In Kansas, officers of the 39th Bomb Group of the US Airforce recall that they spent several months ‘on a state of constant alert (mostly playing bridge)’, which reminds me of the suburb of the northern English town of Bradford known as Idle where it is possible even now to visit the ‘Idle Working Men’s Club’.
Bridge is not only popular with the enlisted men but also with their commanders. All through the war General Dwight D. Eisenhower continued to indulge his passion for the game. ‘On November 7, 1942, he relaxed at the card table while waiting for news of the landing at Casablanca in North Africa. One of the other players was General Alfred Guenther, last heard of directing the Culbertson-Lenz match in 1930.’ Guenther and Eisenhower were, in fact, bridge friends for many years. After the war, the former Supreme Commander, Allied Forces in Europe – under whose command my father eventually fell – took it easy for a while as President of Columbia University. The post suited him because it left his afternoons free for playing bridge. Truscott takes up the story: ‘One day he was at the card table and was told by a club servant that he was wanted on the telephone. He was not at all pleased at being disturbed and grumbled off.’ He returned with a thunderous expression on his face, and his partner, a young player called Caulkins, asked what the matter was.
The ‘matter’ was President Truman who had called to ask Eisenhower to take up the appointment as head of NATO in Paris.
Truscott reports the conversation:
‘Will you go?’
With a shrug, ‘If the president says go, you go.’
‘Who will you take as your number two?’
‘Well, I ought to take Bedell Smith. But I think I’ll take Guenther because he’s a better bridge player.’ Which is how General Alfred Maximilian Guenther subsequently became head of NATO when Eisenhower returned to the United States to run for the presidency.
Eisenhower was not the only world leader obsessed with the game. The view of Hilaire Belloc reflects the extraordinary appeal of the game for men and women, and for all classes and political persuasions, for it is a curiosity of bridge that, although its roots are among the leisured classes, it has found as many adherents on the left as on the right.
The accursed Power which stands on Privilege
(And Goes with Women, and Champagne and Bridge)
Broke – and Democracy resumed her reign;
(Which goes with Bridge and Women and Champagne).
Bridge in China, for example, has its roots in the cafés of Paris in the 1920s, where it was part of the mix of ideas and revolutionary fervour enjoyed by middle-class students and taken back to China on their return. Deng Xiaoping worked for a time at the Renault factory in Paris and learned the game while staying at the apartment of Zhou Enlai. He remained a fanatical player for the rest of his life, even in defiance of the orders of Chairman Mao, who regarded bridge as a middle-class affectation. Mao banned the game in 1949 and it remained an illegal activity in China for the next thirty years. But, even through a period of internal exile during the Cultural Revolution, Deng continued to play the game. He is reputed to have been a ‘crafty’ and ‘political’ player, basing his success as much on his estimation of the weaknesses of his opponents as on the strength of his own cards. Throughout his time in power, Deng played bridge three or four times a week and by all accounts was a world-class player, ‘as good as Omar Sharif’, according to Kathy Wei-Sender, who is herself world-class. Bridge became legal in 1979, and the game is now played at every level. There are more bridge players in China than in any other country in the world. Because of his promotion of the game, Deng was honoured at the 1981 World Championships when he was voted, by the International Bridge Press Association, Bridge Personality of the Year, a unique honour for a world leader. With his support, China joined the World Bridge Federation and in 1995 went on to host the World Championships.
Deng resigned all offices some years before he died – although he remained paramount in China – and at the time of his death his only official title was that of honorary president of the Chinese Bridge Federation. Of course, his motivation for keeping his love of the game in the public eye remained at least partly political. He is often quoted as saying, ‘When people see me swimming, they think I am physically fit. And when they hear of me playing bridge, they think I am mentally fit.’
And it is not just China. The war takes bridge around the world. From the prison camps of Burma to the parade grounds of Calcutta, people are playing bridge. It will be some years before countries other than ‘old’ Europe and ‘new’ America start producing world champions – but that time will come. By the end of the war, bridge is played by more people in more countries than ever before. The war has made it a global game.
Dad sees out the balance of hostilities in Italy, ‘playing bridge in a state of constant alert’, but some distance behind ‘the action’. His unit is in Milan on 28 April 1945 when Mussolini and his lover are hung out to dry in the Piazzale Loreto. ‘God, what an ignoble end,’ Eisenhower says, with elegant understatement.
For some months after the war ends, troops hang around Europe waiting to be sent ‘home’. My father is in due course demobbed. But he is not sent home. His nationality is by now disputed. When he left Scotland for South Africa, he had no passport, only a name tag and an address. When he enlisted into the South African Army, he was given a South African passport. And this document determined where the army would send him. And so he sails, together with the rest of his unit, back to Cape Town. He arrives there towards the end of 1945 and makes his way back to Johannesburg. A place has been kept for him at the University of the Witwatersrand and he now has a little money, which when coupled with a bursary or two and an ex-serviceman’s grant enables him to resume his studies amidst the social whirl of Johannesburg.
He is now an ex-serviceman, a soldier. He smokes, he drinks. He has looked into the abyss and survived. In that sense at least, he has had ‘a good war’. His parents are not forgotten exactly, but nor are they part of his life. The rift that opened when his metal trunk first appeared in the sitting room in Greenbank Road in the late summer of 1940 has become an unbridgeable chasm. It will be another four years before he sees Rose and Tom again. When, finally, he does arrive in Edinburgh in the autumn of 1949 his youngest brother – my uncle Brian – looks at him quizzically. ‘Who are you?’ he wants to know. And what the bloody hell are you doing here? Robin and George returned home at the end of the war, young enough still to complete their schooling at the Holy Cross School. For them, the South African adventure was an interlude. For Dad, it was everything. And, after the freedom and light of Johannesburg, Scotland does not feel much like a place to come home to. It feels like a place he left. He stays for less than a year. His future lies elsewhere.
PART IV
A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING
23. The far side
SOME JOURNEYS IT is better not to travel alone. In the months after Dad’s death, my brother and I see more of each other than usual. There is the trip to the Drakensberg where I teach the kids how to play bridge while David shows them how to tie knots. Another time, we go to Tanzania where we and my elder daughter attempt to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Even after all this time, David’s still angry with Dad, fuming in fact. One night, looking out across the African plains, he tells me about the time he found Dad having a nightcap. Mum and Jackie were in Europe; I was at boarding school. It was just David and Dad. David took the bottle of whisky and poured it down the drain. There was a tense standoff before David turned and walked out.
‘I never really felt we spoke again,’ he says.
And, in the autumn of 2004, he and I head for Siberia, together with Cal and a friend who lives and works in Moscow. ‘You’ll like the silences,’ my friend says. ‘Nowhere has silences like Siberia.’ It was, we agreed, both a promise and a threat. ‘I like to listen to the wind,’ he adds. He is a scholar of some distinction, known in his field for his formidable intellect, his carefully phrased arguments
and the intimidating reach of his knowledge. The idea of him listening to the wind has a certain quixotic appeal. As, indeed, does the idea of him liking Siberia. He had, after all, spent a large portion of his childhood there when Stalin imprisoned his parents.
In addition to a promise and a threat, it is a curious ‘sell’. We are going to the wilds of Kamchatka in the Russian Far East. The peninsula is famous for many things – for its volcanoes and bears, for the streams filled with salmon and for Avachinsky Bay filled with the rusting hulks of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. It was the promise of bears and salmon that caught Cal’s attention but I harboured a sneaking interest in the tarnished fleet.
Kamchatka is known too as the place from which the Danish explorer Vitus Bering, then in the service of the Russian imperial court, launched his successful, but fatal, second attempt to prove that America and Asia were not in fact joined. And it was while working for Bering that the botanist Stepan Krasheninnikov wrote his astonishingly accurate portrait of the undisturbed lands and people of Kamchatka. The work was published first in 1755 and remains in print to this day. He, like all travellers to Kamchatka, was impressed by its size and its distances, and by its relentless, inhospitable beauty.
And, as we talked about it in the rushing traffic of central Moscow, the idea appealed more and more. Within minutes of plunging into the rude cacophony of Sheremetevo airport’s domestic departure hall, I found myself longing for silence. Any silence. Kamchatka’s would have done nicely.
Kamchatka, however, was still 4,000 miles away. On his first trip it took Bering four years to get there and back. The peninsula is nine hours and 120 degrees of longitude ahead of Moscow, twelve hours ahead of London. You don’t need to reset your watch, for night is day and day is night. As we flew I traced our route on the map: north past the ghastly Soviet labour camps of Vorkuta before crossing the Urals and heading east over the endless tundra.
We take off in the afternoon, but soon plunge into the night. David watches a late moon rising at 15 degrees an hour before we find ourselves flying into a sunrise that appears unwilling ever quite to happen. It’s his first visit to Russia. He counts the three great Siberian rivers – the Ob, the Yenisei and the Lena. One by one they mark the passing hours.
We are staying in Nalychevo, one of five ‘nature parks’ run by the provincial government of Kamchatka Oblast. It extends for some 300,000 hectares and is dominated by three volcanoes – Avachinsky, Koriaksky and A’ag, which separate it from Petropavlovsk, seventy kilometres to the south. Our helicopter lands in a soft, wide valley, a basin almost, filled with birch trees and blueberry bushes, rivers and hot springs. There are no fences to these parks. The wildlife – bears, wolves, wolverines, Arctic foxes and small rodents – come and go. Five species of salmon come to Nalychevo to spawn, but the rivers also have plenty of smaller, more feisty fish. And the valley is surrounded by towering snow-covered peaks, mountains forged in violence and now silent, remote and beautiful.
But not inactive. We listen for rumblings in the earth. I expect them to start any moment, to send billowing clouds into the night sky. From the helicopter, the volcanoes seemed small, conquered. From their foothills, they seem to glower against the darkness, daring those who would to remain within reach. We can picture the fury of an eruption. We can imagine the way the red lava would have flowed across the mountain’s icy, alabaster skin.
People in such a place are self-selecting. They come there not by chance but because they too value the peace and quiet, the relationship to nature which is neither hostile nor subjugated. In our immediate circle, there was Irina, the cook, and Volodya, the guide. And then there was Yuri, one hand damaged in an industrial accident, who teaches Cal rope tricks and gives him a gorilla mask with which to terrorise us all over the coming days. There are also the guards who work for the park, and a smattering of volunteers – pensioners, sailors on shore leave and students on vacation. All of them give up their summers to work in the park, unpaid. One evening after dinner, there is a singsong at which a succession of Russians sing mocking songs of love or the motherland.
One of the singers is Waldemar, a thin freckled man with a sailor’s beard and a command of his audience. ‘I am from Belarus,’ he says, as though that explains everything. Waldemar is something of a nationalist, although his story is very Russian. ‘I cannot go home,’ he says in response to another question. ‘I have been in Russia ten years, but I am poor. I can’t go home. My parents will say, “Ten years you have been away! Ten years in Russia! Where is the money?” To go home I must have money.’
I like Waldemar. He brings us rhododendron stems (‘good for the liver’) and wild spring onions (‘Delicious, like garlic. You try?’) and it is he who catches the 25-pound salmon on which we feed for two days.
Cal, David and I do what boys do. We fish in the rivers, bathe in the hot springs and swing from the birch trees. One could do worse, said Robert Frost, ‘than be a swinger of birches’. For the child and the man, it is good in both the going and the coming back. One night under the wide sky, when there is no light but starlight, and no sounds but the breeze on bark and the occasional rustle of a mouse in the blueberry meadow, we take a midnight ‘banya’, and beat each other with birch twigs before letting the hot steam leach away our city cares.
When it rains, we play a form of three-handed whist. Although he is of the same generation as Dad, our companion does not play bridge. In his extraordinary life – from the Jewish quarters of Vilnius to the prison camps of the Altai, from his soldiering days on Burma Road in Palestine to professorships in Manchester and Moscow – he has managed to avoid the reach of Culbertson’s game.
‘Strange but true,’ he says.
Later that year, I return to Moscow on other business. One evening, my companion and I take the opportunity to visit Moscow’s only bridge club. I have arranged to meet and interview Tatiana Ponomareva, a member of the Russian women’s team that won the gold medal at the 2004 Bridge Olympiad. It is the country’s first medal in international bridge. It may well be a sign of things to come. In the open contest, the Russian men’s team won the bronze medal, coming third to Holland and the seemingly unbeatable Italian team.
Tatiana is as surprised by their victory as anyone.
‘I started playing in 1990,’ she tells me. She speaks mostly in English but every now and then she has to grope for the correct phrase. From time to time, my friend acts as translator.
‘It was a strange time in Russia. The Soviet time had ended, and a new time had started. But we do not know what this new time is. We do not know what it means.’
She has just graduated with a Master’s degree in Mathematics from Moscow University, but she was not sure that there was any future for her in Russia.
‘Nowadays people can go straight into business,’ she says. And so she and a group of friends decided to wait and see. There were some friends who had started to play bridge, which she took to be a sign of the times. Since the Brezhnev era, bridge had been more or less forbidden in Russia. Certainly, no bridge clubs were allowed. But now things were opening up and – like so many great bridge players before her – she started playing to gain the attention of a friend of a friend. The friend of a friend is now her husband.
Tatiana looks too ordinary to be a world champion. She is a tall woman with straight hair and easy, soft features. She smiles quietly, as I remind her of moments along the way to her victory – as if she needs reminding. Every minute is etched in her memory. But she is not too carried away by her victory.
‘You don’t win tournaments by always bidding the right contract,’ she says. ‘Sometimes you take chances. Sometimes they work.’
The Russians’ final margin of victory in the Olympiad was twelve international match points (IMPs are a mechanism for calculating advantage in duplicate bridge). And they picked up seventeen IMPs on a single hand (known in tournament bridge as a ‘board’) when Tatiana’s partner, Victoria Gromova, made a diffi-cult small slam in hearts.
Other pairings playing with the same cards managed to go at least two down in the same contract and some went down in a contract of 4 . It seems the Americans made a poor play. In a key moment, Tobi Sokolow, one of the game’s great players and a very experienced tournament competitor, failed to ‘give count’ for her trump holding; as a result, her partner did not lead a club, which Sokolow would have been able to trump and so to defeat the contract. The Russians made 6 , worth 1,430 points. In duplicate bridge, each team has two pairs, playing in separate rooms. In one room, Team A sits ‘North-South’. In the other room. Team B sits in that position. That way, players from each team play with exactly the same cards. The question is not what you ‘make’, but whether what you make – or what you prevent your opponents from making – scores better than what your opponents make with the same cards. In Istanbul, the Americans in the other room played in the same contract, but went two down, which was worth another 200 points to the Russians. Altogether a difference of 1,630 points, or seventeen IMPs – more than the final margin of victory. On such decisions are championships won and lost.
I was in Istanbul for the Olympiad and watched the final between Russia and America on the vugraph (a projection system whereby the play is relayed on to a screen for a large audience) in the main theatre at the conference centre where the tournament took place. The audience’s sympathy was almost universally with the underdogs – bridge is that kind of game – and in this case the underdogs were the Russians. The final took place over two days. Going into the final session, the Russians held a lead of thirty-five IMPs. But the Americans started strongly. In the first five boards, they gained a total of twenty-three IMPs. The margin was down to only twelve IMPs when board twenty-two came up on the vugraph. The audience watched as the play began. Would the Russians bid the slam? Would they make it? In the other room, Randi Montin of the USA bid to a small slam, but made only ten tricks. The audience knew this hand could secure victory for the Russians. The experts didn’t think it could be made. ‘With a club lead, I don’t think there is a chance,’ said Michael Rosenberg, who was commentating on vugraph at the time. In the open final being played, Norberto Bocchi, one of the Italian world champions, went down in 4 with the same cards. A club was duly led and these were the cards:
Vulnerable in Hearts Page 16