is described as the worst hotel in Europe. I don’t know why they left it at Europe – I don’t think any hotel in the world could be as bad. If there is one, they’re doing something really wrong. Karosta advertises to stag and hen dos and those management-bonding groups, so they can experience being treated like a prisoner in the Cold War era.

  I walked into the courtyard and approached a guard to get checked in. I went to shake his hand but he smacked it away, so I knew where I stood. Or I thought I did. As soon as I went through the door I was battered and knocked about. The guard was screaming at me in Russian, but I obviously had no clue what he was saying. At first I thought it was a bit of an act, but the longer it went on the more I thought, These buggers aren’t messing. I was put up against the wall to be searched and the guard found something in my pocket. He asked what it was, or I thought he did, because he was growling at me in Russian. I took my wallet out of my front jeans pocket to show him, and he snatched it out of my hand and chucked it.

  I had to do an assault course, then I was put in all these stress positions that are used on prisoners of war and Guantanamo detainees as a form of torture. You put your arms behind you head and squat low to the floor, staying there until they say move.

  Then the guards took me to a cell where I was shown how to make my bed. If you don’t make it exactly how the guard wants it, he chucks it against the wall and starts pushing you about. And he was a big unit. He wasn’t messing. I had to keep telling him something that sounded like ‘Tes Toyshna’. I reckon it meant ‘Yes, sir’.

  The TV lot thought the experience would be a bit more ‘play fighting’ for the camera, but it wasn’t. I was expecting a bit of a banter and some gruel, and even thought about bringing my book to read in the cell. I was way off. The Russian voice was intimidating enough, but it wasn’t long after I’d broken my back and being shoved about and booted when I was on the floor was a bit much. The wall of death had been cancelled because they reckoned I wasn’t fit to ride a bike and the insurance company wouldn’t sign me off, but here I was in a Russian prison getting the shit kicked out of me on a cold concrete floor by a Latvian nutter. I wasn’t wimping out, but my self-preservation kicked in and I lifted up my top to show the fresh pink scar running the length of my spine, as if to say, Come on, mate.

  I had meant to stay the night, but I didn’t in the end. I was still hurting too much, so we went back to this rare hotel, the Fontaine, in the same coastal town of Liepāja. It was no bother getting in. The town was quiet when we were there, out of season, at the beginning of November. I liked the place, because the reception doubled up as a shop where I bought a Russian gas mask and a poster that’s on the wall at home.

  The last job before coming home was to meet all the family. Walter had two brothers, Arvids and Rihards and their two sides of the family tree had never met each other. There was no friction between the families I met, but I think there might have been between Walter’s two brothers. The Kidals family came from all over the country to meet in a pub, just outside of Riga.

  I was dead nervous about meeting them. I thought it was going to be like pulling teeth, with painful small talk, but it was spot on. They were nice people. They all spoke English, some perfectly, and I learned that one of my relations opened the first disco in Latvia and owned a lighting company that supplied nightclubs and shops. One relative was a tree surgeon, and another worked in a launderette. One lass was an English teacher whose two sons were in university, one of them in Switzerland. Her son, Uldis, said they could tell straight away I was a Kidals, because of my ‘square head, side beards, big nose and eyes set back in my head’.

  We flew home on 8 November, and the main thing that stayed with me was how hard Walter’s life had been. I knew before that he hadn’t had it easy, but I had no idea just how much he’d been through. My mum was upset because she hadn’t understood how tough his life had been before he reached England. There was no wonder he could be a bit of an awkward bugger.

  He was one of 26,000 what they termed ‘displaced’ persons – now called immigrants – who came from Latvia to the UK to work. A report from the time in the local Hull paper said they were here to do the dirty jobs the English people will not look at, adding, ‘They are likely to show up the British workforce with their likeliness to work hard.’ And this was in 1947, telling a country that had worked its balls off to survive the war! And I think they were right. The Latvians would do anything to get out from under Soviet control. Walter only ever went back twice because he was fearful of what the Russians might do. He took my mum in 1979, and she remembers them being warned to be careful about what they said because it was likely the room they were in was bugged. He went again in 1990, with Uncle John, the year before Latvia became independent again.

  After Walter arrived in England in 1947 he worked as a farm labourer, builder and miner. He’d work, work, work. People make assumptions about immigrants now and about how they are going to behave once they’re here, but people don’t know. If I knew what I know now when he was alive, I’d try to sit and talk with him. His eyes saw more than mine ever will.

  I’m proud to be the grandson of a Latvian immigrant. He did alright out of it all by getting his head down and getting on with it. Making this programme made me realise w
hy I’m happiest at work – it’s the Latvian way. And it made me feel privileged to have a bit of Latvian blood in me.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was like swimming with a shark

  AFTER LATVIA I was back on the trucks and putting in a lot of miles on the pushbike, training for the Tour Divide. I did a few days’ filming around Lincolnshire in early September for a programme about the Vulcan bomber’s last ever flight, only a month after the crash. It involved going through the whole take-off procedure in the Vulcan. I was as sore as hell in that, but I didn’t make a fuss in case someone said it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to do it. I’d taken the day off work, so I wanted to get on with it. The seats weren’t comfy, then there was the G-force, and even just getting up and down the stairs into the dead cramped cockpit was hard enough, the state I was in. It wasn’t the worst pain in the world, but it wasn’t good. It was worth it for the experience, though. We did exactly what a crew would do for a take-off, just stopping short of leaving the ground. I knocked the power off at the moment it wanted to leave the runway, then put it back on and the Vulcan wheelied. I also biked up to Inverness in January to the Strathpuffer endurance event to see how I’d cope on a bike and sleeping rough.

  Then some more TV stuff was offered, when the BBC backed out of their Formula One deal three years early, because of budget cuts, and Channel 4 took over as the free channel to show the races. They asked if I wanted to be involved with some presenting. I didn’t have to think about it for a minute, and told them, ‘Thanks very much, but it’s not for me.’ I’m not a pundit. I don’t want to be seen as someone telling someone else how to do their job. Some folk have made a job of talking about it, and that’s fair enough, the job needs doing, but it’s not for me. There might be another way of doing some TV bits on the technical side with the F1 in the future, but I had plenty on with the wall of death and the Tour Divide, so I didn’t really need to be doing telly stuff when the season started.

  A while later, Channel 4 wanted me to show my face at a press-night thing in London. It was a big party for the sponsors and advertisers, and all Channel 4’s top bods were there. They’d rented out a fancy place in London to show clips of all the stuff that was going to be on the channel in 2016. Channel 4 and North One don’t ask much of me on the PR side of things, because they know I don’t like doing stuff like that, but both had asked me. I do bloody well out of the job, getting all sorts of opportunities, so I went.

  While I was there Neil Duncanson, the boss of North One, said they had another idea. They wanted me to race a bike against a Formula One car. That was more up my street, and it could be filmed in two days, in the middle of February, before the F1 season, when things weren’t too busy. I know plenty about Formula One, because I read Race Engine Technology magazine, and I was dead excited about it.

  Over the next couple of weeks, more meat was put on the bones. It would be me versus David Coulthard. The hour-long programme would be filmed at Silverstone, the home of the British Grand Prix, and we’d have the place to ourselves for two days. The finished programme would be shown in the week before the start of the F1 season to help get people talking about the races being shown on Channel 4.

  Coulthard would be driving a 2012 Red Bull RB8. Ideally, I wanted to use my Martek, the Pikes Peak bike, but I was too busy concentrating on building the wall of death bike to get it properly fettled, so Mark McCarville, the foreman from TAS (Temple Auto Salvage), the team I’ve raced for since 2011, brought over the BMW Superbike for me to ride. It gave the team a bit of coverage, so they were happy, and the closer the date came the more genuinely excited I was to get a chance to race against an F1 car.

  I’d never met David Coulthard before the first morning. I was told later that he’d wanted to phone me up beforehand to suss me out, but the TV bods had put him off. I wouldn’t really know what to say to him on the phone, but I got on with him from the off when we met at Silverstone. He’s a nice, polite bloke. Articulate. Mick Moody deals with his brother, Duncan, because the Coulthards are in the haulage business. I got his brother’s name from Moody and mentioned it to David, thinking it might be a bit of a conversation starter, but he explained that he knew nothing about the road haulage side of things. Disappointingly, he didn’t even have a Class 1 truck licence, but we still had plenty to yarn about. He was interested in the TAS race bike, and I think he liked it that I was dead interested in the car. He knew everything about the set-up – spring rate, spring pressure, shims, brake biases – but he didn’t know much about the recovery system the cars use now. I was never short of conversation with him.

  The set-up of the two teams couldn’t have been more different, and I heard it made for a good TV programme (but I never watched it). On the bike side were me and Mark. He’d set off at one in the morning to get the ferry over from Northern Ireland, with the bike and everything else we needed in the back of a high-top Vauxhall van. Coulthard had an 11-man pit crew, including one bloke they’d flown in from France especially to start the car.

  The Red Bull RB8 is a 750 horsepower, 2.4 litre, V8 worth £5 million. It’s the model of the car Sebastian Vettel won the 2012 Formula One title in. Coulthard, who has 13 Formula One race wins and 62 podiums to his name, had been involved in the development of the RB8 somewhere along the line.

  When I saw the car versus bike challenges the TV lot had come up with, I didn’t think the bike stood a chance of winning any of them. The first was a quarter-mile drag race the wrong way up Hangar Straight. There were some cones lined up to show where the start was and the finish line was a bridge over the track. I lined up and looked to my right, where it’s not another bike, it’s David Coulthard in a V8 F1 car! Bloody brilliant. I was on the Superbike spec BMW S1000RR. It has launch control, but I wasn’t using it. I’m quicker setting off and controlling it manually, balancing the throttle, clutch and rear brake. With all the grip and power the F1 car’s got, I thought Coulthard would smoke me. It was my first time on a superbike since breaking my back six months earlier, but I got off the line much quicker than the car. I was pressing hard on the back brake, to keep the front end down, and leading the car up to the halfway mark. Coulthard was coming fast and he just beat me, by three-tenths of a second. The terminal speeds were 159 mph for the car and 157 mph for the bike. Everyone was amazed how close it was.

  The next challenge was braking from 100 mph. We did a lap of the track before coming on to the straight, where the car pulled up next to me. I set the speed and Coulthard matched me, because the bike has a speed read-out on its dash but the car doesn’t. When we reached a line of cones we slammed on the anchors. The bike didn’t stand a chance. If I braked too hard I’d lock the front wheel, risk skidding and losing the front, or I’d stoppie over the front of the bike. I’m braking with two fingers, feeling for the grip. Coulthard just pushed on the pedal as hard as he possibly could. They reckon F1 drivers push on the pedal with enough force to shift two full-grown men. The car could just lock its brakes and skid to a stop, and that’s what it did. The car stopped from 100 mph in just over 50 metres. It took me 24 metres longer to come to a standstill, but there wasn’t a lot of control going on in the car’s lane – it was just locked up, going in a straight line, white smoke pouring off its fat tyres. We were quite even in the first bit of braking zone, until the car’s tyres generated more heat and made it stick to the track surface even better and increase the rate it slowed. Coulthard ruined a pair of tyres beating me, though.

  In between the challenges I had chance to quiz the mechanics to death. The car’s steering wheel alone cost £27,000 and had a button on it that squirted a drink into the driver’s gob. They don’t even have to suck their own drinks. I had a go at changing a front wheel too, and on the second attempt I managed to do it in two seconds, about the same time an F1 mechanic is expected to do it in, but obviously I wasn’t under the pressure of a pit lane halfway through a race. If I was ten years younger I’d jump at the chance of being an F1 mechanic. Coulthard had a go a
t changing the bike’s back wheel and did it in less than a minute, longer than a TT mechanic would take, but I was still impressed.

  Porsche has a Human Performance laboratory at Silverstone. They do physical assessments of folk and advise them on what they should do to improve their performance, from exercise to diet, and more specialist advice like dealing with competing in extreme heat. We went there and did a few physical challenges against each other. One involved pulling on this thing that measured hand grip while you lowered your right arm from horizontal to down by your side. My hand still had a load of metalwork in it from the crash a few months before, so I wasn’t confident I’d win this one either. They reckon Aussie driver Mark Webber has a 65-kg grip. Coulthard’s was 49 kg – mine was just under 36 kg.

  Next was a test of reaction time, using a thing called a BATAK machine. It’s a frame with red lights in the corners and middle, a bit like something you’d see in an arcade on Cleethorpes seafront. You smack the buttons when they light up, in a random order, and see how many you can put out in a minute. We were told that an F1 driver at the top of his game can turn off something like 60 in a minute, twice as many as the average person. Coulthard had done it before and scored 37. I was just behind with 35 on my first go. Another one I’d lost.

  The car they were using, the RB8, was a few years old, for a couple of reasons. Driving a current car, even for a TV programme, would break the F1 testing ban. The other reason is that new F1 cars are too complicated to use for something like this. They have energy-recovery systems to make the most of the power the cars make. There are friction brakes on the wheels, like a regular car or motorbike, but they also have a retarder like on a truck. When you use the brakes on your car the forward motion is converted into heat that is just lost to the atmosphere. So instead of wasting the energy, they load the engine using a motor. An electric motor is bolted to the gearbox, and it works a bit like a starter motor but in reverse, so instead of trying to turn the motor forward, it is trying to turn it backwards, and acts like a brake. This motor works as both a motor and a generator to charge the battery when the car is braking, so when the car exits the corner it can use the energy it’s just put in the battery to power itself and to give extra acceleration. Cars like the Toyota Prius have used similar ideas for years.