|
Everyone who plays tennis to any standard has someone who started them off. It can be a parent, a coach, or maybe a teacher at school. Tennis is such a great game, and this is such a great gift for one person to give to another. You do get the feeling that had the game of tennis been invented at the time of “Star Wars,” then Alec Guiness might well have been handing Luke Skywalker a tennis racquet and initiating him into the mechanics of a topspin forehand, rather than “The Force”. Maybe this would be a good goal for 2005. If you are a coach, to spend a little more time with that group of nine year olds who are just deciding whether tennis is for them. If you are a teacher, to give up a lunchtime or two to organise a school tennis club. If you are a tennis committee member, to do all you can to give juniors as much court-time as possible. And then you can become one of those extra special human beings - the people who help to pass on the gift of tennis to the next generation.
But you don’t even have to be a committee member or a parent to be such a special person. My own “Obi-Wan Kenobi” was a lady called Miss Roud, our next-door neighbour who first offered me a trip to her tennis club when I was ten years old. Miss Roud was a retired schoolteacher who seemed very ancient and owned a sky blue Morris Minor. She was impervious to the cold and enjoyed driving with the hood rolled down. We used to pray for rain on the journey home so that she'd put the hood up. But not on the way out to the club. In those days no-one played tennis if it was raining. When it rained we had to sit in the clubhouse and listen to the grown-ups talking.
The club was called Lyndhurst in Hampshire and we would get there using a circuitous route Miss Roud called the pretty way which managed to avoid most of the traffic and took close to an hour. Much of this time was spent narrowly avoiding ponies in the New Forest. On the return journey she would take our lives in her hands and risk the towns and roundabouts to get us home in thirty minutes.
I can still remember those journeys.The car seemed to have three speeds - slow, slower and stationary. Miss Roud always left a space the size of a football pitch between us and the car in front. She called this her safety gap. Every time someone overtook she would brake sharply to get her safety gap back.
Sometimes she would take us all - my mother, my two older brothers and myself - crammed horribly into the Morris Minor like wriggling sardines. I mostly ended up in the middle of the back seat, surrounded by my brothers who would poke me in the ribs at the least encouragement. But this was still preferable to sitting in the passenger seat next to Miss Roud, as even at twenty miles an hour, a journey spent in the passenger seat was a frightening experience. It had all the heart-stopping drama of a Death Ride at a modern amusement park - a leisurely-paced Death Ride it must be said, but still not one for the faint-hearted. Mostly we left our Mum perched up there (driving in the middle of Summer, the sun blazing down, “Are you cold, Mrs Tarran, your hands are shaking?”), and this seemed the sensible solution.
Miss Roud also had some great ideas about children. "Children just love to do things for me. They enjoy it." So we'd have to carry her racquet and wind up the net, and climb through the back fence in pursuit of her misdirected lobs. And listen to what a thrill it all was.
Once, my family having stayed at home, she challenged me to a game of singles. Miss Roud was a doyen of the old school where ladies only served underarm. What made this unfair was her refusal to let me reciprocate.
I'd hit a double fault. "Can I serve underarm, Miss Roud?"
"You may not."
"I'd hit another one. "Please can I serve underarm?"
"If you serve underarm you will never learn to serve properly."
"But you serve underarm, Miss Roud."
"I am a lady. In my day all ladies served underarm. You are not a lady."
Another double fault. "Please Miss Roud."
"You may not."
She was a hard woman.
I remember that she beat me 6-2 and I was furious, losing to an old lady who couldn't serve. Actually though her serves were pretty mean. They had a vicious sidespin which was impossible to master. It was only much later, in her seventies, that they began to lose their bite. She even started double-faulting. This was when I should have challenged her to a rematch.
Mostly we were pretty horrible to Miss Roud. She was old and perhaps a little lonely, and I never showed her enough kindness. Both of us had moved away by the time she died - me to London, she to live in an old people's home. She left me nearly a thousand pounds in her will, the cheque by odd coincidence arriving by post on my twenty-first birthday. But the real gift had come much earlier - taking us the pretty way to Lyndhurst tennis club, to play tennis with the old ladies.
|
