The Mighty Walzer (16 page)

My father did what he could with me. Sometimes, to break the calamitous spell of bashfulness I’d cast, he’d leave me in it, leave me to carry out the nest of cardboard suitcases with the rust-loving hinges to the non-existent punter at the back — ‘Sold!’ — leave me to go wandering at the furthest fringes of the edge and return, if I ever found the courage to return, with the cases concealed somewhere about my person. By turning me into the joke, some of the fun of the fair might just come back. I knew what he was up to. I understood the necessity to tease
me. But that didn’t mean I could ever get my face right. I’d give anything, today, to be able to look my father in the eyes and say, ‘Go on, go on, Cheap Johnnie, make a shlemiel of me, let me be your stooge. I can take it, I can take a joke against myself. I have to take a joke against myself, otherwise I am madder than Mad Jack myself’ But it’s too late for that. And anyway, my face would let me down again.

This would never have gone on for long, even if I’d been good at it. There was no question of my being removed from school and turned into a marketman. Education was God. Education would stop us ever having to be beetroot farmers again. Or swagmen. And my father didn’t want me with him all the time, anyway. I cramped his style. The van was starting to turn up at some strange places, just as the bus once had. He was on first-name terms with the women who buttered the fat wedges of toast in every transport café between Manchester and north Wales, north Wales and Worksop, and Worksop back to Manchester again via Sheffield and the Snake Pass. They knew when he was coming and prepared special treats for him, liver and onion fry-ups, cheese and ham pies with double cheese, bread and butter puddings of which they gave him extra portions wrapped in foil to take home to my mother. Ha! Sometimes he’d slip me some loose change so that I could play the pinball machines while he discussed his dietary requirements with them in the kitchens. Sometimes they’d come out from behind the stoves and counters, wipe their hands on their aprons, kiss me and tell me how lucky I was to have such a wonderful father.

Now it was his turn to look bashful.

I was in his way.

Let’s be even-handed about it — we were in each other’s way.

So when he came to hear that Sheeny Waxman had fallen out with Sam Sam the Bedding Man and was looking for a job he jumped at him. Sheeny was reckoned to be one of the best
pitchers in the country. The sizes of the edges he pulled were legendary. London Boys were known to come up just to watch Sheeny work, and to go back whistling through their teeth. His trick was to start sedately, ringing a little dinner bell and engaging individual punters in a confusion of free gifts and part-exchanges, and then turn progressively more demented. In this his natural tics and twitches were of inestimable help to him. As was his fastidious taste in sharp suits, white shirts with detachable collars, and matching ties and handkerchiefs. Short as he was, you could see and hear him from everywhere; whatever else you were doing you dropped, wherever else you were going was suddenly of no account, such an irresistible spectacle was he, frothing and jerking in his downy mohair whistle, one parrot-eye closed, hoarse and golden like an aristocratic dwarf, a scion of some Nordic royal family, gone mad and reduced to knocking out swag on English markets because of centuries of syphilis and in-breeding.

Of course there was no point hiring someone with Sheeny Waxman’s reputation to work the floor, assuming he’d ever have consented to play second fiddle to another pitcher anyway, but my father made it clear he didn’t in the least mind stepping down in order, in his own words, ‘to defer to a master’.

‘
I’m
not ongeblozzen with pride,’ he told me, pointedly. ‘I don’t think I know everything.
I
don’t think I’m too good for everybody.
I
don’t think there’s nobody I can learn from.’

The principle of becoming better and stronger is very simple. If you improve, you become strong. How to make improvement is very, very difficult, however.

Zoltan Berczic (one-time national coach of the
Hungarian Table Tennis team)

MY FATHER’S POINTEDNESS apart, it gave me a queer satisfaction to have Sheeny Waxman working for us. It altered the relations between this and that. It put my separate worlds in harmony and in some way that I couldn’t properly explain made me feel more important and grown up.

Maybe there was nothing to explain; maybe having Sheeny on the family payroll simply flattered me with the illusion that I’d bought a share in his haunts, that I’d put my name down, so to speak, for the Ritz and the Plaza and the Kardomah, especially the Kardomah where hoarse-voiced men in camel coats croaked lewd propositions to women young enough to be their granddaughters.

The Kardomah had its own unofficial prep school. Laps’. Only after you’d submitted yourself to an undefined period of continuous assessment at Laps’ — social audacity alone was the criterion: volubility, brazenness, wideness as we called it — were
you considered up to doing the Kardomah. And even then you may have shot your bolt too soon, in which event it was back to Laps’ for another indeterminate stint. No one I knew could remember when there hadn’t been a chip shop called Lapidus’s on Bury Old Road. It was institutional. Tell your parents you’d been at Laps’ when they caught you creeping up the stairs after midnight and all your sins were remitted. Yes, you could get yourself into deep waters at Laps’, but at least you were swimming between the flags. At Laps’ one of our own, one of unserer, was always there to save us.

Not infrequently, successful graduates of Laps’ — Sheeny Waxman, for one — would drop in to see how we were getting on, leaving the roofs of their cars down and their engines running, acknowledging greetings from juvenile versions of themselves, dispensing advice, alluding briefly to their own apprenticeships, in the manner of great men returning to their old schools on speech days. The closer you were to graduating yourself, the more you recognized these sentimental homecomings for what they were — acts of late-night desperation, the final foray before the lights went out in Manchester and all that remained was the ignominy of an empty bed. Laps’ gave you one more go, there lay the beguilement of the place even for those who thought they had put it behind them; at Laps’ there was always just the possibility of cashing in on someone else’s mishap, or of simply doing a deal. On Saturday nights, especially, the atmosphere of bazaar and barter on the pavement outside Laps’ was so fervid that motorists strange to the area would stop to consult their maps, imagining that they’d taken a wrong turning and driven into the Lebanon. It’s a measure of how miffed Sheeny must have been by Cynthia Cartwright’s refusal to accommodate him on my debut night that he dumped her in the middle of Miles Platting instead of bringing her back to Bury Old Road and exchanging her for someone more amenable at Laps’. Not that there had to be a swap. Sometimes you would simply drop off a non-performer
altruistically, as a kindness to a fellow head jockey. Because it was understood that women were a perverse species, who would with some and wouldn’t with others.

So on top of everything else it was, Lapidus’s chip shop was a hotbed of early feminism, too? You could say that. Certainly anyone listening to Selwyn Marks on the injustices suffered by Ruth Aarons would have been impressed by the humanity and understanding a boy his age was able to show towards a woman he had never met.

We were sitting in the back room of Laps’, sharing a big plate of pickle meat, sweet and sour cucumbers, mustard and chips. Funnily enough, Sheeny Waxman happened to pop his head into the room as we were talking. With Sheeny you always saw his stiff snow-white cuffs, and then his gold shield links engraved with his initials, before you saw him. It was a Kardomah thing; at the Kardomah you led with your cuffs, filled your mouth with phlegm, tugged at the lapels of the coat which you wore loose and empty-sleeved around your shoulders, then made your pitch.

‘So who’s this Ruth Aarons?’ Sheeny wanted to know.

‘No one you’ve shtupped,’ Selwyn said.

Sheeny twitched. Maybe he hadn’t. He’d be surprised, but maybe he hadn’t.

‘Anything here?’ He didn’t expect an answer. What would kids like us know, anyway? After checking the room out for himself, he ratcheted his neck up out of his collar, jerked a handful of our chips into his mouth, and left.

‘Big shot,’ Selwyn said.

‘I like him,’ I said. I didn’t go on to say, ‘And my father slips him his pay-packet.’

So who was this Ruth Aarons?

‘Who won the Women’s World Table Tennis Championships in 1935/6?’ Selwyn asked me.

‘Ruth Aarons?’ I hazarded.

‘Correct. And in 1936/7?’

I hesitated. I could feel a trick question coming on. ‘Not Ruth Aarons?’

‘Ha!’ Selwyn banged the table, causing Lotte to look up from behind the fryer. Any trouble in the back room at Laps’ and Lotte had you out. Selwyn, who was already flushed with indignation on behalf of Ruth Aarons, flushed further under Lotte’s stare.
‘Not
Ruth Aarons is a very good answer,’ he said.
‘Not
Ruth Aarons. Not nobody.’

‘How come?’ I asked. ‘Were there no women players that year?’

‘If there were no women players that year, explain to me how Votrubcova was able to win the mixed doubles with Vana, and Depetrisova was able to win the women’s doubles with Votrubcova.’

I couldn’t.

‘The best women players in the world were there. All of them. Including Ruth Aarons who’d won it the year before and was playing better than ever. But do you know what it says in the record books under Women’s Singles 1936/7?’

‘Not Nobody?’

‘Worse. It says “Title Vacant”.’ He waited for the information to sink in. ‘How do you like that? — TITLE VACANT!’

Was I meant to be amazed by this, or crestfallen, or outraged? I plastered mustard over a slice of pickled meat, folded it around a wedge of cucumber, and tried an expression that was a combination of all three.

‘There was a final, you see,’ Selwyn went on. ‘Between Ruth Aarons and Trude Pritzi, but no winner.’

‘They didn’t finish?’

‘They weren’t allowed to finish. They were disqualified.’

Selwyn’s eyes bulged so violently I wondered what the women could possibly have been disqualified for. Not unladylike behaviour, I hoped.

‘Well,’ Selwyn said, ‘you’re not all that wide of the mark.
Pushing. That’s what they were disqualified for. Pushing. After one hour and forty-five minutes of chiselling the umpire looked at his watch, said “Jude Raus!”, and called it a day.’

I was familiar with the one hour forty-five minute rule. Anybody who knew anything about ping-pong had heard of the marathon battle between Erhlich of Poland and Paneth of Romania at the Worlds in Prague in ’36. For two hours and five minutes they pushed the ball back and forth before either of them won a point. Two hours and five minutes and it was 1–0. By 1–1 the crowds had all gone home. Assuming a tight finish, the possibility arose of a five-game match lasting more than a fortnight: a computation that took no account of the need to sleep. Thereafter the International Table Tennis Federation decided on limiting all matches to one hour and forty-five minutes on pain of disqualification.

So Ruth and Trude got theirs. Tough, but rules are rules. However, I had a fair idea that ‘Jude Raus!’ was an interpolation all of Selwyn’s own.

‘But if both girls were disqualified …’

‘Ruth Aarons was the holder of the title. Until someone took it off her it was hers. And if all Pritzi was prepared to do was chisel, what was wrong with Aarons chiselling back. “You want it, Trude? Then come and take it.” Tactics. Suddenly you’re not allowed tactics … If your name happens to be Aarons.’

‘Selwyn …’

‘You know where these Championships were held?’ He looked around the room as though it wasn’t safe to talk about these things still, not even in Laps’. He lowered his voice. ‘Baden.’

I wasn’t the mine of ping-pong information the Marks brothers were but I was in possession of a few essential facts, especially when they related to my nearly-hero Richard Bergmann, as for example that Baden was where the seventeen-year-old Bergmann became World Champion for the first time. ‘Bergmann, Selwyn.’ I rubbed my nose. ‘Bergmann!’

‘Exactly. They couldn’t give both titles to a Jew. Not in Baden. Not in 1937.’

I shook my head.

‘She was a golden girl,’ Selwyn went on. ‘I see what you’re thinking. A golden girl with a name like Ruth Aarons? Girls called Ruth Aarons are dark little meerskeits with a big shnozz and thick glasses. Well that’s your problem. She was a golden girl with blonde ringlets, a beautiful figure and a scintillating personality. But Baden finished her. Trude Pritzi went to London the next year and won the title. Ruth Aarons never played in a World Championships again. The yiddenfeits did for her.’

There turned out to be something prophetic about this conversation. A fortnight later the yiddenfeits did for Selwyn.

Years after the one hour and forty-five minute fiasco an expedite law was devised, of such complexity that it was altogether better for one’s long-term peace of mind to be disqualified and have done. How were you ever supposed to remember which was the twelfth shot on your own service and the thirteenth return of your opponent’s? Now I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that people play with calculators in their pockets. But at the time that Selwyn himself was disqualified from a tournament the Law of Expedition had yet to be hammered out. An umpire suddenly got twitchy and you were a goner, that was how it worked then.

He was right to feel he’d been hard done by, since if he was guilty of slow play so was his opponent. All you could say in the umpire’s favour was that Selwyn’s off the table tactics were slow also. ‘It’s my religion,’ Selwyn complained afterwards. ‘You know what will happen next if we aren’t allowed to practise our religion while we’re playing? They’ll disqualify us because of our names. Starr — you’re disqualified! Mistofsky — you’re disqualified. Walzer — you’re disqualified. The way they did with Aarons.’