FIVE MINUTES NON-FICTION: I LOVE MY BIKE!

Today a non-ficcional story...

My first bicycle it wasn’t really mine, but it was borrowed by a neighbour who had a shop and sold second hand bicycles. I was about five years old and I could ride one since I was three. But just then I had a bike just for me. So my first bike was the beginning of my personal revolution. Then I could go everywhere and all the streets are my new playground. At that time children could play in the streets and we wanted to. There wasn’t computers neither playstations… we all lived on the streets waiting our parents come back to the work, and we were truly the happiest children of the world. We thought so!

In my grandmother’s street since I had my own bike I took a high category in the children rating. So I took the street and its warriors for the speed, and the possession of a bike which was faster and bigger than the others. It was my first social lesson too.

Since I was a very important people in the street’s playground, I got many new friends, children of my age and bigger came from the neighborhoods to share their marbles or their sweets for a ride on my bike. I took the chance and in a short time I was the child who has not only the best bike but the bigger number of marbles, and the marbles’ play it was a very important children business at that time. It was my second social lesson: Friends and marbles grow in proportion of our bike’s speed.

Between children street’s business were not fare nor gracious, if you had something to share, bread, a cake or a ball, everything went right, but if you had a fantastic bike you could be a king. At that time and for a while I was a really princess with velvet pants made with old curtains’ fabric which my grandmother found somewhere.

Next year I went to school and my father gave me a second hand bicycle, not so good as the one my neighbor borrowed me, but great. I loved it at first sight, its orange and black iron structure, too heavy but strong enough almost relentless. I had that bike for four years. One day I sold it to buy my first pair of imported jeans from England and the entire collection of Proust’s books “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” and some books of Portuguese writers because I wanted to be a writer but I had no books in my grandmother’s home. But I wanted to be a stylish writer and I always was looking for different clothes that my best friend’s mother brought me from London where she worked and lived. I was eleven years old and I dreamed a lot.

Some years ago I worked in holidays to buy a new bike as the pair of jeans number two, three, four… but nothing like the first bike that made me the princess of the streets and the first jeans embroidered on the top as used to in London in the 70’s which made me the most stylish teenager of the little town in South Portugal. 

Text by Paula Lamares for Fashion Heroines

Images via http://www.nowness.com/