Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country (10 page)

At dinner that night, Nan quietly asked me what I’d been doing previously in the pool. Laughter erupted, causing food to shoot out of several mouths. It was almost as if my earlier behaviour had been silly.

It’s not easy being a genuine innovator.

***

‘How’d it go?’ asked Ken, the following morning, as I chatted to him whilst he tinkered with his tractor.

‘Not that well,’ I replied, with a measure of understatement. ‘The pool definitely needs to be on the flat.’

‘Does it?’

‘Yes, it very quickly emptied itself completely.’

‘Haven’t you got a flatter bit of ground at the bottom of the garden?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, shall we have a go at trying it there then?’

I was impressed. Ken seemed even keener than I was to see the experiment with the Hawks Harness carried out successfully, quite possibly because he hadn’t suffered the previous day’s humiliation.

‘I’ll pop over in the afternoon and give you a hand.’

My neighbour, like me, had the pioneering spirit.

Fran’s ten-year-old brother Oli helped with the preparation of the land. I believed him still to be a Harness sceptic, but levelling ground was obviously more fun than preparing food, and this was the only other activity that was on offer to him. This odd mix of workers soon had a circle of land close to our rear fence ready for the second attempt with the pool. After a couple of hours’ hard labour, we sat back and watched as the pool filled with water again. Ken reiterated his confidence that the harness would work, but made a suggestion for an improvement.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘If you add a chest expander – you know, like body builders use – between the rope and the harness, that will provide a bit of give and stop you being pulled backwards too sharply, after you take a strong stroke that pulls you forward.’

‘I’ve got one in a box I haven’t unpacked yet,’ I replied.

‘Shall we try it?’

‘What have we got to lose?’ I asked.

A beat.

‘A chest expander,’ said Ken.

‘And my pride,’ I added.

Ken then popped back home for tea, on the understanding that I would fetch him for the successful unveiling of the Hawks Harness once the pool was fully filled.

That fine summer evening saw six adults (Ken had brought his wife Lin) and two children gathered by a low-grade, bottom-of-the-range, above-ground, inflatable swimming pool. Two of the onlookers were excited. The rest were ready for a good old belly laugh. With Ken’s assistance, I tied the weightlifting belt around my waist, and reached down for the chest expander and began to attach it. Big laughs. Mocking noises of derision. Stolid, resilient, unflappable Ken – a picture of concentration like a top golfer’s caddy – fetched the rope from the tall post that he’d attached earlier to the back fence. He had done this so that the rope could be angled down from a sufficient height for my legs not to become entangled in it, as I swam. To the others, this attention to detail was reason for yet more juvenile giggling, but I wasn’t allowing this atmosphere of jovial cynicism to dent my spirits. This would only serve to make the moment more precious, when the Hawks Harness did what it said on the (not-yet-available) label.

For the second time in twenty-four hours, I clambered into the pool. Behind me, a chest expander dangled and a rope trailed. The frivolous audience applauded mockingly in feigned deference to a special moment. I raised my hand.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming here today to see the first experiment with the Hawks Harness.’

‘Second experiment!’ called Fran’s dad. ‘What about yesterday?’

‘OK, second experiment,’ I conceded, ‘but the first one in a pool that isn’t rapidly emptying itself.’

Renewed applause.

‘I shall now lower myself into the water,’ I said proudly, lowering my swimming goggles to cover my eyes, ‘and we shall see if the Hawks Harness is the success that Ken and I think it will be, or the hopeless failure that the rest of you are wishing for.’

Laughs and more applause.

I let myself fold down into the shallow pool and I felt the chill of the water prick my skin. The initial signs were good. My arms seemed to have enough water beneath them to affect a swimming stroke. There was no point in delaying, so I stretched out my feet behind me and set off, launching into my best crawl. To my amazement (I hadn’t been as confident as I’d been making out), one stroke followed another in the same way as normal. I kicked with my feet and pulled with my arms and yet I was being held in the same position. There was no jolting, no discomfort. I swam for a full minute. Each time my head turned to breathe, my goggles framed the stunned faces of the surrounding witnesses. I experienced a totally new feeling. Elation whilst submerged in water. For a second, I knew the joy of the Channel swimmer and the Olympic gold medallist. No point in smiling into water, but that’s what I felt like doing.

After enough time had passed for there to be no doubt that the Hawks Harness had enabled me to swim on the spot effectively and normally, I ceased swimming, drew in my knees, lowered my feet and let myself rise triumphantly from the water, like Britannia from the waves.

‘Yes!’ I shouted euphorically. ‘It works!’

‘What does?’ said Nan, who had presumably, not for a single moment, had any idea what it was that she’d just been witnessing.

‘Oh, no!’ said Fran. ‘It works. This means he’ll be trying to get me to do it.’

Oli jumped into the pool, eager to go next. Fran’s dad took photos. I looked at Ken, who was smiling, arm proudly around his wife.

Triumph.

We were inventors, not piano removers.

5

Mister Chairman

When you move to an entirely new area, where you know nobody at all, you need to be a little proactive in order to move your social circle beyond your immediate neighbours. One method I have always used over the years is to join the local tennis club. OK, you’re not going to meet the crowd from the wrong side of the tracks, but you’ll soon know, whether you want to or not, the doctors, solicitors and architects in the area. And one eccentric. And one bossy committee member who will tell you off for wearing training shoes with the wrong kind of soles. These are the rules.

Despite our distinctly rural location, our neighbouring village had a tennis club with three courts, two of which had floodlights. (Don’t let the floodlights give you the wrong impression – the clubhouse was a hut with no changing rooms or toilet facilities.) I found the name of the club coach in the local monthly parish magazine, rang her, arranged a hit, and when she saw that I hit a half-decent ball, I soon had the men’s team captain on the phone.

‘Would you consider playing for the men’s team?’ he asked.

I hesitated . . .

***

There was good reason for my hesitation. When I’d first moved to London a quarter of a century earlier, I had pretty much followed the same procedure outlined above, and I’d agreed to play for the Globe Lawn Tennis Club men’s team in Belsize Park. Soon I became involved in a seemingly never-ending string of rather tedious matches, all of which appeared to be ‘vitally important’ in the eyes of our captain – who clearly didn’t have enough going on in his life.

After several years of this, I reached breaking point one day and decided to retire. The occasion was a damp evening when I was sitting in my hundredth wooden clubhouse, eating disappointing cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and drinking stewed tea, desperately trying to make conversation with a group of men with whom I’d spent the past three hours hacking bald tennis balls around drab hard courts wedged between middle-class suburban houses, and with whom the only common ground was a willingness to subject ourselves to this social torture. For the hundredth time, I’d been asked how our team were doing this season, and for the hundredth time I’d replied that I wasn’t even sure what division our team were in.

I don’t know why I’d never bothered to find out – perhaps I was concerned that to do so would exhibit a dangerous level of commitment that could be spotted by my team-mates. The remotest display of enthusiasm could be reported to other team captains in the club who were always on the lookout for players in the many available leagues. The summer mixed-doubles league. The winter men’s. The summer men’s. The winter mixed. And let’s not forget the cup matches too. The summer men’s cup. The winter mixed cup. The winter men’s cup. The mixed summer cup.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, it was pointed out to me one day by some team captain or another that I was allowed to drop down and play one match per season in the second team too. This generated a new batch of fixtures that required fabricated excuses in order for me to avoid more monotonous tennis and, worse still, the agonising post-match teas with their excruciating tête-à-têtes about missed volleys and banter about our prospective relegation from this division, the identity of which had never been known to me in the first place.

Finally I’d cracked. No more weakness.

NO MORE MATCHES.

A friend asked me why I’d packed it up.

‘Because I don’t think I ever really enjoyed it.’

‘And it took you all these years to work that out?’

‘I guess so.’

I was a slow learner. But most of all, I was crap at saying no. Periodically, I am asked to give a talk quite some distance from home, at an inappropriate venue to an undesirable audience, with little or no money on offer. I still struggle with the ‘N’ word until a conversation with Fran brings me to my senses.

‘But didn’t you
pay
to play in those matches?’ my friend asked.

‘Err. Yes.’

It was true, and it simply compounded the madness of it all. The protocol was that you had to give the team captain a match fee. This was to cover the cost of the balls, and the post-match refreshments. We were, to all intents and purposes, the
opposite
of professional tennis players. Instead of being remunerated, we had to pay for the privilege of representing our club. And there were no bonuses for winning either. Not even an extra cupcake.

So that’s why I hesitated when the men’s team captain called.

He assumed that I hadn’t heard the question properly.

‘Would you consider playing for the men’s team?’ he repeated.

‘Err . . . Um . . .’

‘It’s an important game. We need to avoid relegation.’

‘Err . . . OK. Yes.’

What did I
mean
– ‘yes’? What was I
thinking
about? The answer was no. An unequivocal ‘no’.

‘Why didn’t you just say “no”?’ said Fran, over dinner that night.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied, ‘perhaps things are different now. The last time I played in a match was years and years ago. Things must have changed.’

***

I found myself sitting in a wooden clubhouse with seven other middle-aged rural tennis players, tucking into crisps, supermarket quiche, and cheese-and-pickle sandwiches. Laborious conversation stuttered and faltered. The man to my right, the opposing team captain, congratulated me on our narrow victory and asked me how we’d done so far this season. I replied that I didn’t know what division we were in.

Forty-five minutes later, I was handing our captain the five pounds match fee.

‘You will play again next week, Tony?’

‘Err . . . it’s just that—’

‘It’s an important match versus the division table toppers.’

‘Umm, I, er—’

‘We need you.’

‘Oh. Right. OK. Same time, same place?’

‘No, next week we’re away. It’s quite a long drive, so can you meet us here an hour earlier?’

‘OK.’

I played five more matches for the team, before it became more agonising to answer Fran’s questions about why I kept agreeing to play, than it was to explain to the captain that I’d had enough. I broke the news to the team captain, which he took with a surprising, and ever so slightly disappointing,
bonhomie
.

My unsatisfactory, unheralded, and spectacularly unprofessional competitive tennis career had come to an end. Three words best described the feeling.