Australian Motorcyclist — January 2018

CLASSIC MORRIS

eyed while focussing on the match as
he made quite a mess out of lighting
the thing up, often coughing and
spluttering, while thereafter being
wreathed in a cloud of smoke until
the thing was exhausted or went
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inhaled the smoke, so it seemed a
pointless exercise.
To me it was such a comical display
that I sometimes had to leave the
room with a hand clasped over my
giggling mouth.
He was clearly a hopeless smoker, if
there is such a thing, and I could never
understand why he bothered sucking
on a cigarette at all, for I couldn’t help
but note more than a few customers
looking at him a bit sideways as he
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smoke into their faces. The cigarette
never left his mouth until it was
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his sentences around the thing, with
explosive consonants like ‘P’,‘F’,’T’
and ‘V’ emitting even more clouds of
smoke. He never, ever, smoked at any
other time, so I imagine it must have
been a soothing thing for him to do.
But now that I come to think of it, I
suppose it was a whole lot better than
having him sucking his thumb in their
various faces: Gawd help us, how off-
putting would that have been, and not
only for customers either!
He was always immaculately dressed

• often an odd thing to see in a
  suburban motorcycle store – with his
  wall-toed shoes buffed to a mirror
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  pair of those brogues; one a light tan,
  another a deeper brown, the third a
  deep, reddish- purple called ox-blood.

I never saw a black

shoe on either of

his feet. Those

lighter coloured

shoes shone so

brightly they

probably glowed

in the dark, and

you could always

see the showroom

ÁRRUDQGWKHJODULQ

front windows

clearly illuminated

upon them.

His nick-name, be

told me once, was

what I thought he

said was the Baron.

But it was actually

the Barren, for he

later said he was

entirely unable to

father children due,

he told me, to a

motorcycle accident

in which his pelvis was busted. This,

he added, had some grim affects upon

what he called his manhood – not his

ability to ‘perform’ well, he hastened

to add, just his fertility. That accident

was the reason, I suddenly realised, for

his very subtle limp, for one leg was

very slightly shorter than the other.

What about the obvious ding on top

of his head, I rudely asked him shortly

thereafter, but he said that was not due

to the same - or any other - motorcycle

accident, but was caused by a small

enemy mortar-bomb exploding on

the very top of his ‘tin-hat’ during his

campaign in WW2 in Europe!!

Other than his odd machinations

with those confounded cigarettes, he

seemed to me to be quite OK after

J

t

Buy it!

Hey, my 196-page book, “Vintage

Morris: Tall Tales but True from a

Lifetime in Motorcycling” is available

for purchase.

To secure your signed copy, please

send a cheque or money order for

$42 ($29 + $14 postage nationwide)

to: L&L Morris, PO Box 392,

Winston Hills NSW 2153. Cheers

for now. LM

such a fearsome thing happening to

him, but he did admit he wasn’t too

sure who he was, where he was, or

in fact what he was for months after

his tin-hat was rent asunder by the

blast. He was always going to bring

the well-splattered metal headgear

in to work, he said (for he had

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