‘Then your sisters will take you.’
‘No!’ I said.
‘Ah, Ma, no!’ they said together.
They no more wanted to be seen with me in my tracksuit than I wanted to be seen with them in their ballooning net petticoats and ankle socks and Olive Oyle high heels.
So there was nothing else for it. My mother and the Violets accompanied me on the train from Bowker Vale and waited for me in the card room at the Akiva. It’s an ill wind. There was a dance on in the card room that night and it was here that my aunty Dolly, the oldest of the Violets — though she had come out in nothing more alluring under her maroon overcoat than
a yellow cardigan with a button missing, and the S for Spinster throbbing on her chest — met the man who would one day take her out of herself, make her heart dance, and then break it. Gershom Finkel.
I went all phlegmy seeing Twink and Aishky again. I coughed, blaming the fog, but it was puppy love that was guggling up at the back of my throat. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed them. They hadn’t turned up for practice after the jam and marmalade fiasco. Aishky had had to lie down all week, and Twink had blown his life savings on a trip to London to hear Giuseppe di Stefano sing Rudolfo at Covent Garden. Di Stefano was his favourite living lyric tenor. Aishky thought Mario Lanza but Twink laughed in his face. That shreier! Not counting those who had long jossed it like Caruso, and those who had recently jossed it like Gigli (though he’d always been too much of a crooner for Twink’s taste), it went di Stefano one, Björling two, Ferruccio Tagliavini three …
Over Del Monaco?
… Tagliavini three, Mario Del Monaco four, Richard Tucker five …
And then Mario Lanza?
Twink snorted. Mario Lanza, Aishk, didn’t make it into the top twenty.
Sheeny Waxman wanted to put in a vote for Bill Haley.
‘Do me a favour,’ Twink said.
I tried a joke myself. ‘Where would you rate Victor Barna?’
Twink looked nonplussed. ‘As a table tennis player … ? You’re moodying me.’ Then he got it. ‘Dependable, but not up there with the very best of them. He can be a bit flat for me. But definitely above Lanza.’
He was in high spirits, limber, laundered, up there with the best of them himself, ready to take on anybody. Opera lifted him, warmed him through, cleared his asthma, put arias in his hair. He’d unearthed some rare and precious 78s of John McCormack
while he was in the Smoke, including Act I of Boito’s
Mefistofele
and the exquisite and almost impossible to find ‘Pur Dicesti’ by Antonio Lotti, both in mint condition. It was Twink’s ambition to own the biggest collection of recordings of lyric tenors in the country. Already it was second to none in Prestwich. ‘I’ve got stuff even the BBC don’t know where to lay their hands on,’ he told me. ‘They ring
me.
How do you like that?’ So he was well on his way.
I noticed that his bat looked as laundered as he did. The pimples sat up unusually flexuous and nipply. ‘Have you shampooed your bat?’ I asked.
‘Listen to the kid! Have I shampooed my bat? Shmerel! I bought new rubbers from Lillywhites. Fatter pimples. I decided to change my game while I was away.’
He was magnificent that night. Going on a hunch, Aishky put him in at number one, which was strictly Sheeny’s spot according to recent form, to say nothing of its being what Aishky had promised me when he’d signed me up. But Twink didn’t let him down. He hit like di Stefano. Full of chest, but sweet. No screamers, just winner after winner stroked sweetly off a thrumming blade, lovely smooth high bouncing legatos, picked up early and pitched perfectly on the line.
His form affected the rest of us. Aishky found the rhythm that had deserted him the week before. He could do no wrong. Even when he was manoeuvred out of position and was forced to try his infamous behind-the-back retrieval — a shot Twink was forever begging him to forgo, because it looked smart-arsed and would upset the goyim — he pulled off an unbelievably acute angled return that left his opponent open-mouthed, with his hands on his hips. ‘The ball’s stuck to my bat,’ he whispered to me, beaming, as he changed ends. ‘It’s on elastic’
Selwyn Marks won handsomely, by his standards, as well. Striking his thigh and sometimes even his head with his bat, and berating himself as always — ‘Make your mind up, play the
shot you mean to play, what’s the point of starting to hit if you don’t hit, come on, watch the ball, come ON, COME ON!’ -but actually playing shots tonight, actually trying to get the ball past his opponent instead of just keeping it in play and hoping.
‘Geh, Selwyn!’ Sheeny Waxman called out after a couple of exaggeratedly effective forehand smashes, whereupon a circle of pink appeared in each of Selwyn’s cheeks and he smashed the next five forehands into the net.
‘No,’ he yelled to himself. ‘NO!’ And netted two more.
‘Steady, Selwyn,’ Sheeny called. ‘Take it a point at a time.’ And the crisis was over. Having thrown away a 19—12 lead to end up on 19 all he reverted to what he did best and pushed his way to a 21—19 win. ‘Better,’ he said to himself even as he was shaking hands. ‘BETTER!’
Sheeny, ticking and flicking, won easily. That goes without saying. He should have been playing in a higher division. But that would have meant practising a couple of nights a week, keeping himself in shape. And Sheeny was otherwise engaged. He had an air of wasted brilliance about him. Could do better, they’d written on his school reports. Does himself no justice. Performs below his potential. He carried that one around in his wallet and showed it to the girls he chatted up in the Kardomah. ‘I wouldn’t mind performing below your potential, darling.’ Be careful not to underestimate me — that was the challenge he threw out. I’m not the low-life you take me to be. Not
only
the low-life you take me to be. I have a say in the matter.
And I? How was I on my first ever home appearance?
I beggared belief. Need I say more? I made a pauper of credulity.
Whatever embellishments Aishky went on adding to the famous story of how I’d turned up at the Akiva carrying a bat as big as the Empire State Building and zetzed my way into club legend, I was never an out-and-out come-what-may hitter. My game was built around control and demoralization. I loved
ping-pong most when I felt the fight go out of my opponent. You can hear it sometimes. Hear their self-belief crack, hear their heart break. Like a twig snapping in a moon-frozen forest. The fight goes out of players differently. Some give up in a fit of irritation as soon as you’ve bamboozled them with a couple of spin serves. Others decide you hit too fiercely for them and settle for admiring what you can do. ‘Shot, son. Too good.’ Or they sense the night’s luck is running your way and can’t be bothered to resist it. But nothing hollows out a player more than when you soak up everything he’s got. Think Ali on the ropes against George Foreman. You stand back and let them do their worst, take the lot — go on, hit harder, harder, go on, is that it, is that all you’ve got? — and then kapow! All very well releasing my backhand and thinking I was Victor Barna. I did that only once the ball sat up, begging for it to be over, a superiority I’d achieved at a distance of ten or twenty feet from the table, chopping deep and low in the manner of Richard Bergmann, the little Austrian defender who stood so far back he was almost in the next room, and who had become World Champion at the age of seventeen.
Had he been a bit taller, and looked a little bit less like some of my cousins on my mother’s side, Bergmann would have been my hero. As it was, I’d gone to the trouble of learning many of his reflections on ping-pong off by heart. Such as, ‘You should at all times be able to vary your style of play and go back to defending of your OWN ACCORD.’ In other words, defence wasn’t a recourse, forced on you by the will of your opponent. It was your choice (like Sheeny’s to become a low-life), made in your own time and in reference to no one but yourself. Was that true of Ali, holding on and covering up for so long in that Zaire night? Maybe not. Maybe he defended of Foreman’s accord. In which case little Richard’s will was more fearsome than big Ali’s.
Something else Bergmann said which I’d committed to memory: ‘Practise until you have a feeling of absolute safety, that certain “I
can’t miss” feeling.’ He was talking about the backhand defensive chop. Of all table tennis strokes, this is the one it’s easiest to have that ‘I can’t miss feeling’ about. If you don’t have an absolutely safe backhand chop you might as well forget ping-pong as a career. That was true of the game as it was played in my time, anyway. Now — but in every way now’s different.
Precisely because it does (or should) come naturally, precisely because it’s an intimate, easily camouflaged stroke played without discernible risk close to your body, you can’t demoralize an opponent with a backhand chop alone. To break a spirit comprehensively you need to be able to chop with your forehand. Of all table tennis strokes the forehand chop is the loveliest — speaking classically now, speaking of grace and elegance, speaking of music and poetry — and the most deadly. To execute a forehand chop you must leave the sanctuary of your body, go out on a limb, risk your reach and your balance, expose yourself. Get a forehand chop wrong and everyone can see it. Ditto get a forehand chop right. Not just see it either; execute the forehand chop to perfection, take the ball into custody on your forehand, cradle it, coddle it, suspend its trajectory for a millionth of a second, caress it, make it yours, put your name on it, and your opponent will shudder like a patient on an anaesthetist’s table, feeling fingers pulling at his heart. You shudder yourself at that moment of suspension and possession, as though futurity, with its adoring millions, has paused to lay flowers on your grave. Yes, it is the loveliest and the most arrogant of all ping-pong strokes because it infinitesimally arrests the game and controverts its logic. In this way it is crucially different from a counter-hit, however unexpected, for a counter-hit merely answers like with like, whereas the forehand chop refuses your opponent’s entire vocabulary. It is insouciant. Egotistical. Imperious. Soul destroying.
And I played it as though I’d invented it. ‘You must be able to execute this stroke in your sleep, on the roof of a burning house, in a blizzard and on the high seas with a north-west gale
blowing,’ Bergmann said. I went one better: I executed it in the face of Gershom Finkel’s sneering.
He missed the first game of my first match. I count that as significant. It meant that I was able to get my chop going, free of the evil influence of his detraction. He wandered round the club on match nights, unable to watch, unable not to watch, unable to stay in the room, unable to leave it, as though an invisible devil with a pitchfork were goading him from one hellish circle to the next. Who knows, had we compared sightings we might have discovered that he was in the ping-pong room at the same time he was in the billiard room, and in the billiard room at the same time he was in the card room, that even as he was sneering at me he was dancing — still in his buttoned-up navy coat, still laughing mirthlessly to himself — with my aunty Dolly.
He turned up — some bodily form of him turned up — just as I was completing victory number one. He ducked in, between points, like a bailiff, stood at the far end of the room where I couldn’t fail to see him, and clapped ironically, dead knuckles on a dead palm, when the match was over. You can always tell when someone from your own side would much rather you had lost. Though it might be stretching language a bit to say that Gershom Finkel was on our side. He wandered off again for Twink’s and Aishky’s second matches. Went dancing, presumably. Put his dead hand between my poor aunty Dolly’s quaking shoulder-blades. How did he know when to come back? Who told him that I was about to go on again?
‘I’ll umpire this one if you like,’ he said, testing the net for height, and twanging it for tautness, before sitting down.
No one likes umpiring. No one undertakes the job willingly. Least of all, my team-mates told me later, Gershom Finkel. ‘The mamzer’s never umpired a game in his life,’ Sheeny reckoned.
‘Once,’ Louis Marks corrected him. ‘Three years ago, when Johnny Leach came to play an exhibition match in the club. He called him for foul-serving as well.’
As well.
The phrase tells its own story. ‘When you’re ready, gentlemen … Away call. No, it’s tails. Walzer to serve. Love all. Foul serve, love—one.’ That was about the way it went. I exaggerate only slightly. To be fair to Gershom — though I can’t think of any good reason to be fair to Gershom — he cautioned me about my serve before calling it. Cautioned me once, called me twice, and then, to rub salt in, rose from his chair, stood behind me, breathed into my neck, and showed me what I was doing wrong. My serving palm was not flat, there was the problem. ‘In the delivery of the service,’ the rules stated, ‘the free hand of any two-handed player shall be open and flat, with the fingers straight and together, thumb free and the ball resting on the palm without being cupped or pinched in any way by the fingers.’
Make a rule and you’ll always find a life-hating pedant who will interpret it ungenerously. Later emendations of the rules — having just such an umpire as Gershom Finkel in mind — removed the emphasis from ‘the precise degree of flatness of the server’s free hand’. What’s so special about flatness, when all is said and done? Illegal spin, that was what the no cupped-palm rule existed to prevent. Sol Schiff’s legacy. Diabolically concealed finger-spin. The thing that had once dashed Gershom’s own hopes. But just because the four fingers of my free hand were not lying dead straight and together, like the corpses of four little Victorian pauper babies, it didn’t mean I was doing a Sol Schiff.
This could have been the end of me. Mortification in front of friends; mortification in front of strangers; my confidence shot down just as it was taking flight; and a palpable ineptitude demonstrated in the area where I was most sensitive — in the matter of what I did with my free hand. I thought I would burn up. There is nowhere to hide on a ping-pong table. I have said that about a bus, but compared to a ping-pong table a bus is a haven of hideaways. I lost control of my mouth which began to skid horribly across my face. I was within a whisker of throwing my bat down, covering my shame, and running out of the Akiva
for ever. So what stopped me? Not my own presence of mind, that’s for sure. I was a shell-skulker, a lavatory-stewer, a secret cutter-up of aunties and grandmas — I
had
no presence of mind. What saved me was the generosity of my opponent. Dave. They were all Dave or Derek, the Post Office team. Derek Lockwood, Dave Clayton, Derek Hargreaves. This one was Dave Hancocks. I was lucky in him. He let Gershom’s first decision go. Took the point. Not gladly. But took it. You don’t look a gift-horse. But after the second call he deliberately hit his next return off the table and subsequently dribbled his own service into the net. Thereafter, whenever Gershom fouled me, Dave Hancocks threw away the next point.