A Handful of Summers

by Gordon Forbes

  ‘It’s me all right,’ he mused. ‘Definitely me, lyin’ next to the bath, holding my ears, waitin’ for a grenade to go off.’ He turned to me and asked in a kindly voice, ‘What kind of grenade?’

  ‘Just an ordinary one,’ I muttered, feeling a fool, furious with myself, but still under the influence of the nightmare.

  ‘Just an ordinary grenade,’ said Abe. ‘Not an unusual one.’ He gave a shaky snort of laughter. ‘Just a run-of-the-mill kind of hand-grenade.’

  Getting up, he peered round the edge of the door, entered the bedroom and looked under his bed:

  ‘Jesus, Forbsey,’ he said. ‘I mean, Jesus!’ His voice carried a finality beyond exasperation. ‘You’re not for real. With you, every night’s like bein’ in a movie. First I think I’m Titus Oates, or that Scott guy, then I’m at Omaha Beach in a shell hole. If this goes on, in a week I’ll be the world’s only double-VC, and clean off my head.’

  It was to go on for some time. The third night of that memorable week I awoke, and, frozen with horror, saw the wall above Abe’s bed collapsing on top of him with deadly acceleration. Again I acted with incredible speed and bravery, leaping out of my bed to stand astride his pillow and support the wall. Abe’s eyes shot open to their widest in an instant, but only a small section of his hair stood on end.

  ‘The wall’s falling. Help me hold the goddam thing up,’ I ordered through clenched teeth.

  ‘Oh, the wall’s falling,’ said Abe wearily. ‘That shouldn’t be a problem. Why don’t you just let it fall and go back to sleep.’

  ‘You bastard!’

  I invariably felt a great mixture of anger and foolishness after these incidents, and behaved as though they had nothing to do with me and were not my fault. Abe eventually grew used to them, and became very protective, telling his friends that he had better go and ‘make sure Forbsey doesn’t check out of the hotel in the middle of the night with my gear’, or some such remark. The possibilities of this particular situation intrigued him for a moment, and he pursued it enthusiastically.

  ‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘what would happen if one night you dreamt you were urgently needed for a match in Hong Kong. That wouldn’t be a problem for you. You’d pack, take a cab to the airport, tell the driver to contact me about the fare, and get on the plane. Then you’d wake up when they started serving breakfast on the plane and ask the stewardess why the hotel was movin’.

  “We’re going to Hong Kong,” she’d say.

  “We can’t be,” you’d say. “I’ve got a doubles with Segal at Queen’s Club.”

  “Never mind,” she’d say, “maybe they got a Queen’s Club in Hong Kong.” Then you’d start to panic and tell her that it’s the wrong Queen’s Club!’

  Abie’s madness!

  Diary Notes: Copenhagen 1955

  Now there’s this thing about chatting up girls. New sort of art form. Abie’s the best at it. The top seed, and also impatient as hell. Things have to happen immediately. If it suddenly comes to him that girls are needed, you have to galvanise yourself into action. Broads. If I ask him where to find them, he gets scornful.

  ‘Jesus, Forbsey! Go out an’ make the right noises, buddy, an’ they come out of holes in the ground! Listen! You think they don’t want a bit of action?’ He gives a snort of laughter.

  ‘The world’s full of broads, buddy, an’ the only time they’re not lookin’ for a bit of action is after they’re dead!’ And if I still look dubious he goes off and hunts for both of us. Once he even unearthed girls for the whole team, like a bird-dog.

  Meanwhile, in his rough way, he’s an expert at it. Like in the queue at the airport, waiting to get on the plane. I’m right behind him, and in front of him is this girl – great, with all kinds of eyes and legs. Abie takes one look at her and goes into action. He starts to sniff and sniff, turning his head this way and that. ‘God damn,’ he says. ‘Somebody around here smells like Christmas!’ The girl immediately turns, and he pounces. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he says. ‘That figures. I knew it couldn’t be the idiot behind me!’ And she starts to shake with laughter.

  Now if I’d done that, she wouldn’t have turned round. I’d have had to keep on sniffing and saying, ‘God damn, somebody around here smells like Christmas’ about five times until the security people came and took me away.

  Last night, after our meal, we walked in the Town Gardens. They have an amazing stall there, full of white china crockery. You pay a bit of money and get six wooden balls to let fly with. I never missed – an orgy of shattering. I picked off all the teapots with the first six throws. Because of all the practice I’d had throwing stones at things in the Karoo. As I turned to buy more balls, Abie, who was watching, said: ‘God Almighty, Forbsey! You just stay here an’ keep on crackin’ their teapots an’ I’ll go and nab us a couple of broads.’ He was back in a few minutes with Ushi, and I was told to, ‘keep her while I go find another’.

  Ushi. Absolutely Scandinavian. She knew about twenty English words to my Danish ‘Tak’, and although she had a bit of a hook in her nose, she was not bad for a three-minute foray.

  We smiled at each other and, six teapots later, Abie reappeared with Heike. Dark-haired, this one. Definitely an older woman. Black sweater, bulging with sharp-pointed equipment. ‘She’s a dancer,’ said Abie, explaining everything. ‘Great legs, Forbsey. With legs like hers, you don’t need arms!’

  He was carried away by his success and was raving on a bit.

  The Danes were much tougher than the Norwegians, having in their team Kurt Nielsen and the Ulrich brothers, Torben and Jorgen. Nielsen was a mighty player, a first-tenner, in tennis language, and even at that time there was sufficient mystery about Torben to give each of us a private set of jitters. Abie hid his by claiming that there was ‘No way a guy could keep all that load of religious crap in his head and still play tennis.’ It was no use telling Abie that just because he ‘moved in a mysterious way’ Torben was not necessarily religious. At that time, all things that seemed to Abie to be in any way mystical or occult got lumped together and labelled ‘religion’. In Torben’s case, considerable weight was added by his Christ-like image – long hair and bearded face, out of which shone eyes bright with sensitivity and things incomprehensible.

  As it was, we ended up by narrowly losing the match, but as I was still the junior of the team and not involved in any of the critical matches, the loss did not personally affect me that much. I was more interested in the fact that Torben Ulrich played the clarinet in one of Copenhagen’s best jazz bands, and that he’d agreed to have us visit his club. That was where we’d taken the two girls that Abe had found while I was cracking teapots. It was a bareish club, I remember, full of wooden tables, where you sat on hard chairs and listened. Torben welcomed us in his usual way, reserved and confiding, and sat beside us, licking at the reed of his clarinet while we drank Coca-Cola. The band hammered out several songs, and I kept expecting Torben to get up to join them, but he just sat there, intent and listening.

  ‘Play, Torben,’ I urged him.

  ‘I must wait,’ he said, ‘until something happens inside me. So far nothing very much has happened.’

  For some considerable time, apparently, nothing very much continued to happen, and then, just as I was beginning to give up all hope, Torben suddenly got to his feet and walked to the bandstand. He nodded to his colleagues, counted in a rhythm, and then, on cue, he put the clarinet to his lips, took a breath, closed his eyes – and did nothing else at all. Nothing. Didn’t blow a note. After several minutes of agonising suspense he returned to the table and sat down again, sheathing his clarinet.

  ‘Do you know, Gordon,’ he said seriously, ‘I could not think of a single note to play!’

  ‘Shit, Torben,’ exclaimed Abie, unimpressed. ‘There had to be something. You could have just blown into that thing. You never know. You may just have fluked a few notes!’

&nbs
p; ‘Sometimes,’ said Torben, ‘just blowing is not enough. Music is . . . well, you know . . . more, I think, than just simply blowing.’

  It was my first experience of the Ulrich intricacies. There were to be many more.

  Slightly chastened by our loss, we recovered our spirits and began preparing for the next tournament. Rome. Where all the Italians played.

  Diary Notes: Rome, Summer 1955

  Today, Abie forgot to pack his tennis socks and jockstrap for about the tenth time this month, and borrowed mine. As usual, I received them back in a very dodgy condition – stretched to twice their size, for a start. In the dressing-room, after our match, he dumped them in my lap, and while I was contemplating them, Roy Emerson began singing in the shower. Emerson has a singular showering technique. Thus:

  1. Remove all clothing except tennis shorts.

  2. Enter shower. Adjust temperature.

  3. Cover body in soap suds from head to foot.

  4. Scrub body.

  5. Scrub tennis shorts.

  6. Commence song of the week.

  His delivery is enthusiastic, but inclined to drift off key. This week the song is one of the current hits:

  ‘Many a tear has to fa-l-l-l-l-l

  But it’s al-l-l-l-l-l

  In the game.

  All in that wonderful game

  That is know –’

  ‘Shad up! Shad up! Shad up, bloody Emerson!’

  It was Drobny. He had entered the dressing-room, covered in the marks of a titanic struggle. Red dust, sweat, dirty shoes, fogged-up spectacles, tousled hair, generally unkempt. The singing stopped. Emerson’s eyes appeared around the edge of the cubicle, then disappeared. Drobny dropped his rackets into the silence.

  ‘That is known,’ came from the shower, ‘as l-o-o-o-o-v-e . . .’

  ‘Bloody Australians,’ said Drobny.

  Another silence, humming with prospects.

  ‘Once in a while she may cal-l-l-l-l,’ came from the shower.

  ‘But it’s al-l-l-l-l-l

  In the game.

  All in that mad, crazy game –’

  ‘Emerson!’ shouted Drobny. ‘Shad up singing or I’ll get really mad!’

  Emerson’s head reappeared from the shower. ‘What’s up, Drob?’ he asked, infinitely cheerful. ‘What’s up? Did you play like a cunt, or what?’

  Emerson is one of tennis’s all-timers. An unbelievable disposition – perhaps the perfect combination of kindness, humour, determination and ruefulness. Tremendous lust for life – Emerson.

  The tennis stadium in Rome, called Foro Italico, is a heavy marble affair, with sunken courts, red, wet surfaces, slow and soft as Mozzarella cheese. Tennis in slow motion, under a Mediterranean sun, watched by statues and cypresses. Here the net-rushers curse and toil, and the groundstrokers adjust their grips, lick their lips and pound away at their topspins with all the time in the world. The clubhouse, also marble, smells of cappuccino and overlooks the outside courts. Arriving at Foro Italico on the opening day of the Italian championships, one is struck dumb by hundreds of groundstrokes. Every young Italian player of any consequence sports immaculate forehands and backhands. Stand at the railings of the little cafeteria and look down over the sunken courts, and all you will see are thousands of them, deep and heavy. Balls moving back and forth, carrying the marks of the wet, red clay. These were the hunting grounds of the great Italians – Cucelli, Del Bello, Gardini, Merlo, Pietrangeli, Sirola, Panatta.

  Not Forbes and Segal.

  In Rome, net-rushers were cannon-fodder. On the way to net, one automatically had visions of the valley of death; the six hundred; the whistle of ball and shot, and danger to life and limb. Inevitably, we lost early on (though I once took Larsen to five sets) and so there was plenty of time for practice and sightseeing. The Colosseum, St Peter’s, the Catacombs, all the old places. In the Sistine Chapel Abie gazed upwards and said:

  ‘Forbsey, would you believe that this whole roof was painted by a guy called Angelo. Old Michael. God damn, I bet he ended up with a chiropractor havin’ to do one hell of a neck job on him!’

  Diary Notes: Rome 1955

  Giuseppe Merlo is small and handsome and drives everyone completely demented by the way he plays. He has no service whatsoever; just tosses up the ball quite carefully and, with a slightly pained expression, pops it into play. His racket seems half the size of everyone else’s, and so loosely strung that you can’t hear him hit the ball. On the forehand side, he holds the racket halfway up the handle, and on the backhand side he just adds his other hand, which means that his hands are back to front. His shots sneak past the net-rushers like bullets out of a silenced gun, so quietly that they are never sure exactly when the point has ended.

  He’s beaten almost everyone on clay. It’s unfair, really, because the general opinion among the players is that it’s impossible to play the way that he does, and that he should lose all the time, and never win.

  Until Pietrangeli and Sirola came along, the Italians specialised in the unorthodox. Gardini, one of their greatest players, used to move about the court like a spider running over water, and had a game consisting entirely of forehands and lobs. Matches between him and Merlo often used to be mammoth affairs during which spectators opened picnic lunches and knitted sweaters. Invariably these matches would end in huge Italian dramas, with both players collapsing with cramp and appealing to various gods, umpires, linesmen, spectators and gods again.

  Tennis in Italy.

  Quaranto Quindici.

  A law unto itself.

  Having survived the rigours of nocturnal Oslo and the constipations of the pastas of Rome, we travelled to Paris.

  How agonising and unattainable is the appeal of Paris. There it lay, unforgettable in the mild May sunlight, with its avenues and boulevards, fresh new leaves and sly sophisticates, all fashionably got up. That first evening we walked the Champs Elysées – wide and sparkling, and the city touched us, although it was all too rich then – an acquired taste, like old whisky for people accustomed to lemonade.

  At the top of the wide street the American Bar shouted at us and Abie immediately removed his thumbnail from the corner of his mouth and gave me a nudge. ‘There’s the action, Forbsey,’ he said in a satisfied way. ‘Too much of this French can soften your mind. At least in there they’ll understand about beer and meatballs.’

  In those days, Abie had a vicious appetite which would often pounce upon him between meals and create immediate and intense culinary demands. Often he would do a quick sidestep into the self-service section of a delicatessen and trim the counter, sometimes arriving at the pay desk with an empty tray, having eaten his whole meal in a series of gulps en route. His power of ingestion staggered me.

  ‘You must have a crop,’ I said to him one day after a particularly intense foray.

  ‘A crop of what?’ he asked.

  ‘Not that kind of crop,’ I replied. ‘The other kind.’

  ‘What other kinds are there?’ he asked.

  ‘A bird’s crop.’

  ‘You mean birds,’ said Abie, ‘or birds? Say what you mean, Forbsey.’

  ‘Birds with feathers. They don’t chew, you know. They eat into crops and whatever they eat just lies there and sort of dissolves.’ With Abie, one never had to bother too much about technicalities. ‘That way they can be sure to get their share of whatever’s going.’

  ‘A crop, hey?’ said Abie, interested. ‘That sounds like a good deal. That way I could eat two meals at a time and carry one of them as a spare!’

  The idea intrigued him enough to trigger off one of his monologues.

  ‘I’d be out there in the fifth set,’ he said, ‘playin’ someone like Woodcock. At about nine-all, he’d be gettin’ real exhausted, an’ I’d just switch over to my spare meal! That would really psych everyone out. “Watch Segal,” t
hey’d say, “he carries two meals!”’

  Diary Notes: Paris 1955

  The French foods sometimes confound Abie and me.

  At the Racing Club where we practise, they have a fantastic alfresco lunch all laid out. You help yourself.

  On the table are these huge artichokes which have fascinated us for some time. We always see the French carrying them about on trays.

  ‘I’m going to give one of those green bastards a go,’ says Abe, and sticks the biggest one on his tray.

  He can’t wait. As we sit down he breaks off one of the big outer leaves, sticks it into his mouth and begins chomping. Tremendous milling process inside his head, and then after a minute or two he gets a pained expression, and pushing a finger into his mouth, he pulls out this soggy wad of stuff that looks like jute fibre.

  ‘Christ, Forbsey,’ he says, ‘these French must have tough jaws. How the hell do they eat these things?’

  Later, Pierre Darmon came over and explained to us how you eat artichokes.

  ‘This is the only thing in the world,’ said Abie, ‘that you end up havin’ more left than you started out with.’

  Food, for Abie, was very important. To begin with, he needed a fair quantity to drive his fairly considerable plant and machinery. But there was more to it than that. More than anyone else I know, Abie loved, absolutely revelled in, the act of alleviating hunger. The hungrier he was, the faster he would eat. And, at such times, speed more than quantity seemed to be the essence. A fair-sized steak, for instance, would last about three gulps, while meatballs went down whole, like oysters in lemon juice. Somewhere in the primeval mists of Abie’s breeding line, there must have been a canine strain. There was only one person whom I ever saw eat faster than Abie, and that was Orlando Sirola eating spaghetti. I mean, all Italians eat spaghetti twice as fast as anyone else, but Sirola simply annihilated it. A large bowlful would disappear in a flash. There seemed to be no question of it being chewed. Forkfuls would go into his mouth, like hay being loaded, and effortlessly slip down his throat.