AJS Motorcycle stopped by Rogue Cardigan

I HAVE a short story which combines alcohol, motorcycles, chicks and stupidity perfectly, and it fully explains why the 1970s was one rip-snorter of a decade. Like all my memories of youth, only the important bits remain in the brain, but with a bit of logic and some reverse engineering, a full script for a fantastic night can be pieced together. 

This particular incident occurred on a Sunday night in 1978, so working backwards, it really started at the Harbord Diggers Club which was the place to be for Northern Beaches kids on a Sunday night — at the Donnie Sutherland’s Disco. It wasn’t really a disco, rather a giant auditorium filled with hot chicks and scumbag beer drinking bastards. They played some good music (but mostly bad) and the hot chicks would race to the dance floor to do the special dance for the ‘Bus Stop’ or ‘Nutbush City Limits’. 

I even invented my own dance there. True! It was called ‘The Ajay’ and perfectly mimicked the ritual of starting a 1950 AJS single cylinder motorbike. It went like this: With your left hand, turn the petrol tap on. With the right hand, tickle the carburettor. With the left hand again, set the ignition lever on the handlebars to retard, then pull in the valve lifter. Next, with the right leg on the kickstarter, slowly bring the motor over compression. The final move is also done by the right leg as the dancer leaps upwards the stomps down heavy on the kickstarter and the final flourish was with the right hand vigorously rapping the throttle… I don’t know why it never caught on as a dance craze.

Me and me mate Skraps were standing up the back of the Digger’s Disco that Sunday night having a fine old time; Skraps’ 750 Triumph and my 500 AJS were parked outside the Diggers which, thankfully, featured massive plate glass windows so you could keep an eye on the machines while you partied.

Now, at a nightspot, every bloke has their own favourite pick-up line and Skraps had a beauty, but it was a very specialised line. See, Skraps used to work for the PMG (Post Master General) or Telecom, or whatever it was called back then, and the lad had access to telephone exchanges and long distance calls for free. So Skraps would chat with girlies, and glean info from them, paying particular attention to the hint of an accent in the girl’s speech. Tonight he was talking to a blonde named Sally-Ann who spoke in a proper English accent and he asked how often she gets to speak to those back home.

“Oh, I miss my mum so much,” Sally-Ann said wistfully.

“So why don’t you call her on the phone?” Skraps asked.

“It’s so expensive to call England Long Distance,” she replied.

“I might be able to help you there,” said Skraps slyly. “Let’s ride over to the North Sydney Telephone Exchange and get you a free phone call to your mum in England. 

Now, for the young’ns reading this piece, the magical world of telephony back then was not the limitless monster it is today; there was no app to ring anyone in the world for free on mobiles phones that didn’t even exist then. No, it was a complicated affair and it was expensive. 

It was nearing midnight when we left the Diggers on the motorbikes. Skraps’ cunning plan to get frisky with a top-shelf blonde unravelled slightly with the inclusion of Sally-Ann’s Fancy Man Chris — he was down for a pillion ride to North Sydney too. Of course, I didn’t help with my suggestion that the slim and compact blonde should really go on the back of my 500 cc AJS while he pillioned the taller, heavier Chris on the more powerful 750 cc Triumph. 

“Yeah, orright then, I s’pose,” was Skrap’s only comment.

It was a beautifully crisp Sunday night that two black, British motorbikes took off from the Diggers Club, North Sydney-bound, both carrying pillion passengers with me carrying the nicer looking of the two. 

A brisk pace was set as we roared through Northern Beaches suburbs, down over the Spit Bridge and up to Mosman and Spit Junction. It was there that the incident occurred and it could’ve gone either way — a monstrous tragedy or just a ball-tearingly funny glitch to remember decades later. 

The two bikes sat at a red light where Spit Road turns right into Military Road. On the Green for Go, both AJS and Triumph lunged forward but right in the middle of the intersection, the Mighty AJS engine stopped suddenly with the back wheel locked solid. But that wasn’t all — I’d lost my pillion passenger! It didn’t take to much searching to find her, though — Sally-Ann was lying on the roadway, tucked right in tight against the back wheel and trapped. It seems the massive, billowing and probably very expensive woollen cardigan she’d been wearing had somehow got tangled into the rear chain and got dragged in, stopping the motor and back wheel as it got dragged further into the works. 

Poor Sally-Ann was trapped with her arms pulled back under the bike and pert breasts that had probably never been thrust so far forward, Yeah, it’s amazing what you focus on when you’re in the middle of a crisis situation. 

While I held the Ajay upright, Sally-Ann slithered and shimmied out of the deadly cardigan and emerged completely unscathed, just a little bit colder. 

I’ve got to tell you, dragging the locked-solid Ajay out of the middle of Spit and Military intersection and onto the footpath was no easy task, and the work load didn’t get any lighter when we tried to untangle that infernal woollen mess from the chain. It came out piece by grease-stained piece, some large, some small, and even some bystander produced a knife which helped immensely.

Like I said, it could been a lot worse and anyone who has ever heard the story of Isadora Duncan would surely agree: On September 14, 1927, exotic dancer Isadora Duncan dies in Nice, France, when the enormous silk scarf she is wearing gets tangled in the rear hubcaps of her open car. The poor girl was instantly strangled, her body dragged from the car by the rogue scarf — brown bread, mate. 

But we were all lucky that night, and we only needed to untangle a cardigan and we were on our way. That was only after hurling the remnants of the rogue cardigan up on top of a shop awning. A short time later, we were sitting around at the North Sydney Telephone Exchange, listening in as Sally-Ann spoke tearfully to her mother in England. 

A brisk and bracing ride home almost finished the night off perfectly, but when we arrived, someone produced a bottle of Tequila and that was a whole other story…

Road Tales by Kelly Ashton