Big Norton, Little Cathy and the Talking Bull Terrier

I’D HAD the Mighty Norton Commando on the road for about a month when Little Cathy, my favourite pillion passenger at the time, suggested we head out into the country for a decent ride. My mate Rocky had invited us up to his place the following weekend for a big ‘urinate skywards’ (piss-up… duuh!) so the desto was sorted.

Rocky lived out at Sofala in the Central West Goldfields of NSW (turn right just before Bathurst and you can’t miss it) in a really old house, like 1850s old. Rocky’s place had the interesting address of ‘Second House, Back Road, Sofala, NSW’ and it used to be a hotel back in the Gold Rush days. He was living there with his future ex-wife, a Weimer (one of those stupid, shiny dogs), and Jake the Talking Bull Terrier, but more on Jake later.

I couldn’t wait to get all country, but there was just one problem, The Mighty Norton had a noise coming from the motor and it didn’t sound nice.

Now, theoretically, I was starting to learn something about mechannickin’, but quite obviously, not that much. They say self-taught mechanics usually have a dummy for a teacher, and I suppose that was right. I mean, my first powered two-wheeler was a Victa lawnmower engine in a Cyclops pump-up scooter, followed by the regulation BSA Bantam. Without so much as half a clue, I did manage to successfully complete some major heart surgery on the little Bantam, splitting the cases, delving inside and rectifying the problem that caused it to drop out of top gear.

My first real motorbike, The Mighty AJS, had been wrecked, rebuilt, wrecked, rebuilt then wrecked and rebuilt again before I purchased the Mighty Norton as a smashed and rusty (but very low mileage) wreck for just $150. As bent as the bike was, that sucker had only two and a half thousand miles showing on the smashed speedo so it wasn’t even run in yet.

And rebuilding that Norton was a steep learning curve, teaching me all sorts of restoring skills like painting and polishing. Somehow, I managed to do a total rebuild, only needed help fitting the pushrods which is pretty tricky. My mate Kevo came around and soon installed the pushrods, and bringing his Floyd Clymer Workshop Manual with him.

“They have books to tell you how to do this sort of shit?” I asked incredulously. Needless to say, my next purchase was a Clymer manual.

But shit! I was so proud when my Norton Commando was finished and on the road. It looked sensational and went fantastic. That beautiful machine went like stink, but strangely, after a scant month, it started to make a noise, sort of like a clattering sound.

This noise had me worried so I sat down with a cup of tea rather than beer, and performed an RTFM operation. RTFM is the first thing a computer tech-head will tell a novice before even looking at a malfunctioning computer — it stands for READ THE FUCKIN’ MANUAL!

I studied the official version of what I’d already done completely by guesswork, and even dragged out the small box of left-over bits from the initial rebuild. You always have a collection of seemingly perfect bits left over from any rebuild. In fact, a mate called Browneye reckons if you rebuild the same motorbike enough times, you’ll eventually have enough left-over bits to build another motorbike!

Some casual cross-checking identified one of the left-overs as a perfectly good camshaft thrust washer that I knew I didn’t install, even though I was supposed to. Dohhh!

So some time between ‘Discovery’ Wednesday and ‘Departure’ Saturday, I managed to rip out, rip apart and split a Norton motor, replace the pesky camshaft thrust washer and rebuild that sucker. All went well, and a smart decision to remove the stub of a sheared-off bolt was about to cause much grief, although I didn’t know that then. Yep, in the initial build, I’d ham-fistedly snapped off one of the tiny ¼-inch UNC bolts which fix the inner primary case to the crankcase. With the cases apart, the broken-off part came out using just the fingers, and rushed for time, figuring it ran fine without it, leave the prick out, I said.

Bad move.

With the bike loaded up with a big tank bag and a Little Cathy, we were off on an adventure. Slogging through Saturday arvo traffic on Parramatta Road, an oil leak in the Mighty Norton was detected. And I’m not talking about your average Old British Bike Oil Leak, but a massive, dripping, multi-source gusher that made pushing on seem like a bad choice. Wracking the brain, I reviewed the recently completed rebuild and came to the crushing realisation that some peanut had convinced himself that leaving a small ¼ inch bolt out of the inner primary case wouldn’t leave a direct path for the engine oil to run from the sump to the primary case, or that the crankcase pressure would fill up the primary and blow oil out of every orifice and everywhere.

We stopped at a servo, and luckily, were carrying just enough tools to do the job after robbing a spare bolt from somewhere unimportant. Then we were on our way.

For those who don’t know, a Norton Commando is a brilliant bike for open, country roads, truly brilliant. A beautiful ride on some great roads, and this was before the soul-less dual carriageway that stretches most of the way from Lithgow to Bathurst. Lots of winding roads, up and down hills with fast sweeping, or slow, bumpy corners — yep, Norton Country.

Being the middle of winter, it did get really dark really early, and in those days, the winding road from Bathurst, up and over the mountains to Sofala was still dirt, none of this girlie bitumen stuff. Also, the concept of putting guardrails at the edge of the rutted dirt road before the massive drop down the cliff was slightly gay as well, so it was good that it was dark by the time we hit that dirt part. One really bad corner, with a rutted washout that playfully sent us close to the edge of the precipice, didn’t make me go ‘gulp’ until I saw the drop down in daylight on the Sunday.

But we made it, and on that Saturday night, a hugely big time was had by all in Sofala for Rocky’s piss-up which was largely conducted at the Royal Hotel, Sofala’s ritziest (and only) pub.

It was outside the Royal I witnessed one of the funniest interactions between a cop and a drunk. A bloke and his sheila were saddling up to jump on a Honda Four parked across the narrow way from the pub. The sheila looked a lot more sober than the bloke, who was Schindler’s List as a parrot, and didn’t seem to care about the cop leaning on the marked Nissan Patrol cop car parked in the next space. 

‘Here, hold this,” he slurred, as he passed a slab of beer to his best girl.

The bloke’s name was Malcolm and he lived in the caravan park that used to be right at the bridge at the start of Sofala, a few hundred metres from the Royal Hotel. He and his girl had the beer, but were both without helmets; they may well have had helmet exemptions, as it was the era of ‘anything goes’. Strangely enough, the riders who suffered from headaches and neck pains bad enough to obtain a medically-certified helmet exemption were mainly the riders of American or British bikes, rather than the Jappers.

The cop made his move, and drinkers milling around outside the pub all gulped as one. But it was not what we expected.

“Malcolm!” the copper bellowed. “Surely you are not thinking of riding home?”

“Yep”, came the smart-arse reply. “I do believe that’s what I’m thinking of right at this point in time,” he added with a grand flourish, theatrically prodding the starter button.

The Honda Four roared into life, no doubt a lot louder that necessary, owing to the drag pipes.

“Come on, Malcolm,” the copper pleaded. “Leave it here and get it in the morning,” he tried to say before Malcolm drowned him out by dialling in double-digits on the tacho.

Malcolm’s girl compounded the copper’s frustration by saying, “Here, hang onto this slab while I get on the bike,” and the poor bloody top-Aussie-bloke police person stood there meekly, holding onto the slab of cans which had just been thrust at him. Mrs Malcolm was wearing a fairly short skirt and the onlookers all muttered “Heyyyy-up!” in unison as she threw her leg over the Honda. The cop handed the slab back to her and told Malcolm to be careful on the short ride home.

“No worries, matey,” Malcolm yelled over the din. “I’ll toot the horn to let you know I made it home safely.”

And with a fistful of revs and a heap of smoke, home they went, redlining that protesting Japper in first and second gear but probably not getting to max out in third gear before the horn tooted on arrival.

I thought that was funny, unusual, Australian, and so very rural country.

The party kicked on for a while back at Rocky’s place, but by 3 am, this bash was well and truly over and all the beds in all the spare rooms were taken. Little Cathy and I had brought along sleeping bags but no tent, so the lounge room floor heated by the open fire sounded a better deal than the grass in the backyard. Better still, the decent size three-seater lounge looked like luxury, so we baggsed it like a beauty and were set.

Or so we thought.

Now, me and Cathy were just good friends, but every so often, we were kinda like better than best friends, and I was hoping, nay expecting, that would be the case that cold night. You know, roaring fire and all that.

Jake the Talking Bull Terrier had other ideas.

All dogs talk in some way, and some breeds are better talkers than others. Yeah, yeah, they don’t talk like humans do, but if you get to know them, the sounds they make all mean something. And Bullies vocalise mostly when they’re laying down with their paws in the air and furiously squirming to scratch their back. ARROOWOOWOO, they’ll say, and you just know it’s dog language for, “Oh, baby, that feels just so freakin’ good and don’t I look cute?”

I kind of got the feeling that we’d stolen Jake’s bed as the mongrel of a thing kept wedging in between Little Cathy and Me.

“Grrrwahwahsnargenworra,” the bloody thing was saying as it shuffled and squirmed its way between us. Jake was really still a pup, but like all young Bullies, he was massively strong, built like a brick shit-house, and it wasn’t going to let two interlopers have any fun on his bed on his watch.

Now, I know I was the guest and the dog was the resident, but I have certain views on humano-canine relations and that is humans are the boss. I had no second thoughts about hauling the dog outside and locking the door after it. I don’t know whether it was the dog’s intelligence or the structural integrity of a very ancient house, but that bloody mongrel of a thing was back inside within minutes, and I never found out how it was getting back inside. After many unsuccessful attempts to de-dog our sleeping arrangement, Little Cathy and I admitted defeat and threw out sleeping bags onto the floor, nearer to the fireplace, which was still giving out lots of heat, but still right next to the bloody dog’s lounge.

We drifted in an out of sleep to the sound of Jake, the Talking Bull Terrier, vocalising and squirming as they do. He was quite probably bragging about all the rabbits and feral cats he’d torn up that day but we just weren’t listening.

It was getting light, but was still pretty dim in that lounge room, on the floor next to an expired fire. Little Cathy and I were just in the process of becoming better friends, when the incessant growling, gruzzling and groaning just seemed to go up a notch on the volume.

“GRRRUNNURRAMUN” and “HHHHMMMMPHARRM,” and even “MMMMMMMMRRRRR,” was the sound emanating from the lounge chair not one metre from where we were and it was just plain annoying.

And then something really strange happened. The dog said, “Mmmmmfwwwoar… shit, it’s cold.”

Huh? Little Cathy and I just looked at each other. “A talking Bull Terrier?” we both said incredulously.

We both looked up at the lounge and thank Christ for the sake of sanity, Jake was not alone. No, at some stage during the night, Rocky’s landlord’s mother had rocked in to find Rocky’s party at her son’s house in Sofala was well and truly over. Evidently, she was an artist, and had been drinking red wine with her arty friends somewhere near enough to Sofala to kick on at the next soiree. Finding the place in darkness, she stepped over two prone bodies cocooned on the floor, arm-wrestled Jake for a portion of the lounge and proceeded to pass out until she woke up with a weather report which freaked me and Little Cathy out just a tad.

I don’t know what she saw, if anything, or whether she, Little Cathy or I even cared, but like I said, it was unusual and something we never expected to encounter.

After that, it was the usual big country breakfast, the standard hungover fiddlin’ & fartin’ about before loading up and setting off for home to return to the Monday morning drudgery. But between the Sunday afternoon leaving of Sofala and the Monday morning drudgery, there was still the simple matter of having the very cute Little Cathy hunkering onto the tight pillion seat of the Mighty Norton and riding that magnificent motorcycle over some fantastic roads.

Jeez, it was so good…

Road Tales By Kelly Ashton