An Audience with an Elephant (17 page)

George opened his mouth many times. He moved forward in his seat and we who know him jerked upright, but then he had moved back again, his head turned towards the speaker, and there was a dignity about him.

All I can remember now about those 22 minutes is the huge escarpment of one man’s silence, as George listened for England.

Heroes

Race Against Time

NE MORNING IN SUMMER
, the London to Newquay express train having slowed because of repairs to the sea wall at Dawlish, passengers were startled to see an old gentleman get to his feet and start reading aloud from a book. The book, he told them, was
Through the Window.
This had been published by the Great Western Railway and described all the rail-side scenery from London to Penzance, provided the train went slow enough for a man to see it. He had bought his copy, he said, in 1927.

He was asked, was he going to Cornwall on holiday? No, said the old gentleman, he was going to Cornwall to race. They tried to hide their smiles and then someone, more daring than the others, asked, what sort of race might that be? The triathlon, said the old gentleman. At that silence fell like a guillotine, for they had all seen on television the iron men of athletics swimming, cycling and running through the landscape. There was some stealthy semaphoring of eyebrows, but most of the passengers began to stare fixedly through the windows. The old gentleman was still reading aloud from his book.

A few weeks earlier a phone had rung in the Ashby de la Zouch headquarters of the British Triathlon Association. The caller was the organiser of the Fowey Triathlon in Cornwall, in which competitors would be expected to swim over a third of a mile across the estuary at high tide, to cycle 18 miles over a switchback landscape and then to run 7 miles, all this without stopping. The caller was a troubled man.

‘I’ve just had this entry form from a man who gives his age at 80. I take it that’s a typing error.’

‘Oh no, that’s Patrick.’

‘What do you mean, “That’s Patrick”?’

The generation of schoolboys brought up on the
Wizard
comic would have had no doubts. He would have been Wilson, the mysterious athlete taught by a hermit to slow his heart down to 40 beats a minute, who in the 1896 Olympics came second in the 100 metres, 400 metres, long jump, high jump and the shot; coming second in all these events only because he had been savaged by wild dogs while competing in the marathon.

Patrick Barnes was born in 1915. A chartered accountant for 33 years with British Airways, he took little exercise during his working life but in retirement Mr Barnes turned athlete. At 66 he ran his first marathon, at 69 his first triathlon; last summer, at 80, Mr Barnes completed 14 triathlons.

Wilson of the
Wizard
’s first appearance on an athletics track was startling, for he ran barefoot, dressed only in black combinations. Mr Barnes’s materialisation in his first triathlon also stunned officials. While the other competitors leapt on to their stripped-down, high-tech bikes, a single frame of which can cost £3,000, Mr Barnes mounted the Raleigh Popular his father had bought for him in 1925. If this were not enough, the thing had a basket on the front and Barnes, to hide its rust, had painted it emerald green. He called it Beelzebub. ‘A photograph of me on Beelzebub appeared in a German magazine,’ he said stiffly. ‘I do not read German but I knew enough of the language to be able to recognise the word “Greenhorn”.’

Then there was the matter of his kit. Triathletes, the women alarmingly, turn out in a state not far short of nudity. Mr Barnes wore an old tropical shirt and shorts to his knees; he also wore gym shoes, which he paused to lace after his swim. ‘I know he’s only had a wet suit for eighteen months,’ said Dave Arlen, chairman of the London region of the BTA. ‘Before that, I’d never seen anything like it, he just used to get into the water, whatever its temperature. Now for a man of his age to be competing in triathlons was extraordinary enough, but to be competing under those handicaps, with everybody around him in high-tech gear. . . . And he was completing the courses.’

Fowey was Mr Barnes’s 100th triathlon, but it worried him. This was not because the organiser, Tony Bartlett, had rung to describe in very graphic detail the high tides, the waves and the terrible hills. Mr Barnes was worried about his bike.

While competing in triathlons he keeps his teeth in his saddle-bag. Not only is he the one living triathlete to do this, he is probably the only triathlete to have a saddle-bag at all. Also lights. And mud-guards. For, after an accident in 1994 when he wrote off his car, the bike has been his only means of private transport

Elaine Shaw, chief executive of the BTA, recalled her first meeting with Mr Barnes at an awards dinner held at the Donnington Thistle Hotel. ‘The first thing he said was, “Well, you certainly managed to find an inaccessible place.” I didn’t understand, because the hotel was near a junction of the motorway. It was only later I realised that he’d come by train and cycled the 12 miles from the station, with his dinner suit in the saddle-bag.’

His present bike, a second-hand Dawes 12-speed, is his third. He calls it Pluto, and still owns its predecessors, Mephistopheles and Beelzebub. What worried him about Fowey was that the organisers guaranteed to look after Pluto only for a certain time after the cycle stage was completed; so he could see himself running the 7 miles to Fowey and then back again to claim it — all this without teeth. . .

The weekend began badly. He got off the train with Pluto (and his copy of
Through the Window
) only to find he had left his cycling safety helmet on a train disappearing down the line to Newquay. British Rail retrieved that for him. He then walked down to the harbour and saw the water, and the wind on the water. That night Mr Barnes prayed (‘though I normally consider it bad form to ask God to do personal favours’), and in the morning laid his address book prominently beside his bed in the guest house, the page open at the telephone number of his next-of-kin. Then Mr Barnes went swimming.

The first thing he found was that he could not do his usual crawl because his legs would not move. Following a prostate operation earlier in the year, he had been prescribed steroids by his doctor; these had puffed up his body so that movement within the wet suit became difficult. He settled for a side stroke and began swallowing water in the waves so that his face, as he recalled, came to feel like salted meat. When he got out he could not stand but then, as an onlooker said, he saw some press photographers and he somehow straightened up. As he changed into his shorts and T-shirt there was great applause. And Mr Barnes went cycling.

To be accurate, there were times when he walked as well, noting at one point the site of the greatest Royalist victory in the Civil War. Elite triathletes, as he has observed, notice only gradients and markers; he feels sorry for them as he notices flowers and trees and history. This has, of course, meant that on occasion he has lost his way or fallen with his bike into a bush or, during a triathlon in South Wales, swum steadily towards the open sea. ‘Going out with the tide then?’ asked a chap in an inflatable, watching him with interest before pulling him on board (for the first time since Dunkirk, noted Mr Barnes).

But that day in Fowey, as the hills became more abrupt, he noted that he couldn’t even walk without stopping for rests. ‘As one does when climbing Kilimanjaro,’ he mused. Since his retirement Mr Barnes has climbed Kilimanjaro four times. One thing he did not like was the way a St John ambulance, primed by the organisers, kept shadowing him along the route, like Death in a foreign art film. Its officers urged him to give up for it was raining and to put his bike in the back. No, said Mr Barnes, he liked to finish his races.

And then the cycle stage was over and Mr Barnes, having come to an arrangement over its retrieval, went running. The sun had come out, there were blackberries as big as grapes in the hedgerows as Mr Barnes, cursing his missing teeth, jogged on, apologising to every marshal he passed for being two hours behind the man in front of him. But at least this was not the Bath Triathlon, where they have a time limit, or the Leicester one, where the race is stopped at sunset, like social life in Transylvania.

‘What staggered us was that he finished,’ said Lyn Bartlett, the organiser’s wife. ‘The chap picking up the race markers may have been treading on his heels, but what was so wonderful was that all the young athletes had decided to wait for him. It would have been so depressing if it had just been him and the time-keeper, and they’d said, “If he can do this, then we’ll wait for him.” So they did.’

In 1993 he represented Britain in the 75—79 age group in the World’s Triathlon in Manchester. ‘He got a bigger cheer than Spencer Smith who came first,’ said Dave Arlen. ‘He couldn’t understand it and kept saying, “I’ve got to get away, I’ve got a train to catch.”’

Fowey River Triathlon, 1995: Winner’s time, 107 minutes 51 seconds; Mr Patrick Barnes’s time, 324 minutes 54 seconds. Mr Barnes was 57th overall, also last. But there is a curious irony to all this, for Mr Barnes did not really come last. Not then, not ever. ‘In triathlons results are normally graded by age groups. This is where I come into my own, for although I am nearly always last in the race, I am always first in my age group. The fact that I may be the only one in my age group is of no consequence. In my career as an athlete I have acquired many prizes.’

There is a house near Osterley Park where the cups and plaques are everywhere, contending for space on mantelpiece and sideboard with photographs of grandchildren. Here Mr Barnes has lived alone among his trophies since the death of his wife five years ago, his only other claim to fame being the fact that he is the one surviving member of the prep school Scout patrol once led by Michael Foot.

Keswick Triathlon, 1st man over 60 (‘Looks a bit like a tombstone, that one’); Newquay Triathlon, men over 70; Aylesbury, 1992. Like Wilson of the
Wizard
, Patrick Barnes has rarely lost a race, for the only competition he has faced was when he took up the sport and there was a man three years his senior competing, but he got killed hang-gliding. So what made Patrick run?

The only sport he had done consistently was skating and, though for twelve years secretary of the Royal Skating Club, he was, by his own admission, an elephant on ice (‘which is why they made me secretary, to keep me off the rink’). Then, one year away from retirement, Mr Barnes was in Tokyo to do an audit and found the streets blocked off for an event he had never watched before, a marathon. ‘And it occurred to me that this was not like skating at all. In skating you have to do the thing properly and artistically. In marathon running all you have to do is finish.’

And so, just as Cromwell pondered on what if a man should take upon himself to be King, so Mr Barnes pondered on what if a man should take upon himself to be a marathon runner. In Osterley Park he started by running 200 yards, then a mile, then 5 miles. It took him a year and a half to get up to the 26 miles (‘and 585 yards,’ said Mr Barnes with feeling). The only thing was that he had measured Osterley Park himself and it was three miles short, which was disastrous for his first races. But Mrs Barnes, he said, was pleased he had found a hobby.

Mr Barnes ran nineteen marathons, among them five in London and five in New York, also the Marathon to Athens, the course on which the race was based. He ran his last in 1993. One reason was that Alice Billson, two years older, whom he had met in various marathons, managed to beat him. It was not the fact that she could run faster, he said, if anything he was the better runner, but Mrs Billson could walk faster, and the intervals of walking had become longer. Nevertheless, it is gossip among athletes that Mr Barnes abandoned the marathon because he could no longer lace up his shoes.

By then, on Beelzebub, he had taken up the triathlon. He had been recommended to do this by his physiotherapist, who had herself run a marathon and thought he was not doing enough training for that event. He took part in the 1984 London Triathlon and came last, so far behind the other competitors that he was kissed by three beauty queens in the Royal Victoria Docks. Enter the Great Barnes, Triathlete. Of his 100 races to date, he has completed 89.

Sometimes he is cycling when the other athletes have moved into the last, running, stage. They then have the eerie experience of being overtaken by Mr Barnes on a bike. Sometimes he runs a specially shortened course (‘otherwise I’d still be out in the country somewhere when they’ve all packed up and gone’). None of this has deterred him.

‘He’s a little bit of a hero,’ said Elaine Shaw of the BTA. ‘He’s slow but he finishes. If he’s there, he’ll be last, but then he ought to be last. I’ve seen him at the National Championships swimming in the Thames. It was June but God, it was cold.’

‘He’s a throwback, a man out of his time,’ said Dave Arlen. ‘This old-fashioned English gentleman competing in a sport that is so new.’

At Osterley Park the throwback had returned from one of the two aerobics classes he goes to each week. ‘I’d rather you didn’t say too much about training,’ said Mr Barnes. ‘I am a very lazy man.’ He did not think he would do fourteen triathlons this year, he said, but he would do some. He would also do some the year after, which would bring him to within three years of the Millennial Olympics, when the triathlon will be included for the first time. But one question remains unanswered. Why does Patrick run?