A Handful of Summers

by Gordon Forbes

  ‘The whole match got completely out of hand,’ he recounted, ‘and would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so serious. In the second set, at set point for me, I threw the ball up to serve, and never saw it again! I waited tensely for some time before I realised that it wasn’t going to come down, ever again!’

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked him.

  ‘My dear chap, what was there to do? I simply threw up the second ball, hoping that whatever it was up there that was taking away my tennis balls wouldn’t do it again. I was so relieved when the second one came down after all, that I served a double. It’s bad enough to have to serve a second ball on set point when you know it’s coming down, but the first one hadn’t, you see, and I wasn’t sure!’

  What had happened, in fact, was that Teddy had thrown the ball high into the sun and a terrific gust of wind had blown it into the hedge behind him. The match wended its way to the close, and finally Teddy was down at set point against him.

  ‘It was his service,’ he said, ‘and when he missed his first ball, I knew I had him because he was serving into the wind. His second ball came straight towards me, and as I was getting ready to hit it, it suddenly turned off at right angles, fell on the line and went into the water jug under the umpire’s chair.’

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked. I was prepared to ask the most inane questions just to make him continue.

  ‘I questioned the umpire,’ he said, ‘and made him consult the rule book. There are so many, you see – rules, I mean, and one never knows whether rule two of paragraph three might read: “a second service on match point which finishes in a water jug may be declared a let”. But there was nothing, so I had to concede.’

  Match points used to give Teddy tremendous problems.

  ‘They rarely come my way,’ he said, ‘but when they do, I prepare for the worst. On grass my opponents invariably serve into a weed!’

  At Eastbourne, at the end of that first season, Gordon and I found ourselves playing doubles against Teddy and Howard Walton. They both had immense forehands and positioned themselves so that it was almost impossible to hit on their backhands. We were thus confronted by streams of these forehands which we had to volley back, and having at that time limited experience, we made heavy weather of the match. We reached match point at last, and Gordon was given a short lob which he killed with terrific force. It had been raining heavily all week, and where the smash bounced, a small jet of water arose from the grass to the height of about eighteen inches.

  ‘Great Scott!’ cried Teddy. ‘He’s opened up a spring! That’s all I need – a match point against me where my opponent’s smash opens a spring!’

  The incident added another story to Teddy’s already colourful repertoire. And often on other occasions I heard Teddy’s voice from the corner of the change-room or tea-lounge:

  ‘At match point with a smash so powerful it opened up a spring!’

  By the time Wimbledon came along, I had scored some reasonable singles victories and Gordon and I had won the Hurlingham doubles title. We were accepted for the Wimbledon doubles, but were condemned to the agonies of Roehampton in order to qualify for the singles and mixed. We survived, and again found ourselves living dreams.

  In my diary I find a page headed ‘Wimbledon’. How simple, then, were the needs of a tennis player!

  Diary Notes: Wimbledon 1954

  The big black cars drive right through the iron gates and into the club. People line the road and wave, and it’s all sunlight and lawns. At the dressing-room entrance you step out, carrying a stack of rackets, and listen to the people whispering. Wherever you go, they whisper. For Hoad and Rosewall they murmur and chatter away. The dressing-rooms are stocked with Robinson’s fruit juices, and the showers deliver steaming torrents. Up in the restaurant there are hot meals, and in the little lounge, desks with All England Club writing paper. Very upstage is Wimbledon. Six new balls every nine games! And the people at the referees’ office are kind and respectful. The members stand about in large hats and eat strawberries. Everybody seems to be patient; just standing there, and pleased to be around.

  And so, on Monday afternoon at twelve, a large black car with a purple-and-green pennant on its bonnet stopped before our Earls Court hotel, and carried us in state to participate in an event which had, for me, hitherto been an impossible dream.

  I was moved to tears, I remember, as I took the court for my match against Canadian Bob Bedard, so that I dropped my first service game due to burning eyes, and finally lost the match. But the badge marked Competitor lasted for the full two weeks, and awarded me all the privileges of the winner.

  I watched Jaroslav Drobny win Wimbledon that year. From the competitors’ stand, I saw him out-think Ken Rosewall. Marvellously deft tennis, all poise and balance, and the colossal forehand lying in wait.

  At match point a deafening silence fell. Then Rosewall’s backhand return snapped up against the tape of the net and the Wimbledon people leapt to their feet. They had grown to love ‘Old Drob’, as they called him, and wanted him to win, and as he stood there, all smiles, I envied him.

  Diary Notes: London

  My friend JJ has been behaving in a slightly superior way all through Wimbledon. He left the safety of England for a few weeks to play the French championships in Paris. On his return he immediately informed me that he had finally and definitely ‘cracked it’ in Paris. Goaded, apparently by desperation, and egged on by the evil Owen Williams, he had at last found a ‘marvellous creature with bright red hair’ on the Champs Elysees, who, to his utmost surprise, responded to his gauche advances. The reason for the ease with which he persuaded her, over coffee, to accompany him to his room only became apparent after the deed had been done, and she asked him for two thousand francs. He was appalled, but a certain saving of face and money was achieved when she’d finally settled for one thousand. Also by the fact that Owen, who is an expert in these matters, declared that she must have been an ‘enthusiastic amateur’. Professional ladies, he says, always settle the price before and not after. Owen is an expert, because he claims to be the only man he knows who has managed to persuade a ‘working girl’ to let him have the ‘wicked thrust’ on a credit basis. This happened in Barcelona, and thereafter he paid her off on a sort of hire-purchase agreement over the week of the tournament.

  Whatever the ramifications, JJ has ‘cracked it’, verified by Owen. To me the thing is not quite fair, but I am remaining silent as I myself may yet have to resort to financial help in order to achieve this elusive ecstasy. JJ has offered, in a patronising way, to assist with negotiations – he too has become an expert. However . . .

  During Wimbledon the little hotel where we lived in Earls Court also housed Hugh Stewart, a big, good-humoured American who taught me how to appreciate lambswool sweaters, and who raised English eyebrows in the morning by eating huge breakfasts, and finally rinsing his mouth with his last gulp of coffee. He was amused and intrigued by British habits, often stopping strangers in the street to ask them where the ‘toob’ was (he couldn’t say ‘tube’ the British way), and then reminding them not to allow their dogs to ‘foul the footpaths’. Some people hurried away at that warning, others told him they didn’t own dogs. ‘In case you should ever get one,’ Hugh used to say, very warmly. He taught me all the American songs and introduced me to famous Americans like Budge Patty, Victor Seixas, Tony Trabert, Art Larsen and Malcolm Fox, who sang superbly and later became very rich by doing clever things in Hong Kong.

  At Frinton-on-Sea, directly after Wimbledon, Hugh and I found ourselves the guests of one of those unbelievably high-class, commuting, aristocratic English families who dressed for dinner and who ‘walked their shoot’ every now and again, flushing pheasant and pam-pamming them with shooting sticks in the closed season. Their house was large and echoing, and disarmed us with its silences and the foreboding that things might suddenly and for no reason fall over with
a crash, and make people think it was us. The floors creaked loudly at dead of night, so that visits to the toilet were matters for grave consideration. The toilets themselves had long chains and used to flush like tidal waves, before dying to throaty gurgles and other internal rumblings, so that one finally returned to bed shaken and guilt-stricken after a perfectly ordinary widdle.

  Evening meals were particularly nerve-racking. We sat, the four of us, at a long table, with the host and hostess at either end and Hugh and I eyeing one another across the middle. Hugh put me out badly the very first night by pulling a series of British faces into his soup, and mouthing British phrases like, ‘How absolutely too spiffing!’ The table surface was polished to the texture of glass, the crockery was fine and shining white, and here the silence really gathered. Never was an atmosphere so fraught with the probabilities of disaster. We suffered for a night or two, before Hugh’s incorrigible nature got the better of him. Seated in the silence that evening, he allowed the echoes of the murmured grace to wander away, then suddenly cleared his throat with a roar that shook the house, picked up a slice of diabolically crisp toast (which had defied us to eat it for two nights), put it in his mouth and chewed deafeningly. He stopped chewing, cocked an ear and said:

  ‘Did you hear anything?’

  ‘Can’t say that I did,’ said our host.

  Hugh chewed vigorously again, stopped, listened and said:

  ‘There it is again!’ This at last evoked a short, hearty British laugh, and for a while drove away the devils of silence. But there was more to come.

  On our last evening, it was suggested that we dress formally for dinner, so Hugh and I produced jackets and ties and duly repaired to the dining room. The table was superb, glittering with crystal and slippery as ice. There we found our host, immaculate in black, and his wife, regal in a gown which displayed her creamy shoulders and bosom, falling away to a cleavage which, under less stringent circumstances, would have been strongly alluring.

  We took our places gingerly, sharply aware that things seemed ready to slide about at the slightest provocation. The table knives, too, were of a peculiarly whippy design, so that when the roast lamb and gravy were served I was in a nervous state, and set about it with fiercely controlled concentration. Things went so well, however, that by the time I had reached the last mouthful or two, I became overconfident. Cutting at a piece of rind, the end of my knife bent, then slipped, sending a single gravy-soaked pea downrange with the speed of a bullet. It struck our hostess above the heart, clung for a moment, then quickly and silently slid down the skin of her cleavage and disappeared into her creamy cleft, leaving a faint gravy trail.

  Three pairs of popping eyes followed its course, watched her give a little start of surprise, then press a red-nailed hand to her bosom, covering the gravy.

  ‘How very odd,’ said our host, blinking his eyes.

  ‘How silly,’ said our hostess lightly.

  ‘How puzzling,’ intoned Hugh, with a straight face, and in a British way.

  I said nothing, was speechless, and wondered distractedly where the pea would finish up. Lodged in her navel perhaps. At dead of night, if the mood took him, which I doubted, our host would be able to follow the gravy trail downward with the tip of his tongue and finally come upon the pea, nestling in who knows what exquisite cranny. He could eat it. Have a snack en route. But we never did find out where the pea had gone. As far as we were concerned, it had simply moved in a most mysterious way.

  The first tour wended its way through the late European summer – Deauville, Frinton, Hythe, Worthing, Ostende, le Zoute, Spa and back to England – Budleigh Salterton, Torquay and Eastbourne, where Gordon Talbot opened up the memorable spring for Teddy Tinling. At Spa, in Belgium, I had my first tournament win, beating Phillipe Washer in the finals. Phillipe was a nobleman, handsome and aloof, who used to own three sports cars which he drove about Europe at speed, with a scarf around his neck and beautiful women at his side.

  In Deauville we were housed at the Grand Hotel, with flags outside and magnificent doormen, and shrimps in white porcelain bowls for breakfast. There I had a strange, heart-rending little romance with a Canadian girl whom I’d seen watching me play against Rex Hartwig of Australia. She had grave, grey eyes and long fingers, and was waiting at the gate when I left the court, and again in the little bar in a comer of the clubhouse.

  But first, Rex Hartwig. He was a semi-Hopman man, a renegade really, with a soaring talent that could have turned itself into one of the great tennis games of all time. But it was not quite controllable. His game ran around him like a covey of quail escaped from a basket – darting and beautiful, but almost impossible to get together. On court, everything he did seemed to take place in fits and starts. He whipped brilliant shots out of anywhere at all with the utmost lack of fuss, and sometimes, with equal nonchalance, whipped out a cock-up or two, these causing his mouth to rattle off a few curses, as though it had received an impersonal instruction from his brain.

  Playing him that July in Deauville was important for me, because it was the first time that I had concentrated well for an entire match, and had nearly succeeded in beating a world-ranked player.

  But the romance. The Girl with the Grey Eyes.

  Karen.

  Good God!

  We walked along the moonlit esplanade and played miniature golf. Watched the very rich people leave their cars for the casino, bought ices on the beach in the blinding midday sun and talked endlessly. And late at night she would suddenly get a sad and frowning look in her eyes and cover me with kisses which she had warded off all day. Very tender kisses that smelled faintly of Arpège and garlic. But when I asked her to accompany me to my sumptuous room (which I was dying to show to someone), she would break away and hurry off at a fast walk to the pension where she rented a little attic room – to which, I must add, I had never been given access. It was very bewildering for a farm boy. I began to think that Canadians must have methods incomprehensible. But each day that week she came back to the tennis and each day we spent together in irresistible companionship. Saturday night came at last, and I was leaving for London on an early Sunday flight. We were sad that day, both admitting as much, and when my ration of kisses came up, being the eternal optimist, I began again.

  ‘Karen! Come up to my room. Just this once. We’ll have coffee. They bring it up on great white trays!’

  She looked at me thoughtfully and nodded. I was so excited I could hardly speak, and for a while couldn’t get my room key to open the door. Inside, we sat on the great white bed, hand in hand, waiting for the coffee. It came at last and got poured.

  Again the kisses. Suddenly she broke away and gave me a sharp look.

  ‘You must wonder about me,’ she said shortly. ‘Of course I’ve wanted to come here with you. But I’m not like other girls. You didn’t know that, did you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Well, I’m not. And I didn’t want you to know, because I wanted to see you each day. Now you’re going away, so it doesn’t really matter.’

  She wanted me to say that it did, but I only realised this later.

  ‘Karen!’ I said. ‘What on earth are you on about?’

  I couldn’t help feeling that I was in one of the old movies that used to come to our little town hall where the heroine has tragic eyes and the hero knows she has a strange past, but is too noble to care. She watched me watching her, and her grey eyes got huge and defiant.

  Then, all at once, she got to her feet, and keeping her eyes fixed on mine, she began to undress. I sat there, dumbfounded, transfixed, with my mouth open and a massed choir starting up somewhere inside my head.

  So. The shoes first, the stockings, then the belted skirt, all methodically removed. Nothing wrong with her legs. Absolutely nothing. They were in fact long and well shaped, and there were two of them. The scarf next, and then the cotton blouse, button by button.
By the time she’d got them all undone and had slipped the thing off her shoulders, a creeping paralysis was taking hold of me. Napoleon could have walked out of the bedroom cupboard with his arm in his jacket and a muzzle-loader pointed at my head, and all I would have done was to motion to him to go away.

  She didn’t pause, but as she reached behind her to undo her bra, she said simply:

  ‘I have no breasts, you see. They absolutely wouldn’t grow,’ and bit her lower lip.

  She was almost right. I had always carried in my head an image of breasts which spilled out of bras when they were undone, like Howard Spring’s heroines. Hers certainly didn’t ‘spill out’. In fact, they even seemed to shrink a bit when the fresh air got at them. They had hardly grown at all, and the bra was mostly padding – one of those stiff little 1954 models that could stand up on its own in the corner. But the lithe, boyish body which emerged when she slipped out of her knickers and stood there, her eyes full of tears, was definitely that of a girl.

  In other rooms in that grand old hotel, I suppose expert lovers were at that moment busy drumming up their sophisticated ecstasies. We made heavy weather of ours. She lay down on the great white bed and asked me to make love to her. My mind, meanwhile, was busy trying to cope with about forty-six different emotions which were all jockeying for positions in the front row of my head. Here at last, alone in my room, naked, acquiescent, stretched out upon my bed, was my first golden opportunity finally, in the words of Williams and JJ, to ‘crack it’. And scot-free to boot. A cryptically worded cable flashed haphazardly through my mind: Cracked it with flat-chested Canadian girl. Stop. No money involved. Stop.