Two Bicycles and Love

1745twobikes /1500 words

Dec. 5, 2017

Two bicycles and love

by

Harley L. Sachs

When I first saw Ursel Mathilde Hintz she was a South Schleswig girl of Danish extraction with a German passport. She spoke no English and was working as a shop assistant in a Konsum grocery store on the ground floor on Rindogatan in Stockholm. She was a lapsed Lutheran.

I was an American expatriate with a master’s degree who eked out a sort of living teaching English as a second language, two three month terms and two paychecks a year. My GI Bill had run out. I was also working under cover for the CIA. I was a secular Jew.

The only thing Ursel, known as Ulla, and I had in common was we loved to bicycle. At Indiana University I rode one of only three bicycles on the campus. Ulla had used a borrowed old fashioned bicycle to ride from her job in Sonderborg, Denmark to her home town in Germany.

In Stockholm neither of us had a bike.

After three years in Sweden, starting at the International Graduate School, I spoke Swedish. Ulla, having gone to Danish school after the war, spoke Danish and soon learned Swedish, but had not lost her accent.

When my number came up to be served at the Konsum store  Ulla asked, in the formal Swedish used in those days, “What does the gentleman wish?”

Struck by her accent I asked in the same formal way, “Is the young lady Danish?”

She blushed and I was hooked. In the land of free love and open marriages, Swedish girls did not blush. She struck me like a rose bud soon to flower in amazing ways. I wanted to be part of that. She was smart and adventurous. Wow!

It took a lot of persistence and the promise of American apple pie, home baked by this ex-GI, before she would go out on a date. She was independent and always insisted on paying her own way. For a guy who was paid only twice a year that was a good thing.

Our common languages were Swedish and German. Besides the movies, theater, and walks we soon talked about our bicycle days. I had learned that to keep your under cover informants happy in the spy business, you never forget a birthday and always remembered gifts. I bought Ulla a pair of figure skates that winter and got her a student discount on a radio. We had become a couple.

Stockholm in those days was in transition. Cold cupboards with a northern exposure were being replaced by small refrigerators. Automobiles were replacing bicycles. As the winter snow banks melted, abandoned bicycles emerged, often with no front wheel, and generally ready for the junk yard. I rescued three, took them up to my apartment above the Konsum store, and got to work. I salvaged two bikes, one a 26 inch OK boy’s and one a 28 inch woman’s Crescent.

 I bought two used wheels with pretty bad tires. The OK needed a generator and light. The women’s Crescent had a generator but no light. Both were, of course, one speeds with a coaster brake.

I could not have afforded a new bicycle, or even a used one, but with two cobbled together bikes, we were in business. When I gave Ulla her bicycle, she was delighted. I knew then that she would marry me.  

Ulla’s father was a boat builder and I had always wanted a sail boat. Every weekend we would ride those old bicycles to another of Stockholm’s many harbors and boat yards in search of a boat. I hoped that the money I had earned working under cover would be enough. It wasn’t but in the meantime we had fun looking. We even tented one night at Drottningholm on Lake Malaren, taking along a couple of toy sail boats.

Having lived through the war, Ulla was not spoiled by prosperity. Bicycling, tenting and sleeping rough wherever we could pitch the tent  were just fine.

So we fell in love in Swedish and were married in German because her father came to the synagogue wedding and that was his language. Most of our Swedish friends in attendance hadn’t a clue as the service was in Hebrew and German.

The bicycles were integral to our lives and our relationship. When we got married in May, 1960, it was the most natural thing for us to get on those old bicycles and head out, destination uncertain. Naturally, being a wannabe author, I brought along my Underwood portable typewriter on a special cargo rack over the front wheel. It was a heavy load.

We were quite a sight. Laden with everything we needed: tent, cooking gear, sleeping bag, road maps, and food, camera, and the typewriter, we peddled from Copenhagen through Germany and Holland  to the Belgian Channel ferry to England.

Fearful of the traffic on the London-Dover road, we sent the bikes by rail to London and hitchhiked to the city. Once there and with the bikes retrieved, thanks to a good map of England we discovered the Old Foss Way, a Roman road, straight to Nottingham where I had relatives.

My OK bike was not that OK, for the kid who had abandoned it had messed up the rear wheel spokes. It turned out that the number of spoke holes in the hub was not the same as the wheel rim. The spokes were not in the proper order, so were stressed, sometimes to the breaking point. I grew accustomed to replacing broken spokes. I soon ran out of spares and had some made at a shop in Uxbridge.

The rear wheel was also not perfectly round, so had a hump. This wasn’t noticeable until coasting downhill you got a bump-bump ride. The chain guard rubbed against the crank, so it was scrape-scrape with every push.

Ulla’s bike, however, ran like a Swiss watch.

The two bikes were painted the usual black with a bit of white on the rear fender. By today’s standards, they were heavy but nearly indestructible.

We spent the honeymoon winter of 1960 at Borthwick Castle where we used the old Swedish bikes to get from the gatehouse up to the Galashiels road and the bus to Edinburgh.

In the winter we lived there Ulla, always brilliant and determined, taught herself English while I struggled with a bad novel in what had been a cannon port in the basement. By the time she had our first baby her English was fluent.

When I got a contract for a year in Denmark, we had to first store our belongings.  Our possessions which had been in storage in Stockholm, came to Borthwick in an enormous crate. What about the bicycles? They were part of our life. I didn’t want to abandon them. By careful measuring, I managed to disassemble them and fit them inside the crate with boxes of books, footlockers with clothes, etc.

When we later arrived in Denmark for a year we were reunited with the bikes. They were our transportation in that city of bicycles. I rode eleven kilometers from Hvidovre to the university where I learned Danish. So now we had four languages in common.

By the time we were leaving Denmark, we had an old VW kombi to ship back to the United States. The freight company allowed us to pack the bicycles inside the car.

Unwilling to part with them, we carried them on the roof of the VW all summer in 1964. By then we had two daughters. The youngest, Belinda, fit into the bicycle basket on Ulla’s handle bar while Anna-Lena, our three year old, rode on the kiddy seat bolted to the frame.

The bicycles were part of the family, integral to our history and our romance. When we acquired water front property for camping not far from a beach, the bikes were our transportation.

We kept them even when Ulla, who fell in Florida, stopped bicycling, and my legs at age seventy were giving out.

After our fiftieth-fourth anniversary when it came time to move to Oregon, we sold all our Michigan property. What about the bikes? By now they were genuine antiques.  So were we.

I was afraid, when we sold our camp site, the bikes would end up in a ditch beside the road to be taken to the junk yard. I gave our mouse infested Shasta trailer to a young man who, it turned out, collected bicycles. He wanted them.

Those two rebuilt junk Swedish bicycles had carried us across Europe, through our honeymoon in Scotland, our sojourn in Denmark, and back to the United States. Parting with them was poignant, but I know they found a good home.

Nothing lasts. I miss the joy of bicycling, the singing sound of the Swedish knobby tires on wet pavement, the wheee of coasting downhill. Ah, but at 86 my legs have given out. The bikes lasted longer than my legs, but the memories linger on.  Ah, those memories.