I Went There on My Bike: The University Years continues the remarkable life story begun in A Child in Paradise: Wymeswold 1939-1958. In this second volume of his autobiography, Jim Mackley leaves the quiet Leicestershire village of his youth and ventures into the wider world of post-war Britain and Europe. The years 1958 to 1962 see him exchange familiar country lanes for the bustling streets of Manchester, where he studies French at the University under the guidance of the celebrated medievalist Professor Eugène Vinaver.
With warmth, humour and self-deprecating honesty, Mackley captures the social and cultural shifts of late-1950s Britain - from smoky dance halls and student digs in Chorlton-cum-Hardy to the intellectual life of a university poised on the edge of the Swinging Sixties. His account vividly recalls lectures, friendships, football matches at Old Trafford and Maine Road, and the liberating experience of city life after a sheltered village upbringing.
In the summer of 1959, Mackley's fascination with France leads to a life-changing adventure: a job in a children's holiday camp deep in the Jura mountains. The following spring, he sets out from Wymeswold on his "sit-up-and-beg" bicycle to pedal more than six hundred miles across England and France to Besançon, near the Swiss border. His travels - through youth hostels, small towns, and sunlit countryside - reveal the generosity, humour, and resilience of a young man discovering the world for the first time.
Spanning his university studies, French sojourns, and early encounters with adult responsibility, I Went There on My Bike offers a portrait not only of one man's coming-of-age but also of a generation that grew up in the aftermath of war and embraced the new freedoms of the 1960s. Combining memoir, travel writing, and social history, it stands as both a personal and historical document of an era when Britain's horizons - intellectual, cultural, and continental - were expanding fast.
