A Handful of Summers

by Gordon Forbes

  So JJ and I decided unanimously to broaden our sensitivities, and we yearned secretly for mechanical aids such as Abie’s collapsible seat. Industriously we dated girls – carting them ceremoniously to movies, milk bars and the odd night spot. But it wasn’t going to be that easy, we discovered. The girls of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs were highly sophisticated, and for them one needed money and a smooth approach. And the young tennis girls were far too naïve. Flirtations were all very well, but we wanted the real thing.

  ‘We’ve got to get overseas,’ said JJ firmly. ‘They say that there you can crack it with your eyes closed.’

  And so we worked at our games and dreamed dreams of tennis titles and conquests of hot-blooded women, and of magical evenings in the capitals of Europe where, ‘they’ said, romance lurked around every corner.

  I came second-last in those Davis Cup trials, but managed to take a set off Abe Segal. It was, as it turned out, a beginning. A time to move. And the following year, the opportunity arose.

  News that Europe in general, and England in particular, possessed successions of tennis tournaments which took place in their summer, which was our winter, and which could be entered into and played in by quite ordinary people, filtered through to us by way of the dressing-room conversations of our own South African tournaments. Because of limited funds in those days, the S.A.L.T.U.2 could send official teams to compete in the European Zone of the Davis Cup only every second year. These teams consisted of recognised South African stars such as Norman Farquharson, Eustace Fannin, Sydney Levy, and that greatest of South African players, Eric Sturgess.

  They were the elite in our eyes, and we viewed them with some awe, listened wide-eyed to their conversations about Wimbledon, Roland Garros, the way the Italians lobbed and cheated and how Frank Sedgman volleyed.

  But more impressive to us were the few intrepid individuals who had actually made their own way to Europe, entered themselves into the tournaments, and succeeded in winning a few matches. They were the ones who riveted us with their stories.

  London, according to ‘Rookie’ Rooke, the big Rhodesian, was a tennis player’s giant oyster, filled with pearls of every conceivable kind. And for starters, alive with women, who were, as he put it, ‘left over from the war. And love-starved,’ the words whistling through his front teeth. ‘Craving men, do you follow me? Absolutely dying for men!’ Whereupon JJ and I used to prick up our ears even higher, totally unable to imagine why women’s lives should be sacrificed for such a reason.

  David Lurie returned from England as a semi-celebrity, having taken Tony Mottram, the durable British Champion, to five sets in the semi-final of the somewhere-or-other.

  But it was Owen Williams3 who really widened our eyes.

  Determined to get overseas, he had, in 1952, taken a job as a liquor store attendant at a dockside establishment in Port Elizabeth. From there he had become acquainted with the officers of the Union Castle liners, and had begun hounding them for a job. At last, after nine months of persevering, he was appointed third assistant to the vegetable chef on the Pretoria Castle. ‘There were meat chefs,’ he told me later, ‘and seafood chefs, and pastry chefs and dessert chefs and God knows how many other chefs, and they all had assistants who specialised in something or other. I specialised in potatoes.’

  Owen was put in sole charge of the ship’s potatoes. These, being lowly items, were stored in the very bottom of the galley stowage. ‘In the bowels of the ship,’ said Owen, ‘down about twenty ladders, in the pitch-dark, right next to the keel, and I suffer from claustrophobia. Once they closed the hatches by mistake and left me alone with the potatoes. Trapped! Me and a million tubers, separated from the depths of the sea by a mere inch of creaking steel plate!’

  He’d had nightmares about that, and had finally arrived in England more of a potato specialist than a tennis player. News of his voyage had, however, been flashed across to England by South African sports writers, and the headline Potato Peeler for Wimbledon had appeared on every London sports page, assuring him his entry into all the small English tournaments. Human-interest stories are especially dear to the hearts of the British!

  A tennis-loving lady called Doreen Malcolm solved my particular travelling problem. She arranged a tour of the English Summer Tournaments for Gordon Talbot, the South African Junior Champion, and me, and presented it to us as a fait accompli. There was enough money in my savings account to pay for a boat fare and £50 worth of travellers’ cheques.

  With a great lift of my heart, I informed the family, and together we made our way to the Cape Town docks.

  1 A Yugoslav Davis Cup player, who had once toured South Africa and whose service, a left-arm American twist, had filled my father with such awe that he often talked about him.

  2 South African Lawn Tennis Union

  3 Now one of the world’s best-known tournament promoters.

  Two

  Diary Notes: 1954

  By the time we arrived at the All England Club it was mid-afternoon; an ordinary middle-of-the-week afternoon in April. We’d taken the tube at Earls Court, changed at Putney, got off at Southfields and walked from there. There are shops near the station, then the rows of English houses, and then the road curves away, down and to the right, with the common on the left.

  England in early spring! New green and blossom bursting everywhere. I was deeply excited and slowed the walk to make the excitement last. Impossible to write down the feelings you have when you are about to arrive somewhere you’ve always wanted to get to. We arrived at last, and stopped at the gate. There was no one about, only a few old men tending the lawns. The stadium was low and green; old and comfortable looking and lower than we’d thought it would be.

  In March 1954 the Winchester Castle sailed out of Table Bay, carrying on board Gordon Talbot and me.

  There is no departure as thrilling as that of an ocean liner. We stood at the rails, watching the streamers part, while the tugs nudged us away from the quay and out into the harbour. Behind us, the mountain caught the dusk light, with the misty clouds pouring down her face. Ahead, the brooding horizon, dull red where the sun set, turning to gunmetal and purple. The air that swept off the sea carried upon it the bite of an Antarctic spring, and the smell of distance and adventure – acute and agonising in the heart of an eighteen-year-old.

  I remember almost every detail of that six-month journey, and could fill a book with it – one of those mild, comfortable books that one reads after taking a sedative in preparation for an early night. But I’ll distil it, squeeze it up into a concentrate, a sharp succession of flashbacks like a roll of photographic slides: the hour-long gym sessions which Gordon and I faithfully conducted each morning at six-thirty on the windy decks, smelling the salt, paint and diesel fuel on the wind. The wild-and-woolly South African air force pilot who shared our cabin and who, in a flash, had fascinated all the ladies on board. Perhaps, because I had never had a lady, he understood the wistful look in my eyes after one of his many requests that I vacate the cabin for a while. When I finally returned, there, on my bunk, was one of his naked ladies. She had soft eyes and round breasts and there she lay, looking up at me and beckoning with a sly forefinger, thus causing:

  1. My first near heart attack;

  2. A flood of apologetic words that tumbled out of my mouth;

  3. A hasty retreat into the edge of the door.

  ‘Are you afraid of me?’ she asked. ‘You needn’t be, you know. I don’t bite. You may even come a little closer! You’re kind of cute.’

  ‘Am I?’ I asked, rubbing the part of my head that had come in contact with the door.

  ‘Kind of,’ she replied.

  The conversation was not of the kind upon which destinies hang, but I finally composed myself and was rewarded with a fleeting touch or two and several warm kisses. That was my first full view of a naked lady and is still one of my clea
rest mental pictures.

  We basked in the equatorial sun and held kissing sessions on tropical nights, watching the turbulent phosphorescence of the wake disappear into the darkness. Had a Neptune ceremony on the Equator, tasted the wines at Madeira and battered the swells of the Bay of Biscay.

  At last, one morning a foggy Southampton emerged from a sunrise full of promise and, in a daze of images and impressions, we docked and boarded the boat train for London. Waterloo. The Cromwell Road. Earls Court. The King Charles Hotel. A little bedroom with iron beds and eiderdowns. The London Underground – the tube, with its rushing winds and warm smells. Piccadilly Circus, flashing rich and half used up. Red old doorways. The great signs. Regent Street, Leicester Square, The Odeon, The Prince of Wales, Great Windmill Street, Boots, Dolcis, Simpsons, Lillywhites, Trafalgar Square. How absolutely wide-eyed we were!

  Our first tournament was at Sutton, Surrey – cold, damp, old and utterly English. Billy Knight, Tony Pickard, Bobby Wilson, Bob Howe, veal-and-ham pie, lettuce and watercress, fragile cucumber sandwiches. Also Teddy Tinling. A tall man in tennis clothes, who seemed at first glance to be all legs and piercing eyes, approached me and said:

  ‘My dear chap, those shorts you’re wearing are appalling!’

  They were special shorts, carefully bought in the little general store close to our farm. White ducks with turn-ups and fly-buttons. Teddy looked me up and down:

  ‘Simply appalling. You have no knees,’ he sniffed, and added: ‘and the shirt is not really much better.’ (It was a Perry shirt!) ‘Come along with me. We shall have to rig you out.’

  And so I received some Tinling shorts and shirts and, best of all, began a long friendship with Teddy himself. He has a mind and wit as sharp as a razor, and, in those days, his verbal probes used to diminish me, so that I could usually provide suitable rejoinders only after he had left.

  They were so simple, those little English tournaments, so utterly artless. Home-made, if you like. Red clay courts, damp and heavy; clubhouses of old brick, and inside all the woodwork nearly worn out. Floors, tables, bashed-up little bars. In the change-rooms, wooden lockers, wet floors and nice old smells, musty as the devil. They were funny things, those tournaments, but they were open-hearted, and they allowed ordinary people to play them. Everything was absolutely fair and square and the ‘conditions’ that the players were offered, though infinitesimal, were conditions, none the less.

  In Sutton, for instance, Gordon and I each received a return rail fare from London (about 35p), cold lunches each day, private accommodation with warm-hearted local families, and £2.50 for ‘expenses’. If you won the tournament, you received prize vouchers: £5 for the singles, £2.50 each for the doubles, and these stated that you could spend them only on ‘white apparel’. Usually at Simpsons, where white lambswool sweaters cost £2.50.

  Each little tournament tried to include in its line-up at least one ‘star’. Sutton that year had Kurt Nielsen of Denmark, whose deal was similar in structure to ours, except that it probably had a first-class rail fare, hotel accommodation at the local pub, and £25 ‘expenses’.

  It was, in fact, these ‘expenses’ which finally led to the collapse of the true amateur system, as it became very difficult to define exactly what the term ‘expenses’ covered. Later on, therefore, when the tournaments began to compete for the participation of the big stars, ‘expenses’ became very pliable, and easy to bend.

  Who knew, it was righteously argued, how much a tennis star could actually spend in a week if he really set his mind to it?

  But at that time, in 1954, tennis in England was about as close to being truly amateur as was feasible. We accepted it thus, played it, and adored it.

  Diary Notes: 1954

  We told the old man who opened the gate for us that we’d come from South Africa to play tennis. That we wanted to see Wimbledon.

  ‘Club’s closed,’ he said, ‘’cepting only for members.’

  ‘We only want to see the centre court,’ Gordon Talbot said. ‘We’ve come all the way from Johannesburg.’

  The old man whistled through his teeth and looked over our heads into the distance.

  ‘No harm in that, I suppose,’ he said at last, and turned away up the drive, beckoning us to follow. He stood with us in the huge deserted arena while we stared down at the patch of lawn. There were no lines, I remember. Just the new green grass and the darker surrounds; an empty scoreboard, and all those empty, comfortable-looking seats. ‘There,’ said the old man gruffly.

  ‘There it is, then. That there’s Wimbledon. You boys happy now?’ We thanked him and told him that we were.

  Bournemouth, Hurlingham, Paddington, Newcastle, Manchester, Surbiton, Beckenham, Roehampton. The little English tournaments unfolded with a mildness matched by that extraordinarily temperate summer. Gordon and I received £2.50 per week, second-class rail fares, and books of lunch tickets which enabled us to eat egg-and-ham pie and lettuce in dampish tents. Blissfully happy, we played for our lives, practised at every conceivable opportunity, had mild little sessions with some of the English girls in trains, and won the doubles at Hurlingham, a victory which ensured our doubles entry into Wimbledon and gained us some more Tinling and Perry tennis clothes.

  At Beckenham I encountered my first classic Tinling witticism. The tournament was refereed by a pompous ex-army major or lieutenant colonel, as all referees in those days seemed to be. No matter how modest the tournaments were, they always managed to come up with a very British referee, who had a very British moustache, and who used to lay down the law in a very British way.

  The one at Beckenham, whose name I forget, was particularly overpowering. The week turned out the wettest in years, so that by Friday, with the courts virtually under water, only the quarter-finals had been reached. On Saturday a further deluge made play impossible, and Teddy, making for the tea tent, encountered the referee, chin on chest, staring sulkily at an inundated centre court.

  ‘Good morning, dear Major,’ said Teddy with infinite cheer. He himself was out of the tournament by then.

  ‘Filthy weather,’ said the Major. ‘Dashed bad luck. Damned bad show, not finishing. Could have pushed a bit that first day. Might have finished a few more matches. One never really knows, does one? Too late now, of course. Never finish. Just one of those things.’

  ‘Never mind, Major,’ said Teddy, still cheerful. ‘Buck up, old lad. You’ve created a new record, you know?’

  ‘Have I?’ asked the Major, brightening considerably. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘You’ve become the wettest referee in England,’ said Teddy, crushingly.

  Later, over a cup of tea, Teddy explained to me the rivalry which existed amongst the old breed of referees, and the stigma cast over those who were not able, in spite of the English weather, to complete their tournaments.

  ‘They brood, dear chap,’ said Teddy, ‘they brood if they don’t finish, and there’s nothing as bad as a broody referee.’

  Diary Notes: Spring 1954

  Some of the English county players have extraordinary games – all improvised and home-made. Terribly crafty, though. One of them has devised a remarkable doubles system which dispenses almost entirely with the backhand. He and his partner stand in tandem, holding forehand grips, and completely covering the backhand side. When the odd backhand does present itself, they throw up a high lob, and then regroup. Of course, they can’t live with the really good teams, but they love the game so much and it’s heartrending to see them make their little plans and wiles, which work in county tennis, but which get torn apart by the big teams. They take their defeats stoically, in a very British way, and back in the dressing-rooms their cronies say:

  ‘Had a double, old man?’ ‘Any luck?’ And they shake their heads and say: ‘Not a hope. We got a two and a love. Not enough guns, d’you see. Much too good.’

  And they sit down gravely and sta
rt taking off all the pairs of socks they wear, and then shower very carefully and pack all their gear away into old leather tennis bags, then comb their hair and go off to the pub for a pint of draught or bitter. Nearly all of them wear striped shirts with white collars.

  Teddy Tinling was possessed of a fearful forehand, a safe backhand and an extraordinary turn-of-the-century-type service which necessitated a very high toss-up. While the ball was thus aloft, Teddy was able to accomplish the various manoeuvres which he felt belonged to and were an essential part of his swing. When things went well and the racket and ball rendezvoused satisfactorily, an unlikely cannon ball was produced. Windy days caused Teddy’s service to be fraught with tension and often forced him to reposition himself to ensure being present when the ball returned to earth after the toss-up. Scarborough, that windiest of windy places, has spawned some remarkable Tinling rhetoric. One tense morning match, for example, he had to contend not only with a gale-force wind, but had the sun directly in his eyes.