The Tennis Player from Bermuda (10 page)

The invitation also solved an unspoken but real problem in the Hodgkin household, which was that at some point I would have to make an appearance at the London season. Both Mother and English Grandmother had done so.

I was about to turn 19, and our English relatives would expect that this year, or next, or at the latest when I was 21, I would spend the season in London, going to parties and perhaps finding a husband from a good English family. Back in the 1930s, American Grandmother had taken Mother to the season; that must have been an interesting cultural clash. But I couldn’t go to the season alone. That was Not Done, and it was always difficult for Mother and Father to close their clinics and leave for England on holiday.

I finally was able to ring our home in Paget, and Father answered. When he heard me on the line, he said, “I told your mother that you were far too busy with your studies to run off to London for the month of June.” And we both laughed.

When Mother came on, she seemed most concerned about my clothes, which surprised me. Mother normally cared little about clothes, and, in any event, I had plenty of nice things. But she said, “Fiona, you have no idea about the season.” And she was right about that. So Mother wrote Lady Thakeham, thanked her for the kind invitation, and said I was pleased to accept.

And that was that.

Smith for me that spring was a blur of chemistry labs, calculus, and tennis. I received a letter from Mark, which pleased me a great deal. It was just a page and a half of scribbled comments about his clinical work in medical school, but just after his signature, he added a postscript: “Heard that my mother has invited you to stay with us in June; what a coincidence given that you and I just met in Bermuda a few weeks ago; hope you can accept.”

M
AY
1962
E
XHIBITION
M
ATCH WITH
C
LAIRE
K
ERSHAW
L
ONGWOOD
C
RICKET
C
LUB
C
HESTNUT
H
ILL
, M
ASSACHUSETTS

By the end of April, I was ranked number one in singles tennis among girl college students in New England. My ranking led to an invitation for me to play early in May in a ladies’ tournament one weekend at the Longwood Cricket Club, on grass. Longwood was in Chestnut Hill near Boston. I arranged to stay with my cousins in Boston for that weekend, and late Friday after my classes, I took a Greyhound coach to Boston. There would be three rounds on Saturday, and then the final would be on Sunday morning.

But there was a surprise: when I arrived at Longwood Saturday morning, I learned that, on Sunday afternoon, the winner would play an exhibition match against Claire Kershaw. I recognized that name instantly. Kershaw had won the singles championship at Wimbledon in 1960 and 1961. I had seen her only in newspaper photographs. She had been 25 and recently married when she won Wimbledon her first time. Now Kershaw must be close to 27.

At the end of 1961, Lance Tingay, the tennis correspondent of London’s
Daily Telegraph
newspaper, had ranked Kershaw the number one woman player in his World Rankings. Before the objective, computerized rankings began in 1973, Tingay’s World Rankings in the
Daily Telegraph
were considered authoritative.

I asked the referee what Mrs Kershaw was doing here, and he told me that she was on a tour of America before defending her championship at Wimbledon.

When I was handed the draw, I saw that I knew most of the players. I had beaten all the ones I knew, and I had been seeded number one. With luck, tomorrow afternoon I would play the defending Wimbledon champion. My knees went weak as I thought about it. I didn’t lose a set on Saturday; I can’t recall how many games I lost but not many.

When I went home to my cousins late that afternoon, I was trembling. I could barely talk. All I could think about was playing Kershaw.

‘Please don’t let it rain on Sunday afternoon,’ I thought. I wolfed down dinner and went straight to bed, where I tried to force myself to sleep.

Sunday morning in the final, I played an older woman I didn’t know. She was a good club player but not at all a threat. I tried to keep it interesting for the spectators, but mainly I wanted to keep myself as fresh as possible to play Kershaw. After winning the final, I went to the showers and turned on the hot water. I was always amazed by the amount of water, and especially hot water, that was taken for granted in the States. In Bermuda, we had only rainwater, and we heated little of it.

There was a buffet lunch in the Longwood clubhouse before the exhibition match with a crowd of people, all there to watch Kershaw play. I got myself a salad and sat down at table with the tournament referee; I knew no one else. The players I knew had lost the day before and gone home.

A young woman sat down with us. Her hair was so blond it was almost silver; she kept it brushed back and held in place with a simple barrette. Her face was lovely, with large, pale blue eyes, and an impish grin. Her elegant white tennis dress had a matchbox skirt, with narrow, light blue ruffles on the seams. On the hem was embroidered in tiny blue script, ‘Teddy Tinling.’

She wore a thin, plain gold wedding band but no other jewelry, not even earrings, and, unusual for that time, no makeup. Well, perhaps there was a trace of cream on her cheeks to ward off the sun. But nothing else.

She wasn’t a large woman, but when she made even a simple movement – reaching for the pepper shaker, for example – it was impossible to miss the muscular power behind her limbs. Still, she was quite feminine.

The way she chatted with the referee was so friendly and outgoing that she might have been mistaken for an American, except that her upper class English accent gave her away. This, it dawned on me, was Claire Kershaw, and the idea that I was sitting at the same table with someone who had won Wimbledon – twice – was just incredible to me.

The referee turned to me. “Well, here’s your opponent this afternoon!”

Kershaw stood up and reached out her hand. “I’m Claire.”

I shook her hand. “I’m Fiona Hodgkin.”

Claire burst into a smile. “I thought it might be you when I saw you just now! Fiona, I’ve heard so much about you!”

How could a Wimbledon champion possibly have heard of me? I was bewildered. But then a group of ladies descended on Claire for autographs and photographs, and I didn’t have the chance to talk to her again before our match. In those days, tennis outfits for ladies in the States (and Bermuda, for that matter) were usually shapeless dresses, or blouses with pleated skirts that, unfortunately, tended to emphasize the hips. Claire’s carefully tailored dress with its blue ruffles was a sensation at Longwood that afternoon.

Once we were on the court, Claire casually tossed her racket onto the grass. I called it smooth and won the serve. Once we began playing, it was obvious to me that, as they say in the States, I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Claire played effortlessly, with complete grace, and her style was perfectly balanced between the baseline and the net.

She put huge topspin on the ball with each groundstroke, and the ball would sail a meter over the net before dropping like a rock. I practically had to scrape her shots off the grass. She was patient, consistent, and happy for each point to go on until, at last, she would hit a winner.

And she was casual. She chatted with the spectators on the changeovers. Claire knew how to warm up the crowd and charm everyone. She wanted to entertain the spectators; that was the whole point of this match. Claire wasn’t even taking it seriously. I was there only as a foil, so she could delight the crowd, which infuriated me. I was not about to roll over for this show.

Today, I know the custom that often governs exhibition matches, which is that they don’t go to three sets. The matches aren’t fixed. It’s just that the player who wins the first set usually then, by convention, wins the second set, so that both players can catch the late afternoon flight out of wherever the exhibition is played. And the second set often features trick shots to amaze the crowd. At the time, no one had explained any of this to me – and it might not have made any difference even if someone had.

I lost the first set 6-4, because I made two stupid errors when I was serving in the seventh game with the games even at three apiece. Claire took advantage of these errors to break me and then take the set. I decided I wasn’t going to let that happen again.

Early in the second set, on Claire’s serve, I took up my usual spot a meter from the net. Claire hit a beautiful passing shot down my ad court line. I lunged for it, caught it with my backhand, punched it back crosscourt to her ad court corner, and drifted toward the centerline. Claire reached my shot and hit a topspin forehand that made the ball drop over the net right at my feet. I half-volleyed it back; I was so low to the grass that I found myself looking
up
at the net cord. Claire sent up a deep lob. I ran back, with no time to set up, jumped, and smashed the ball. It wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done. Claire got only the rim of her racket on the ball, and it ricocheted into the crowd.

This put me ahead in the score, 30-15, and I went on to break Claire’s serve.

At the next changeover, she wasn’t chatting with the spectators. This was all business now. Claire had no intention of going three sets in an exhibition match with an unknown teenager from nowhere. But that’s what happened. She couldn’t get the break back, and I took the second set.

In the third set, I came to the net on almost every point and punched volleys into the corners of Claire’s court. But, on my serve, I hit a forehand volley that went wide, and she went ahead in the game. That was all she needed; if you gave her the slightest opening, she would make the most of it. She won the third set 8-6, and so the match, but only by making an enormous effort.

The crowd was sophisticated enough to know this wasn’t the match they were supposed to see, and this was confirmed at the net when Claire shook my hand but then put her arms around me and hugged me over the net. Claire was emotional; she whispered straight into my ear, “You’re everything I heard you were.”

A few minutes later in the dressing room, Claire sat down beside me. She hadn’t taken a shower yet; she was toweling the sweat off her arms. She said, “That third set was something. Great for the Longwood members to see a real match.”

“I’m sure you gave me the second set to make it interesting.”

She laughed. “I didn’t give you anything. My plan was to take the second set, sign a few autographs, and head back to my hotel.”

Then Claire said, “Rachel Martin told me about you.”

I was astonished. “Do you know Mrs Martin?”

“Rachel was my coach for four years or so when I was a teenager.”

“That couldn’t be! She and I listened together to the BBC shortwave broadcast of the final last year at Wimbledon when you won. She didn’t say she knew you.”

“We’re certainly talking about the same lady. Only Rachel would not think to mention that.”

“How did Mrs Martin become your coach?”

“She and her husband spent the weekend at my parents’ country house when I was, I guess, 14. Her husband worked in the City for a few years in the ‘40s and early ‘50s. We have an old grass court, and Rachel watched me play with my brother. After we finished, she asked my mother if she could play with me. We played a couple of times that weekend. After that, Rachel arranged with Mother to play with me in London maybe four or five times a week. Sometimes we played on grass at Queen’s. Other times on a covered wood court.”

I felt a chill. This was so much like what had happened after I served for Mrs Martin the first time. I remembered something Mrs Martin had said to me years ago: I was one of only two girls she had seen who could hit the outside edge of the lines exactly, almost every time.

Claire Kershaw must be the other girl.

Claire went on. “I had never been especially keen on tennis, because I disliked all the drills.”

“But Mrs Martin doesn’t use drills.”

“That’s right. No drills. By the time she went home to Bermuda, I was wild for tennis, and then my parents found another coach for me. I didn’t like that coach and dropped him after a couple of months. Never had a coach again. But Rachel and I still play together whenever she’s in London.”

“How did she tell you about me?”

“Rachel and I exchange letters two or three times a year, and last Christmas I mentioned in my note to her that I was going to tour the States in the spring. She wrote back a long letter and asked me to make a point of watching you play, which I planned to do while I’m here. But I didn’t know I would wind up watching you from across the net.”

“What did she say about me?”

“She said that you have a bad case of the serves and volleys. Was she ever right about that!”

Claire laughed but then paused. “Rachel also said that you might win Wimbledon within the next four or five years. After this afternoon, I think she might be right about that as well. Rachel says that what you need is experience in international competition. You need to get out of Bermuda and out of college competition, in other words.”

I was stunned; I couldn’t speak.

“So,” Claire asked. “What are your plans?”

“Both my parents are physicians, and I hope to go to medical school.”

“Good for you! But, actually, I meant more where are you going to play this summer?”

“I don’t have any plans to play this summer. I’m going to be in London for the season. My boyfriend is English, and his family invited me to stay with them in London. Did you ever do the season?” I could tell by her accent that she was from a family that would have made certain she was at the season.

“I did, the same year I made my first appearance at Wimbledon. That was 1956. I met my husband, Richard, at a party that season, although it took us years to get married. Because of my tennis, I didn’t drink at the parties. I’m probably the only person ever to get through the season sober!” She laughed.

“When did you get married?”