My name is Arthur John Peacock. I'm an 82 year old veteran. On my 16th birthday, my father came up to my aunt's house, where I lived, and he said to me, look out there son, what do you think of that? And there was an old ex army 500 Norton and she was the bee's knees. My father jumped on. I got on behind him and he took me out, right out into the countryside, and that is where I began my training to be a motorcyclist. It took exactly 25 minutes from standing still to going through the gearbox. When all that was done, we then went back to my aunt’s place, has a couple of sherberts and sat down and just talked.

My mother came from Malta and so did I and my brother and my father was a soldier in the war. He got married to me mother, had me brother and I and we came to England after the Armistice. Unfortunately, my mother died in childbirth. And he found it very hard to look after his two boys so we was going to be put into the orphanage. Well, you can imagine the orphanage in the 1950s, like Charles Dickinson's. Anyway, my aunt, who was my mother's sister and her husband had a chat. They said ‘no Tom, you move up here with us and we'll look after you and the boys’. Well, moving up here with us was moving into Paddington, which was rat-infested houses, Victorian, but it was a roof over our head. It was somewhere for us two boys to be cared for.

I have to say that my uncle did a marvellous job taking on somebody else's children and when he got his own two, girl and a boy, he didn't alter how he looked after us. He taught me brother and I have to box, all those sort of things, go snaring rabbits. A typical, we called him uncle, a typical uncle the sort of things that he would do for the children. 
The years went by, I became the age of 16 and my father gave me a 500 Norton, single, very much against my aunt's wishes. She said ‘he's too young, he'll kill himself on it’. But me dad took me down a road called Elstree, it was out in the woods, in a woody area, and he showed me how to first start the bike, which is a ritual. Got that under the belt, right, he said, now sit on it with your feet on the floor, pull your clutch in, pull her up into 1st gear and he said just open the throttle gently and away you go. Well, after four or five attempts I got the knack of it and I was riding up and down that road for the best part of an hour. But it was so quiet. At the end of that my father took me back to my aunt and uncle's place and he said ‘there you are son, there's your transport, take care’. And he hopped on the bus then and he went to wherever he was living.

I used to suffer with bronchitis a hell of a lot and because of the dampness of the cellars that we lived in, it really used to come out. Anyway, we got a new council flat and it actually had the bathroom in the flat and the coal shed in the flat! But it was wonderful. Everything there.

And then I started riding a bike because I had a job then and we used to go out the odd Sundays, with his wife, by then my father had a daughter. So there was my father, daughter and his wife. They lived in Paddington and my brother and I, we lived in Burnt Oak. We was only about two miles from Edgware. That's where I stayed until I was about 18 and then I moved in with me father and the first thing my father said to me was ‘son, I don't care what time you get in, I don't care where you go, but I don't want any irate fathers knocking on the door’. Because he was very broad-minded. 

But we used to go out for rides down to Brighton. I've even rode up the Devil's Dyke on the solo bike and you’d bump one side to the other like that. But it's great. It's freedom. Because that was part of the theme them days after the war; you got what you could, you put it on HP if you could afford to do that, or you begged, borrowed, or stole it. It was a different life to what we've got now.