A Handful of Summers

by Gordon Forbes

  My father stopped beside us and surveyed the over turned cannon, our black faces, the cloud of smoke dispersing gently over the water and the shattered galleon.

  ‘A direct hit, I see,’ he said. ‘Very impressive. Now put away that cannon for two weeks as punishment for overloading her. Then get on to the court and play two sets of tennis. You will play two sets on every day that the cannon is out of action.’

  We received the news in silence. The cannon had been built by us at great cost in time and ingenuity, and had become our most prized possession. It had a twelve-inch barrel of three-quarter-inch water pipe, a strong wooden carriage and little levers for horizontal and vertical adjustment. A cumbersome muzzle-loader, it was nonetheless our main armament in any emergency, since, during the war, ammunition for any of the other farm firearms was unobtainable.

  Reluctantly we stowed the cannon away and went after our rackets.

  Diary Notes: 1946

  It’s the middle of winter. In the evenings we sit around the fire and read out loud. This week it’s Robin Hood; so the guns are put away and it’s longbows. Dry quince wood is the best, and heavy baling twine, and there is a wild river bush that makes good arrows. Quivers out of buckskins. The black boys are the merry men, and are armed with quarterstaffs, but Joseph, who is Will Scarlett, demands a bow. We’ll have to make him one. Jack, of course, is Robin, and I’m Little John. The part in the book we like best is when Robin has the Sheriff at his mercy, and the Sheriff calls out:

  ‘Thou art a coward, Robin of Locksley. Had I but a sword, you would mock me no more.’

  And Robin throws him a sword, saying:

  ‘Take then thy sword, Good Sheriff,’ and beats him again.

  Yesterday in the greenwood (the belt of poplars that grow along the river) our activities got so exciting that Webbcorn, who was Guy of Gisborne, was captured, gagged and bound to a tree. We then forgot about him completely, and only remembered him again as we sat down to supper that evening.

  ‘Oh, Lord!’ said Jack. ‘Webbcorn’s still tied up.’ So we had to take a torch and go down into the dark woods to release him. My father was furious. Three hours of tennis, and sixpence for Webbcorn as compensation. ‘Remember, no breaks,’ said my father the next day as we began to play.

  Jack watched him go, then muttered after him: ‘Had I but a sword, you would mock me no more!’

  The compulsory practice sessions enforced on us by our father used to last for two hours each day. Thus, when people say to me, ‘But what made you become a tennis player?’ the answer is fairly straightforward. If you are forced to stand on a tennis court for two hours each day, you might as well practise. We did, anyway. And in those long-ago sessions on the rough farm court, we eased the boredom by inventing a world of make-believe, ‘becoming’ the great players we’d heard of, but whom we had never seen.

  My brother, Jack, the eldest and leader of the gang, had first choice of whom he wanted to be. Usually it was Perry or Budge or Riggs or Kramer. But on inventive days he would sometimes announce that he was Kukuljevic.1 Having done so, he would suddenly become aloof and merciless, and leave us to make our selections with some trepidation.

  Now none of us was quite certain who Kukuljevic was, but the name conjured visions of a truly fearful opponent. My father believed that it was Kukuljevic who had invented the ‘topspin service’, as he called it.

  Having said that he was Kukuljevic, Jack would arrange his face in a fierce and evil way, and serve a selection of spins, wild and frightful, which he called ‘Kukuljevic twists’. Occasionally these ‘twists’ would bounce in the service court, and once, to our profound delight, one of them gave a huge sideways bound, scattering the gravel surface of the court and leaving an oval mark which we all inspected reverently, while Jack strutted about saying:

  ‘That must be it. I’ve done it. That must be the “Kukuljevic Twist”.’

  Speaking from experience, I now submit, without question, that a good tennis shot, struck while one is representing the personage of Budge, Kramer, Parker, Rosewall or Hoad, is infinitely more grand and satisfactory than the same tennis shot, no matter how good, struck while one is anonymous.

  In the evenings, my father would tell us stories of the genius of the great players of that time. Perry could do this, Bromwich that, Tilden something else, Alice Marble still another unbelievable thing. He had a way of making their deeds seem so marvellous that we’d be out at first light, giving them a try.

  Tennis stories became, for us, heady draughts quite early in our lives. Raptly we listened to them, savoured them, re-enacted them and stored them away in our memories. Favourite amongst the early ones was that which told of some great player, we never quite discovered whom, who amongst his rackets carried one which was pitch black all over. At match point, either for or against him, he would with marvellous haughtiness stop the game, walk to the umpire’s stand, draw out the black racket (like drawing a blade, we would say to ourselves) and with this mighty weapon, deal with the situation. He captivated us absolutely, long before we realised the traumas and tensions of that most scary of situations, the match point.

  How often since then, with match points of varying intensities at hand, have I not thought wistfully of that black racket and fervently wished for some such visible strength to draw upon.

  Diary Notes: Summer 1946

  Our father makes us play tennis. Our mother shows us how. She is a very gentle lady; teaches us school, how to mix the mash that makes the chickens lay, and how to make butter. Softens the cross words of my father. He has just announced two very scary bits of news:

  1. That we are to go to boarding school, and

  2. That we are to play in the Border Junior Tennis Tournament.

  Both make my stomach turn. I asked my mother why we couldn’t stay on the farm and have her teach us the way she always has. She looked at me with soft eyes and said that our father knew best.

  Age twelve. I played in and won my first junior tournament. It was in East London, one windy August. The matches began at eight in the morning. I stood clutching my racket, my kneecaps shivering, and jumped when they called my name.

  ‘G. Forbes versus P. Whitfield.’

  ‘Oh God!’ I remember thinking. ‘How good is Whitfield?’

  I didn’t know then that thereafter there were to be hundreds of Whitfields. Hundreds of shivering kneecaps. Hundreds of those nervous little lurches of the heart when they called out my name.

  Jack played in the under-sixteens, and reached the final, losing to Owen Williams; and Jean, who was then about five, spent the whole week hitting a ball against absolutely any vertical surface that she could find. In those days she went about with an old tennis ball in one hand, and a sawn-off racket in the other as permanent fixtures. Any object that looked even remotely as though it might offer a rebound had a few shots hit against it. ‘OK,’ she would murmur to herself, ‘now I’m Bobby Riggs.’ Riggs had been her favourite player since we had travelled to Queenstown to watch the first ever pro tour of South Africa by Riggs, Donald Budge, Carl Earn and Welby van Horn.

  Jean wore our hand-me-down shorts and shirts, and looked like a freckled urchin. By the time she was eight she was winning the under-fourteens and regularly played exhibition matches before the senior finals.

  The die-hards looked on and muttered about another Alice Marble, and my father watched her with an incandescent gleam in his eye.

  In spite of my first victory, I was a bad junior. I disliked the tenseness of the competitions and for a while played cricket and hockey as an escape. But tennis kept cropping up; was always there, waiting.

  Without knowing it, we became addicted to it; inexorably infected by its very deepest urgings, by the whole wide character of the game: the touch of a new racket, the smell of varnish on gut, the way a sliced backhand could float on heavy air and ‘bite’ into a surface of damp clay. The wa
y spins drifted and what they did when they bounced. Floppy hats, sunburnt faces, the ache at the end of the day. The lonely matches on outside courts – the hostile eyes of opponents’ parents. The last sixteens, the mixed doubles, the number one seeds. The wins, the losses, the post-mortems over tea and cake. We got into all that – endless successions of arrivals, first rounds, victories, defeats, triumphs, tears. And throughout our tennis lives this order of things never changed in nature, but only in stature. In every close match ever played, you always fought two things – your opponent and the fear inside you, and the worse of the two was the fear. That was what made you miss the easy volley at 40-30, or serve the double-fault at 5-4 in the final set.

  But wait, I’m losing ground! What I am really trying to say is that there is an enormous amount of agony and effort – an eternity of backhands and forehands, of serves and volleys, of matches won, matches lost, of good luck and bad luck, of triumphs and disasters which must be ploughed through before you can stand on the Wimbledon centre court and, in a gesture of mock despair, hand your racket, handle first, to a ball boy to indicate to the crowd that he might be better equipped than you to continue the match!

  We survived the rigours of junior tennis. By the time Jean was thirteen, she had won two major South African senior tournaments, and was regarded as a sort of teenage tennis miracle. Jack and I were not regarded as miracles. Our games were good, but not spectacular. He loved the farm life. I felt trapped by it, and wanted to move. Tennis offered me an escape. In 1953 I was chosen to play in the Davis Cup trials at Ellis Park in Johannesburg. I was utterly excited. There were twelve players selected, and I was the twelfth. I made the journey up to the city by train. The whole family came to our little station to see me off.

  Diary Notes: 1952

  Three Dunlop Maxplys have arrived for me at the post office. The postmaster has told the whole town. Everybody knows I’ve been chosen for the Davis Cup trials.

  My father, who normally hates going into town, now goes in every day. And to crown it all, playing in the town cricket team on Saturday I hit three colossal sixes in a row off a farmer from Queenstown, who sold us an expensive stud ram that wouldn’t breed. My father was more pleased about that than the tennis. The cricket club is arranging a farewell party at which I must make a speech!

  Who can ever re-examine old memories without feeling a little woebegone and miserable? Who can look at old photographs without that odd feeling of sadness . . . regret, perhaps, for opportunities gone, chances lost, talents wasted. Who can ever be lucky enough to know when good times are at hand, how good they really are? Stop for a moment and say, ‘These moments are as good as they come; these now, not others some other time.’

  When I first arrived in Johannesburg from our Karoo farm, I was wide-eyed at the size of it. Set back on my heels, as Claude Lister was to say. I had come to play in trial matches for the Davis Cup team, and felt diminished by my lack of worldliness and the unruly state of my game, which I was in the process, then, of getting together. It was, I remember thinking, quite brilliant in certain aspects, but it seemed to possess a will of its own and often went off at alarming tangents like a squad of soldiers, all good shots, but all firing in different directions.

  I stayed alone at a dreary downtown hotel, and at night the strange city used to close in around me and drive me upstairs to my room. There are few places in the world as dreary as after-dark downtown Johannesburg. I was nervous about everything, even things like catching buses to the tennis, even if they were labelled ‘Ellis Park’, because I was sure they would take me somewhere else so that I would get lost and not be in time for my matches.

  The other players in the trials were all big names in South African tennis, and struck a certain amount of fear into my heart – Russell Seymour, Owen Williams, Ian Vermaak, Brian Woodroffe, Johan Kupferberger and the original stone wall, John Hurry.

  Trevor Fancutt was a firm friend. And as for Abe Segal, I first came across him in the Ellis Park changeroom. He saw me in a corner and shouted out:

  ‘Christ, kid, you’re like a mouse! Don’t people make noises on that farm of yours?’

  He was really rough and ready in those days, and used to wear purple T-shirts and sing The Nearness of You very loudly, with his mouth full of Chiclets. He, you see, had the advantage of a childhood in which so many things had gone wrong that he knew there was almost nothing he couldn’t cope with. His early life had been a permanent episode of The Untouchables. Street fighting, fence-climbing and the general doing of hair-raising deeds were second nature to him. And by then, he’d already been on one hectic, do-it-yourself overseas tennis tour – had worked his passage on a freighter, lived on the smell of an oil rag, been mistakenly billeted at a brothel, harvested apples, befriended several surprised millionaires and once alarmed an ancient English umpire at Hurlingham by shaking his seat, referring to him as ‘Professor’, and implying that he was blind. All Abie had to learn was which knife to use for fish, and that you were supposed to wear socks with a dinner suit. I had to learn to cope with a world which was several hundred times the size I had first thought it was, and filled with people whom I wanted to believe, but shouldn’t. I was polite to everybody, and Abe was polite to no one. He’d flatten people with raucous statements or contemptuous comments without even realising what he’d done – like once, when a sweet, smelling-of-cologne lady official with powder on her upper lip, who was filling in Abe’s result on a draw sheet looked up at him and said: ‘Have you got a pencil, Abe?’ And he replied:

  ‘Baby, have I got a pencil! Oh, baby, what a question. Have I got a pencil!’

  I swear I could see a shiver run up and down her spine. She probably had a brief vision, terrifying and delicious, of herself, helpless in his savage embrace, menaced by his terrible pencil. Abe soon became possessed of the remarkable ability to commit enormous faux pas, and, by not being aware of them, surviving them as effortlessly as if drawing breath.

  In Athens, for instance, at a formal party given by the ambassador to somewhere, he arrived wearing a borrowed dinner suit, a purple T-shirt with a big white ‘A’ on the front, and tennis shoes and socks. Ravenously hungry, his eyes hunted the elegant old banquet room for signs of food. Chicken was finally handed round. He finished his serving in a flash, then threw the bones across the room into the marble fireplace. The hostess, hurrying to his side, told him not to worry but to leave the bones on his plate.

  ‘Don’t be crazy, kid,’ he cried. ‘This is for refills!’ Whereupon she laughed delightedly, and gave him one.

  Abe appears frequently in this book because he was (and is) the greatest living creator of confusion, chaos and laughter.

  After he’d sung The Nearness of You for about the tenth time, I told him tentatively that I had a great recording of it by Lester Young. He at once stopped biting his fingernails.

  ‘Lester Young?’ he cried. ‘How in the hell did Lester Young get down to that farm of yours?’

  I told him that we had a bit of a band and that I played the clarinet.

  ‘I’ve got all Goodman’s stuff, and Errol Garner and George Shearing on seventy-eights. And, of course, Lester Young and Johnny Hodges, and the guys at the Philharmonic.’

  ‘God, kid,’ he said, ‘you can’t be so dumb after all. I didn’t even know they had electricity on farms!’ (They didn’t. We had a gramophone that you had to wind up.)

  The next day he arrived at Ellis Park with a pile of records, old seventy-eights, and dropped them in my lap.

  ‘Take ’em, kid,’ he said. ‘I got one of these new grams that turns real slow.’

  That week he also gave me several bits of advice about coping with large cities. Some of them were decidedly alarming.

  ‘OK, Forbsey,’ he said one day. ‘So you’re walking down this dark street, mindin’ your own business, and suddenly you see this guy looking at you kinda peculiar. All you have handy is a newspap
er. What do you do?’

  I told him cautiously that I wasn’t sure.

  ‘You got to get ready real fast,’ he said, and then showed me how to fold a newspaper into a hard, tight truncheon, so that, ‘if the guy jumps you, you can lay him clean out.’ The alarm on my face must have told him that I wasn’t accustomed to the idea of ‘being jumped’ or ‘laying people clean out’ with a newspaper, so he added quickly: ‘But first, you run like hell. Don’t ever get in any brawls if you figure you can run faster than the other guys. That way, all you get is out of breath!’

  His method of approach to girls was, predictably, unbelievably direct – ‘Hey, baby! If the rest of you is as good as the part of your legs that’s stickin’ out of that skirt, I’m available!’ He drove about in a panel van marked Segal’s Fashions, which belonged to his father’s clothing business. The front passenger seat had become loose, so that, on fast getaways, it tipped over backwards, depositing its occupant with a sort of rolling motion into the gloomy rear compartment. With this seat, Abie told me, after I had got to know him better, he could get indecisive girls into the back of the van with a minimal loss of time. I never saw the seat used for this exact purpose. It once, however, rolled Trevor Fancutt over backwards just as he raised a pint of milk to his mouth. Drenched, he emerged from the gloom saying, ‘Damn you, Abie. That’s very trying!’

  I began accumulating many other friends in the tennis world. One of these was a mild-mannered young player whose nickname was JJ, and whose tastes and sensitivities coincided almost exactly with my own. We viewed Abie’s adventures among loose women with a certain amount of envy. At that stage of our lives we would both dearly have loved to do dashing deeds with women, being fully aware of the proximity of the girl competitors. Things happened continually underneath their demure, white tennis outfits, and it drove us crazy not knowing exactly what they were. Sunburnt legs protruded, pleasant smells emerged, and glimpses of powdered pectorals encouraged thoughts of more thorough investigations. We would sit in the stands, with one eye on the tennis and the other on things like bosoms and thighs. JJ would get, in his own words, ‘decidedly worked up’ at certain times and suggest that it was high time that he and I ‘cracked one through the covers’. His mild manner and cricket-playing background had come up with this particular term for describing the great and wondrous act. That was only after he had gone to great pains to discover whether or not I already had. I assured him that my experience with women was limited to innumerable flirtations, some modest achievements, but a general skirting of the main issue. He heaved a sigh of relief then, and admitted that, although he himself had put a fair amount of effort into several attempts, he too had not yet ‘cracked it’. Perhaps, he said, our combined ingenuities might lead to the actual doing of the deed. I was ready enough to join forces. Morals then were far more old-fashioned than they are these days. It was true that living near our boarding school there had been a redhead called Theresa who, for half-a-crown, would allow a hand to be slipped into her blouse and a brief squeeze given to the wonders hidden there. For five shillings the same brief access would be given to the inside of her knickers. Heady though this area seemed, it meant the sacrifice of a two-week ration of movies and candy; and in any case, those who had laid out the money reported that it was ‘not all that it was cracked up to be’ – an ambiguous summary, but one which dissuaded the meek from taking the plunge.