A Handful of Summers

by Gordon Forbes

  We accompanied them, me in a daze, Abie triumphant, and finally obtained the necessary permission, from a captain who also liked tennis, to enter the extraordinary place. Even to our tennis-benumbed minds, the experience was momentous. The building was vast. It was also gutted, so that only the shell remained. The lieutenant told us that it had been the ambition of every Russian soldier to place his initials on the walls inside the Reichstadt. It seemed that their ambitions had been fulfilled. The interiors of the great walls were covered with hundreds of thousands of names and initials – written during who-knew-what moods of triumph and victory. Here Hitler had made his schemes and shouted his fanatical words. Here the seeds of the sickness of war had been sown, germinated, flourished and finally erupted into the most unbelievable series of events that mankind has ever precipitated.

  We climbed the endless wooden and rope ladders which made their way upwards, I following Abe, and Abe following a pair of British army boots. At last we found ourselves in the observation post and peered over the sand-bagged ruin. There, stretched before us, were the time-softened, but still shattered, remains of East Berlin. In the foreground, the green mound which gave access to the bunker in which Hitler and Eva Braun had lived and died. Across the wired wall and canal was a nest of sombre Russians with machine guns and binoculars. We stared and stared, and for a brief moment I was lost in a world of espionage, escape, and the cold, lifeless dangers of times past. When at last I lifted my camera for pictures, the Russians swung a machine gun towards us and the British corporal told me sharply to ‘put that bloody thing away’, which I did, sheepishly. Our visit went unrecorded, yet for me the memory remains, tainted with the unease evoked by the nearness of a new reality. We were, they told us, the first civilians ever to have visited the post. Perhaps no one else had ever cared to try – for who really wishes to become involved with machine-gun nests, sandbags and the grey-and-brown austerity of proper armies? Secretly, at that moment, I thanked the panel of gods to whom I addressed my various thoughts and prayers, that I never had to live through a war.

  Abe was deeply impressed by his effort.

  ‘A bus!’ he said contemptuously, as we finally arrived back at our hotel, having been conveyed there by the British Army. ‘Only bums sightsee in buses. Be with me, Forbsey, an’ we go first class! What do these idiots know about seein’ the wall?’

  We flew straight to London with our victory still clutched in our minds, and found ourselves in the familiar clubhouse at Queen’s Club – old wood and brick, with the very British management and damp changing-rooms. Roy Emerson, I remember, was singing in the shower when we arrived. This time it was a monotonous fragment of opera to which he’d attached his own words:

  ‘I tried to-o-o-o-o

  Figure it out, figure it out, figure it out . . .

  But I could not

  Figure it out, figure it out, figure it out . . .

  So I said to my s-e-l-l-l-l-l-f

  I can’t . . .

  Figure it out!

  Figure it out, figure it out . . .

  F-i-g-u-r-e it o-o-u-u-u-t!’

  But, in spite of his operatic enigma he sounded cheerful enough. Roy was another man with the kind of deeply humorous mind which is difficult to put into words. His manner was one of contained exuberance which leaked out grins and sly remarks, overflowing into laughter and snatches of song at the drop of a hat. Without doubt, Emerson is one of the nicest living people. Of course he played well, too – an industrious and ingenious game constructed from enormous enthusiasm and a love of tennis.

  Queen’s Club was the only tournament which took place during the week before Wimbledon, except for the qualifying rounds at Roehampton, and so everyone played there, although ‘expenses’ were not paid at Queen’s. There, one received lunch and tea tickets, could practise indoors and on fair grass courts and, in the evening, buy warmish English beer at the little pub they had, all pasted around with tennis photographs. And yet I liked Queen’s; the bashed-up old change-rooms and pavilion, the creaky wooden floors and the indoor courts, and the mysterious ‘members’ who moved about in a conservative, British sort of way, carrying squash rackets and the extraordinary ‘real’ tennis equipment.

  In the dressing-rooms, the old attendants used to eye the invading tennis players with suspicion and hand out towels for showering as though they thought the players mightn’t return them. Teddy Tinling was always very much on show at Queen’s, walking about dressed in shiny clothes, measuring people up, having several sessions of tea and, in his mind’s eye, still fitting sporting fabrics to the manifold curves of the tennis-playing girls.

  That year at Queen’s I played Allen Fox in the first round and, much to his disgust, I beat him. As we came off the court he told me it was because of his oafish body. Allen was (and still is) a highly intelligent man, and used to get extremely cross when his body wouldn’t obey his brain.

  ‘I have great schemes,’ he would say. ‘Mentally I could win Wimbledon, except my body always lets me down!’

  Often on the court he would berate himself with terse instructions – ‘Keep your head down.’ ‘Keep your wrist firm.’ ‘Don’t foul things up by falling apart on the volley!’ Once, watching his match, I heard him say curtly: ‘Get your service in, Allen!’ He then immediately missed his first service, paused, and said: ‘I meant the first ball, dummy!’

  ‘My body misunderstood me,’ he explained when I mentioned it later. In tennis matches, then, he always had, as a last resort, this rueful ‘out’ if he lost, blaming the whole thing on his inept and clumsy body. But when he played chess against the Russians (when he dared), he writhed in the most secret and diabolical of agonies.

  ‘I hate losing at thinking games,’ he confided in me, ‘because, when I do, I can’t say to myself: “Don’t worry, Allen, he’s got a better body!” With thinking games, it’s all pain and suffering.’

  Allen was a wry conversationalist. He fancied himself as a bit of the courageous underdog, and presented himself as such, but with a knowing smile. We sat in the stands after one of his matches, I remember, and I told him that I was sorry to hear that he had lost.

  ‘I also only heard that I had lost at the end of the match when the umpire announced the result,’ he said. ‘Until then, I thought that I had been winning. I hate losing when I think I should be winning. This was one of those matches. I was really concentrating and playing well, and every now and again I would think to myself: “Now I’ve got to be winning!” and then I’d hear the umpire call the score, and I’d be losing!’

  Allen also hated ‘tall guys with big serves on bad grass courts’, and ‘guys who win a lot of points with greasy shots’.

  ‘Greasy shots’, I discovered, were those that went for winners off the frame of the racket.

  ‘I don’t have any greasy shots,’ Allen told me. ‘All my shots are clean. The guy who coached me forgot to say: “Look, Allen, don’t watch the ball too well because that way you’re gonna get a lot of surprise winners – lobs off heavy passing shots and crosscourt volleys that go up the line. Not only do you win points, but you cause your opponent to pull muscles, changing direction.” My coach said to me, “Allen, there’s a sweet spot in the middle of your racket. That’s what you’re aiming for!”’ He paused thoughtfully. ‘Big Abie,’ he went on, ‘doesn’t have a sweet spot. He just has a big heavy racket and a huge arm. If he did have a sweet spot, and he happened to hit the ball with it, it would just keep on going. Circle the earth and hit him on the back of the head!’

  Years later, also at Queen’s Club, I sat beside Allen watching Fred Stolle playing Clark Graebner. At about seven-all, Graebner served one game which consisted of four absolutely clean aces – the streaky kind that flew past Fred Stolle before he could move. Allen pulled a sour face:

  ‘That’s great,’ he said, ‘if you don’t like long rallies!’

  We also had long di
scussions concerning important points, players who ‘choked’ on them and those who did not. ‘Choking’ intrigued Allen as, in fact, it did me.

  ‘Decline the verb “to choke”,’ I said.

  ‘Choke,’ he began at once. ‘I choke, you choke, they choke, I would have choked, you would have choked, they would have choked. The ability to become paralysed under pressure. Or, conversely, the inability to make any kind of shot at all if the score is five-all in the fifth, and your advantage. You get a kind of nervous spasm which causes your racket to:

  (a) Go back very quickly and then refuse to come forward; or

  (b) Go back very slowly and then suddenly fly forward before you want it to.’

  ‘There are three kinds of chokers,’ he went on, warming to the subject. ‘Spectacular chokers. Pathetic chokers. And reverse chokers. Spectacular chokers are the most admirable. On vital points they serve gigantic doubles that miss by yards, or go for dropshots that float into the back fence. Pathetic chokers are the wettest. They get so tense and careful that the balls just dribble off their rackets. Then they hang their heads and talk to themselves. Reverse chokers are the most interesting. They make the difficult shots, then completely fold up on the easy ones. Everyone chokes at some stage in his career. I even had a linesman who choked in one of my matches. He apologised to me later. “Sorry,” he said, “I saw the ball correctly, but called it wrong!”’

  Then we spoke wistfully about the guys who never seemed to choke – Gonzales, who played his best shots on the big points, and Hoad and Laver who were so good that they could choke and still beat people, and Bob Falkenburg, who used to take only one ball, show it to his opponent, then serve an ace with it on match point.

  ‘If ever I did that,’ said Allen, ‘I’d freeze completely. When I went to toss the ball up, it would stick to my hand. I’d be standing there with my fingers locked round the ball and my arm going up and down! Imagine, getting a match point, showing one ball to your opponent and then to have it stick to your hand! That would embarrass the hell out of you.’

  Queen’s Club drifted gently, as it always does, into Wimbledon by way of the Hurlingham garden party. Here the players put on fine British airs and gently stroll the summer lawns, eating salmon and fresh lettuce or strawberries, and, at four, the little cress sandwiches and four-sided cakes. God, how mild an English tea. At Hurlingham, the exhibition matches were fresh and light-hearted, dotted with subtle volleys and mighty smashes.

  I, for one, always enjoyed the Hurlingham party – a sort of calm before the Wimbledon storm. If you walked up the grass embankment on the far side of the putting course, you could look over the Thames on the one hand, and on the other, the sedate croquet games. After Hurlingham we would go to an early movie show, then eat a steak before turning in for some pre-Wimbledon sleep.

  When I was younger I used to daydream a lot. I still do, but not nearly so much – because, I suppose, daydreams are the inventions of young minds which, when they are older, have used up many of the dreams and found them empty; and, if they are very lucky, have made one or two come true. I am not sure whether Rod Laver ever daydreamed. If he did, one of his dreams came true that Wimbledon. Not that he surprised anyone by winning the tournament – simply that it was his first Wimbledon victory and, as I have said somewhere before, the particular moment of that victory must rate as the great thrill of a tennis lifetime, even one as illustrious as Laver’s.

  I became friendly with Rodney during that Wimbledon. He was very fond of my sister Jean and we spent a good deal of time together. And also Peter Ustinov, who used to love to watch the matches and who amused the devil out of us by his remarks and observations. In an animated monologue he could carry out an altercation between, say, an Italian player, a French player, a British umpire and a sleeping woman linesman and sort the whole thing out after a heated argument. On the evening of the Friday on which Rodney won his title, we went to Peter’s show, Romanoff and Juliet, which, like many of his shows, cut into the heart of human affairs and dressed up the wound in farce. Rod took a bow during the show when Peter called the spotlights onto him, and afterwards we drank beer at the Down Under Club.

  Later that year when we arrived at Istanbul for the tournament in Turkey, I heard that Peter was there making a film called Topkapi, which was about a robbery of jewels from the Sultan’s palace, or something like that. At any rate, there was a great deal of running around on the turrets and rooftops of some famous building, and laughter in the making. Peter invited some of us to watch the filming of one of his scenes and in return we asked him to the tennis. He duly arrived, together with Max Schell, who co-starred in the film. In the evening, when it was cooler, I asked him whether he would like to play a game or two. We found some gear and went down to one of the back courts, where we began our hit-up.

  Peter can best be described as a determined and well-anchored player. His forehand comes flying out from around his middle, the racket head gaining speed all the time, so that by the time contact is made, a shot of considerable velocity is produced. The fact that it sometimes flies off course, like a spark off a Catherine wheel, is probably due to the fact that he doesn’t practise as much as he should. His backhand is a more modest shot – a short-arm jab, struck with a sulky frown. Mobility is also a problem.

  ‘Getting oneself into position is like moving troops,’ he once said. ‘One has to plan well in advance.’

  He kept referring to himself as ‘one’. ‘One should lose weight if one wants to indulge in this sport.’ Or: ‘One must watch the ball. Even if one can’t get to it, one should at least watch it!’

  Max Schell sat on a bench at the side of the court, chuckling away to himself. Peter frowned at him periodically and gave him his famous sulky looks.

  ‘One doesn’t like being laughed at,’ he said. ‘Especially by German spectators. One would expect them to remain silent during play.’

  Our warm-up reached the stage where I felt we should play a few games. Peter looked exceedingly dubious at my suggestion.

  ‘Do you mean actually compete?’ he asked, with his mouth turning right down at the comers. ‘Score points? One isn’t accustomed to actual athletic confrontation, you know. Damned alarming when one meets it face to face! Oh very well. But you serve first. Then one shall be able to say that, “games went with service in the early stages”!’

  I held my service and we changed ends. Peter gathered the balls and himself together and took up his position on the serving line, standing there like a bewildered Roman commander who is not sure what has become of his army. For a few moments he stood glancing from the racket in his right hand to the balls in his left, as if wondering which to toss up. I stood waiting, half expecting him to put on some kind of show – an impersonation perhaps, of some famous player’s service action. Instead, he began a sort of flouncing and curtseying action, his racket going back in a series of loops and frills, one to the front, one to the side and one behind him, while his eyes followed the racket head and his knees bobbed up and down in anticipatory bends, as though they had not been told which twirl was to lead to the final swing.

  While all this manoeuvring was taking place, and as though activated by some complex timing mechanism, his left hand suddenly tossed a ball about ten feet into the air above his head where it performed a graceful little parabola before beginning its descent. I, meanwhile, watched open-mouthed and just as I had decided that there was no earthly way that this preposterous action could ever unravel itself in time to hit the ball, a racket head came flying out of the tangle and gave the ball a crisp whack which sent it whistling past me at about knee height without a bounce.

  ‘Good God!’ I exclaimed, convinced now that Peter was doing some elaborate send-up of, perhaps, a turn-of-the-century ladies’ serve. No one in their right mind, I decided, would consider such a service as standard equipment. ‘That’s the funniest service I’ve ever seen,’ I called. Please do it aga
in!’

  ‘One has to,’ said Peter. ‘It’s the only service one has!’

  Hearing funny noises at the side of the court, I turned to find that Max Schell had fallen off his seat and was rolling with laughter. Peter frowned at both of us, sniffed and muttered something about it being ‘very difficult to concentrate on one’s game with the stands full of unruly spectators’.

  On finals day, Peter and Max Schell played a set of mixed doubles on the centre court, partnered by Margaret Hunt and Annette van Zyl, and by that time I had alerted some of the players to take note of Peter’s service action. His first service game was thus greeted by cheers from the players’ enclosure and near-hysteria by the spectators.

  ‘I seem,’ said Peter to his partner, ‘to have become some kind of Turkish Delight!’

  The little Middle Eastern circuit left lasting impressions: Beirut, Istanbul, Athens – the hot, dry capitals waiting by the side of their tame sea, each with their own ingenious inventions. Beirut, old and festering, rutted by winding streets; nothing orderly, no true planes, no verticals – a city sagging, leaned over by time; the accumulated layers of a thousand years of hoarding, conniving and merchandising crowding its markets and bazaars. In its stores the artefacts accumulate and settle into piles of Eastern goods with Eastern smells: musty mixes of spices – incense, myrrh and musk, overlaid by coffee, curry and diesel oil. You wander in Beirut and are aware, above all, that you are Anglo-Saxon. From the West.

  There is a road that unravels from the honeycomb and sifts through suburbs and open lots with piles of fruit and melons, and finally makes its way up the mountain to Broumana. There it is cooler, purer, if you like, with dusty breezes carrying the smell of pine and eucalyptus from the mountain slopes. And there, on half a dozen sun-baked tennis courts flanked by a school, the tournament was held. The players were billeted in the deserted dormitories, and food was served in the school dining room – cuts of lean mutton, chicken, white cheeses, olive oil, goats’ milk, piles of fruit and huge sheets of tough, unleavened bread. In the morning, Torben Ulrich grumbled about the absence of newspapers.