A Handful of Summers

by Gordon Forbes

  Except, of course, that it didn’t work. My body, taken by surprise, absolutely refused to see things my way. It was like getting a complete sitter at match point in the fifth set, and then finding that you’d dropped your racket on the way in to kill it. I sat down beside her in an agony of embarrassment and told her that she was very beautiful. And it was only by a miracle of diplomacy that in the dawn hours of that far-off Sunday morning, when I finally walked her back to her modest digs, we still believed in one another, and in the fact that, although not lovers, we were very satisfactorily in love.

  We finished the tour at Eastbourne, and after a few days in London, it was the boat train again and the mailship at Southampton. This time, the gods who provide cabin companions on boats had provided me with two just as extraordinary as the mad pilot on the outward journey. One of them was the ballroom dancing champion of the world; who taught me the London jive, and the other was a huge, weather-beaten game ranger whose name was Hannes, and whose sole belongings seemed to consist only of a khaki safari suit, canvas haversack and a leather case containing a double-barrel Westley-Richards 500 Nitro Express, which he took out each day to assemble, polish and oil with loving care. Thank God for the game ranger. He took it upon himself to convert me into an extrovert, and used to fill me up with beer, then lie on his back on the lower bunk and give me instructions on the coarser and more daring side of life.

  Somewhere in his past he must have had a disastrous love affair, for his musings about women were dark and sombre. Women, he held forth, had no sense; were fickle, wily, shrewd, possessive, faithless, and talked too much. They made a man’s life a misery and, in short, were good for only one thing. Marriage was insane.

  ‘No, Forbes, my boykie,’ he exploded several times, ‘you don’t marry women; you poke them!’

  In his drunken moments his diatribes sometimes became so gloomy that he would haul out his gun case. Opening it, he would take out the black and shiny rifle.

  ‘This you can trust, boykie. This, not bloody women!’

  And, on one particularly maudlin occasion, he said with owlish affection: ‘If they made rifles with fannies, boykie, there’d be no need for women at all!’

  I would be on the top bunk, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, but he apparently read agreement into my silences.

  When we put in at the Portuguese island of Las Palmas, the ranger had a complete schedule worked out. First, wine-tasting, followed by a good meal, and then, as he clearly put it, ‘a good long poke’. Although my mind began to play up immediately, there was no way I could back out, particularly after all the effort he had put into my education. Where, I inquired, was this activity to take place?

  ‘At Nellie’s,’ he said. The best girls on the island, and he knew them all. All from good families, busy rebelling against disciplinarian parents. ‘Wait and see, boykie,’ he said, ‘and leave it all to your Uncle Hannes.’

  Nellie’s was an old white double-storey with steps, columns, arches and a little palm court. We made it up the steps and he pressed the doorbell with one hand and pounded on the door with the other. It opened. Yes, they were open. Yes, always plenty of girls. No, Ramona had gone back to Lisbon, and Philomena was on holiday, but there were other Ramonas. Yes, many. The air inside was soft and warm as honey, mildly impregnated with perfume, incense and talcum. Red carpets; curtains and carved wood. The trappings of lavish sin, slightly second-hand, but in good repair. Sweet wine in rose-coloured glasses, and then shuffling and laughter as the girls filed in. The ranger gave a roar like a bull.

  ‘Hey! Hey! You little beauties! Forbes, my boykie, look at ’em. My God – I wish there were ten of me instead of just only one.’

  He kept this patter up as he walked the half-circle they made, and lifted up their chins. Fifteen shillings, I heard him say. But the paralysis was creeping in again – Oh God! The ignominy of failure in this love-swathed place. An agonising image of the game ranger, standing at the ship’s bar with his tankard aloft, shouting ‘Forbes chickened out!’ flashed through my mind, and I turned to go. But a soft hand took mine, and I got led off away down passages and up stairs. A key was turned and curtains drawn across a window which gave onto the palm court.

  For fifteen shillings, that tropical afternoon, I was handed one of the great favours of my life – a guided tour through the miracles of lovemaking by a young, warm-hearted expert. A tour during which the question of failure never even cropped up. A masterpiece. A godsend.

  It was only hours later, when in a happy daze I climbed the ship’s gangway behind a still-boisterous ranger, that it occurred to me that I could safely cable JJ and inform him jubilantly that I had finally and definitely ‘cracked it!’

  Three

  One must be sure to get on the right side of the crossroad gods. The ones who set up the forks in the paths of people’s lives. Sketchily signposted, mostly. They crop up all the time. Some are simply detours; others lead away from one another and never meet again. The one I came to when I returned home after that first tennis excursion said, on the one hand, ‘farm and country’, and on the other, ‘tennis sector’. I took the tennis side. It led me away from the quiet life which I had lived and infused into my blood the urge to move. Taught me to know cobbled streets, airport bars, langoustines and black olives, and laced my life with a fine bubbling excitement.

  I returned to South Africa and discovered, to my surprise, that I had become a reasonable tennis player. Moreover, I firmly believed then that I would become much better – the best player in the world, perhaps. I did become better, but never the best in the world, nor Wimbledon champion. Now, looking back, the reasons seem quite plain.

  I did not at any stage ever commit myself strongly enough to the business of becoming Wimbledon champion; I hopelessly underestimated the dedication and patience required to achieve perfection; didn’t think deeply enough; fondly believed that some preposterously benign tennis gods would help me out with let cords or fluky shots when I was in dire need of them. They didn’t, of course. They very seldom do. The only people upon whom they bestow fluky shots at very critical moments are either those who have irrevocably dedicated their hearts to those moments, or else, and on rare occasions only, to those who have approached the moment with such honest courage and daring and valour that, in reluctant admiration, they have awarded them the benefit of the doubt.

  Of course, there were several times in my career when a few strokes of really good fortune (sheer arse, the Australians would have you call it) would have led me to thrilling tennis achievements. As it was, there were some fine ones, but the really big ones always got away.

  Am I raving on? I doubt it. There it all is, right there. For those of us who are too conservative to risk too much, the only path to the very top is patience, commitment, dedication and hour after hour of concentrated effort. But, above all, the deep, utterly inexorable desire to achieve the goal.

  I found it all out too late; and by the time I had, the doubts had crept in; and with the doubts came the flaws in that greatest of all natural attributes: the marvellous, dauntless, heraldic, unquestioning confidence of the young.

  That is all in retrospect. Right after that first tour, I was full of confidence about my tennis future. Overconfident, in fact. Had I not, I asked myself, improved immeasurably in a short spell of six months’ exposure to the rigours of world-class tennis? I thought then that I ‘had it made’, and assumed the slightly bored and haughty air which hangs about young players before they get wise and realise how many things can go wrong.

  That year I approached the Davis Cup trials with far more confidence than ever before. I was, I knew, much better equipped; not only to go through the motions of playing tennis, but actually to win matches. When you consider becoming a world-ranking tennis player, you need to decide above all else just how you are going to go about the business of winning matches. A section of your game has got to be lethal; able to destro
y your opponent. You need at least one really great shot or attribute around which to anchor your game. My anchor was a good service and volley, a style of play very much in fashion at that time, and best suited for fast courts. Ted Schroeder, Vic Seixas, Mervyn Rose, Frank Sedgman and Budge Patty were all essentially serve-and-volley players. Even the great Gonzales used the technique almost all the time. I introduced serve and volley into that year’s Davis Cup trials, and finished second to Russell Seymour, beating everyone else and surprising the entire South African tennis world.

  During the trials I stayed in an apartment overlooking the Wanderers Club. It belonged to a chiropractor called Doc Andy. Owen Williams and Trevor Fancutt already lived there; also Leon Norgarb, when he came to town, and Malcolm Fox when he visited South Africa to play the summer tournaments. It didn’t really matter how many players moved in, as the flat had a large number of rooms, and each room had manipulating tables or machines for bending or stretching people, which could be adjusted and used for sleeping on. One of these machines was particularly extraordinary. When switched on, it would make a purring noise and begin a pitch and roll motion which was supposed to ease tension of the spine. While it probably achieved this function efficiently, it also provided, as a sort of by-product, remarkably suggestive hip actions to the would-be patient. By adjusting a knob on a rheostat, the motion would become more and more violent until one could virtually use it to practise breaking horses, or training for a rodeo.

  The machine fascinated Owen, who, even at that time, kept an incessant eye open for labour-saving devices. He would switch it on and listen to it purr, then watch with satisfaction when, as he speeded it up, it heaved away like a demented charger.

  ‘You know, Forbsey,’ he said to me one day, ‘if one could get a woman on that thing, one would virtually be able to free-wheel!’

  It was about then that he began courting Jenny, in a typical devil-may-care way, not realising that his bachelor career was forever doomed. Jenny was a marvellous lady, full of fire and fun, with a full gleam in her eyes. Her breasts, as I discovered one afternoon when she and Owen, busy scrubbing one another’s backs in the bath, insisted that I serve them tea, were definitely capable of spilling out of bras.

  One night, while Leon and I were asleep in the players’ dormitory, Owen apparently persuaded Jenny to try the spine-relaxer. Together they must have mounted the machine and taken up their positions. A switch was thrown and tremendous purring ensued. Not content, the intrepid Owen reached for the speeding-up lever and accidentally moved it to full speed. Immediately the cavalry arrived, hell-for-leather in the grandest fashion. Leon and I were awoken by shouts of alarm and ecstasy, rising to a crescendo before ending in a solid thump. Sounds of rearrangement took place, giving way to gales of secret laughter and finally more purring. We eyed each other across the room (Leon and I, that is) and winked knowingly. The prospect of mechanical aids had secretly intrigued us as much as it had Owen, but the very concept of persuading a lady to accept them was completely beyond us. Looking forward, as we were, to a graphic account the following morning, we were doomed to disappointment. Owen looked puzzled when we questioned him and said that we must have dreamt it. Jenny was equally enigmatic, giving us only a Mona Lisa-type smile, but years later, when after a glass or two of wine, I re-questioned her, she laughed and said, with a superior air, that it was the first time that she’d ever managed to unseat him.

  The months spent at Doc Andy’s were amongst the happiest of my life. He was a marvellous man – a healer of people, a body craftsman, a repairer of minds. And the worst thing of all was that, at the time, we never fully realised what a remarkable man he was. He gave us water to drink which he had set out in the morning sunshine in a jug, and fresh vegetable juices. And played music during breakfasts.

  Apart from practising tennis, I worked for a while behind the counter of a sports goods store, advising people about rackets. Even this mild exposure to people apparently preyed on my mind and affected my subconscious. One evening, sharing a room with Trevor Fancutt, I sat up with a start and called out urgently:

  ‘Trevor! Trevor! There is a customer in the shop,’ then collapsed back upon the pillow. Trevor, who also worked in a sports store, got out of bed with a sigh, all bedraggled in his pyjamas, and began serving the ‘customer’:

  ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ he said. ‘Can I be of help?’

  This woke me up, and I sat up in bed again and said:

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  ‘Serving this gentleman,’ said Trevor.

  ‘Which gentleman?’ I asked.

  ‘The customer you said was in the shop,’ he replied. I laughed uneasily, suspecting what had happened, but for once keeping my head.

  ‘You’re dreaming,’ I said. ‘We’re at home. This isn’t a shop.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ he said, climbing back into bed with a puzzled look. And the next morning, upon consideration, he mused:

  ‘I was about to sell him one of my new rackets at a give-away price!’

  Each morning at eight, Trevor and I would put on ties and sports jackets and drive my little Morris Minor into Johannesburg to take our place behind sports counters. It was here that I learned to work cash registers and how to persuade people to buy things. Apart from selling sporting impedimenta, our store was also the agent for Reg Park weight-lifting equipment. Reg had won the Mr Universe competition about twenty times, and each month he used to spend a morning in the store to promote his gear, doing one-arm curls with two-hundred-pound barbells, and pulling open chest expanders which I couldn’t budge an inch.

  I used to watch him wistfully and dream about how firm my wrist would be on the backhand volley if it was as big as his wrist.

  ‘Imagine, Reg,’ I said to him one day, ‘if we could attach your legs to my body, how fast we’d be! Like one of those light sports cars with a huge motor!’

  But the idea didn’t seem to appeal to him (perhaps because he suddenly had the alarming vision of being left with his body and my legs!).

  To cope with the Christmas rush, Mr Duckworth, the owner of the store, employed a young girl. She was about eighteen, a good junior tennis player with a pretty face and superb legs, which used to distract Tony Barnes, the other permanent assistant, and me to the extent that we would sometimes start out selling, for instance, a tennis racket; then in the middle of the negotiations, forget what we were talking about and end up quoting the price of a Len Hutton cricket bat.

  Mr Duckworth told us to utilise our spare time in going through the various items of stock with Winsome, the girl, and explain to her how they were to be used and sold. This we both did with great gusto – rifling drawers of golf pegs, cricket balls, racket grips, sports shoes, in fact all the artefacts craved by would-be sportsmen at Christmas. Pursuing this pastime with Winsome one day, I suddenly came upon the drawer containing cricket boxes. For people unfamiliar with cricket, these objects are used to strap onto the batsman’s crutch in such a position that if the ball, hard, red and shiny, dispatched by a fast bowler, eludes the bat and slips through unexpectedly, it prevents the batsman from being permanently and forever done in. On the spur of the moment and partly as a joke, I told Winsome that the ‘box’ was a knee-guard for hockey players, and jokingly strapped the contraption to my knee to demonstrate. At that moment a spate of customers entered and I quickly undid my knots, returned the box to the drawer and forgot the incident.

  The Christmas rush duly descended upon us, and merchandise was dispatched with the frenzy evoked only by the madness of such times. One afternoon a hush suddenly fell over the crowded shop. I looked up from the two-hundred-pound set of barbells I was busy trying to demonstrate to see Winsome, with one marvellous leg raised, her foot resting on a chair. Before the admiring and astonished gaze of two burly hockey players and a host of other customers, she was carefully strapping the cricket box to her knee. Completing her
handiwork, she gave the box a pat, looked up and said brightly: ‘And that’s how it goes on.’

  ‘And what does it do?’ asked one of the hockey players with a straight face.

  ‘It stops the balls hitting the knee,’ said Winsome.

  ‘I see,’ said the hockey player. ‘I thought that it was supposed to stop the knee from hitting the balls!’

  ‘Well, that too,’ said Winsome, still unsuspecting.

  It was Tony Barnes who finally broke the silence with a sound like a large animal belching after a meal of green stuff. Pandemonium reigned and explanations were made. Although taken aback, Winsome, being resilient, was not really fazed.

  ‘How should I know what you men have got to protect?’ she enquired artlessly, and caused Tony and me to lose track of things again.

  The Davis Cup trials led immediately to South Africa’s little summer circuit of coastal tournaments. We would pack our bags and drive south with not a care in the world. My diary covers one circuit very briefly – probably because the days were filled with tennis and the evenings with the business of chatting up the brown-legged seaside girls.

  Diary Notes: East London, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town – Summer 1955

  The coastal tournaments again. South African summer. We drive down from Johannesburg, stop over on the old farm, then plunge off the plateau into the low country. Soft, temperate, coastal breezes and the smell of mimosa.

  East London. Laughable little port, washed by sunlight and salty air. The locals don black tie for the only nightclub, and behave in a very worldly way. But here, in this outpost, they are still settlers at heart, and drink whisky and Coca-Cola to make merry.

  Port Elizabeth with its winds. Heavy and incessant. The cluster of courts on the little promontory. Here the winds really blow, damp, heavy, laden with salt and things marine. One feels as though one is playing underwater, and considers frog-feet instead of tennis shoes and a mask and snorkel, even. Today, a full-blooded hurricane. Force ten or eleven. On court fifteen, I fight and fight against the wind and a nuggety little four-foot opponent who seems able to play below the weather. Finally, in a fit of temper, I hurl my racket into the teeth of the gale. The wind catches it, whirls it over the car park, around the top of a palm tree, past the head of the umpire and back to me. It is the first time a hurled racket has ever returned to the hand of the thrower.