“Just the one in here, then, eh?” said Larry Yeomans quietly as we entered the Nags Head, on Tottenham High Road. I looked at him and nodded decisively; many of the Honourable and Worthy Pedallers did the same. The locals remained quiet — but then they would do.

‘What’ll it be, gents?’ asked the landlord neutrally. He was a portly chap, but not jolly, and his features were fallen rather than full. He smoked a briar pipe, and each cloud of dense smoke that left his mouth seemed to contain more of his dreams, more of his life, more of his time. Never had I seen a man more obviously and entirely seeing out his days.

‘Twenty pints of pale,’ said Arthur Cobb, club secretary of the Honourable and Worthy Pedallers and holder of the kitty.

‘I have only porter,’ replied the landlord, ‘Will that do?’

‘We’ll have to vote on it,’ replied Cobb. An emergency motion was proposed and unanimously carried. Once the landlord disappeared into his cellar, a voice spoke up from behind us.

‘Look at those clips they’re wearing, Clement. I reckon they got here on machines…’

It was time to face the locals. When I turned around, one of them was standing not two feet away from me. ‘Have you?’ he said. It was a quieter voice than the first that had spoken, but of a similar accent. More rural than the voices we’d passed on the High Road, and more in keeping both with the atmosphere of the pub and with the attire of the speaker. Even more than the landlord, they didn’t sound or look like they belonged here. Yet, at the same time, they didn’t act like they were out of place, exactly.

‘Have we what?’ I said, calmly and politely.

‘Did you arrive on machines? Are you part of that revolution?’

‘Did you arrive on machines? Are you part of that revolution?’

There was uncomfortable shuffling among the HWP. Since its formation, as a reaction against the rumbustious and blasphemous tendencies of the Loyal and Distinguished Pedallers (and in particular, the charismatic Amos Graves), the group had strict rules governing conversation. Style was their primary concern, of course, but content was also governed as a preventative measure. The management style and capability of Jack Addenbrooke was the first topic to be outlawed, being the source of polarized viewpoints for, by now, some thirty years, but in its absence religion and politics had also caused some unpleasant afternoons and had thus been blacklisted too. It was largely assumed at that time that within a group of twenty working class men, at least one (and quite possibly all) would have socialist sympathies, but nobody within the Honourable and Worthy Pedallers would be comfortable speaking about it.

‘That revolution has cost us our jobs,’ said the first voice, which, we now saw, belonged to a top-hatted scarecrow slumped on a bench seat by the door.

‘And our homes,’ said a flat-capped scarecrow at the same table. There were mumblings of agreement.

‘And our husbands,’ said a scarecrow in bridal veil and dress.

‘Now, now, Phyllis’ said Flat-cap, ‘You know we all miss Reg, but you have an ongoing offer of marriage from Cecil here,’ he nudged the figure next to him, which was a rudimentary construction of crossed-sticks topped by a rustic cap. The nudge was a forceful one, and Flat-cap had to react quickly to catching Cecil before he fell to the ground.

‘It was the revolution what killed him!’ screamed Phyllis. The saloon bar fell silent. Cecil’s cap continued swinging and then came to rest.

‘Apologies,’ said the bereted figure before me, ‘but you were saying…’

‘I wasn’t saying anything.’

‘That you came on machines…’

‘Have you been behaving, Clement?’

The landlord returned, and we took our beer. ‘Have you been behaving, Clement?’ he asked the scarecrow in the beret. There was no reply. ‘They can get a bit defensive,’ he muttered apologetically, ‘Too much time on their hands.’

There was no talk whatsoever from the scarecrows at this point, even amongst themselves, and when Arthur Cobb brushed past Cecil on his way to the jakes, knocking him over, it was the landlord, not Flat-cap, that returned him upright.

None of the Pedallers were talking, either, and, perhaps as a consequence, the porter was sinking quickly. It was the flavour of a bygone time and I was warming to it. I called up another round, but Arthur Cobb objected.

‘We had agreed it was just going to be one in here.’

‘It’s good beer, though, Arthur. And, erm, sort of interesting…?’

Cobb looked around the room, then at me strangely. ‘We’ll put it to a vote,’ he said.

The motion to stay was defeated 19-1 and we headed out to the Railway Tavern, which was packed with humans before the match, which Wolves went on to lose 4-2, thanks to a hat-trick by Bert Bliss. Losing away was by no means an unusual occurrence that season, and talk in the Beehive, before we began the long ride home, was centred on our possibilities of re-election. A motion was put forward to temporarily suspend the ban on talking about Jack Addenbrooke’s suitability for the role of Wolves manager, but it was narrowly defeated. Many of those who had supported the motion would go on to form the breakaway Pedallers for Free Thought and Free Speech (a.k.a. The Pafatafs) in a meeting at the Bottom Fox later in the week.