The Tennis Player from Bermuda (5 page)

S
EPTEMBER
1961
S
MITH
C
OLLEGE
N
ORTHAMPTON
, M
ASSACHUSETTS

I loved Smith, but I had never been away from my parents before. Although they went home to England on holiday every three or four years, they always took me along. I say they went ‘home’ to England because that’s what they would say, but both of them were born in Bermuda. Both of my grandfathers were born in Bermuda as well. And Mother’s mother was an American. As a child, I began calling her ‘American Grandmother.’ Only Father’s mother had been born in England. Naturally, I called her ‘English Grandmother.’

I was terribly homesick for Bermuda.

In the 1880s, Smith had been one of the first American colleges to have a tennis team, and tennis had been a fad among Smith students. The Upper Campus had been covered with grass courts with narrow strips of fabric for the lines, which were held down to the grass by – what else? – hairpins.

The first day of practice for the Smith tennis team was several days after classes began in September. I was a few minutes late to practice because my chemistry laboratory ran long, and when I got to the courts, about eight young ladies, from first years to seniors, were already running in a circle on one side of the court while a young man standing on the opposite service line – the team’s coach, I learned – was feeding them balls from a large basket. He must have told the girls to hit the balls deep, because they didn’t seem to be hitting the balls back to him. Instead, they were spraying the balls all over the court.

The coach kept calling out, “Good! Good shot! Keep at it!”

This was a different approach to tennis than that employed by Mrs Martin.

He caught sight of me in my tennis dress, waved his arm, and yelled, “Hi! Come join in!”

I dutifully inserted myself into the circle of girls. But when my turn came, the coach accidentally fed me a ball that nicked the net cord and then dropped softly into my side of the court close to the net. It bounced up only 10 centimeters or so.

I was already there. Both my right knee and the lower rim of my racket grazed the court surface as I half-volleyed the ball. I didn’t try to do anything with it; I just flicked it over the net to the coach.

He looked at me for a moment, and then I returned to the circle of girls.

On my next turn, he hit the ball straight to me. I took two small steps back, swung my shoulders around so I was perpendicular to the net, took my racket back low, and hit the ball with heavy topspin. It flew a meter over the net but then fell sharply and just touched the baseline. I had hit the ball so hard that it drove itself halfway through one of the gaps in the chain-link fence at the back of the court.

The coach held up his hand to stop the circle of girls. “Can you do that again?”

“I think so.”

The coach hit me a hard backhand, with a bit of backspin so that the ball, he thought, would bounce up at steeper angle than I expected. But I didn’t bother letting it bounce. Instead, I closed in and volleyed his shot. I let my forearm recoil to drain most of the pace from the ball, which popped back over the net and landed at his feet.

The coach hit back a high, deep overhead.

I drifted back, used my left index finger to fix the ball as it fell back toward the court, and hit an overhead back to him.

He popped the ball up again, and I adjusted my position, set up, and again just hit the ball back to him.

This time he lobbed the ball high and to my backhand. I had to turn around so that I was facing my own baseline. I looked up at the ball, jumped, and swung over my shoulder. The ball landed at his feet.

The coach and I were both laughing. My Smith teammates were standing beside the court with their mouths open.

He hit another overhead high into the air over the court. Still laughing, I made a show of bouncing from one foot to the other as though I were trying to decide which direction to smash the ball. Finally, while the ball was still on its trajectory over the court, I pointed with my left hand and yelled, “Your ad court!”

I let the ball bounce. It went well above my head. I smashed it. The coach had moved to his ad court and, though he lunged, the ball whipped past him. It barely nicked the outside of his ad court baseline.

He looked back at the fence. Now there were two balls stuck in it. The coach motioned for me to meet him at the net. “Are you an amateur? You can’t play on the Smith team if you’re a professional.”

“I’m an amateur.”

“I’ve never seen you before. You must be starting your first year.”

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?”

“Fiona Hodgkin.”

“Well, Fiona, you’re playing in the number one position on the team. Come over to this side of the net and feed balls to your teammates. I’ll move over there and help them with their ground strokes.”

A minute later, I was standing beside the basket of balls and feeding them to my teammates. I was yelling, “Bend your knees! Good shot! Drop the racket head! Let’s go, Smithies!”

M
ARCH
1962
S
PRING
H
OLIDAY FROM
S
MITH
P
AGET
P
ARISH
, B
ERMUDA

Smith kindly rearranged my classes to give me a full two weeks of spring holiday, and I took an airplane home from New York’s Idlewild Airport. When I landed at Kindley Field, my parents were waiting for me; I was thrilled to see them. We took a taxi from the airport, and so I was quickly at Midpoint and back in my own room.

The next morning, I met Mrs Martin at Coral Beach for a tennis match. We embraced, and I said, “I missed you so much.”

She said, “Let’s knock up.”

“Yes, but first I have to tell you about all the different drills we do in tennis practice; they’re quite humorous.” I said this just to hear her reaction.

She snorted. “After our match perhaps.”

But it was wonderful to see her and to play against her again.

On my second evening at home, I was having tea with my parents, when Mother said that she had spoken that day by telephone with Mrs Pemberton in Tucker’s Town, who said that her nephew, Mark Thakeham, was visiting from England for the school holiday.

“She’s putting together a mixed doubles party for young people tomorrow afternoon, and she wanted to know if you could come join them.”

Mrs Pemberton’s home was called ‘Tempest,’ and it had a private grass tennis court, one of only two in Bermuda, at least to my knowledge. In the past several years, Mrs Pemberton had invited me to play there four or five times, and I had always accepted, just to have the experience of playing on grass. It is difficult, even if one is wealthy, to have a grass tennis court in Bermuda. Our climate is not well suited for it. Tennis players look at the beautiful greens on our golf courses and think, “This is the perfect place for a lawn tennis court.”

The golf greens, though, support a few people each day who walk, slowly, across them to hit, gently, a small ball that rolls softly on the grass.

A tennis court has to put up with someone like me dragging a toe across the same foot of grass probably 80 times in a single match and then pounding along exactly the same path each time toward the net. Even in England, with consistently cool temperatures and plenty of rain, and as small as I am, I can damage a grass court in a single match.

In Bermuda? With inconsistent rainfall and hot temperatures? A grass court doesn’t work well.

But, for all that, the grass court at Tempest was perfect and beautiful, probably because it was rarely played upon. It was for display, not tennis. Mrs Pemberton was not Bermudian, and she did not live in Bermuda. She was from England and stayed at Tempest only on holiday.

Father spoke up. “I served with Ralph Thakeham in the war. First-rate physician. First-rate officer, for that. Now a well-known senior medical consultant in London. He’s ‘Viscount Thakeham,’ of course, but Ralph never uses the title. His patients call him just ‘Doctor Thakeham.’ He’s the younger brother of our Mrs Pemberton in Tucker’s Town. I hear good things about the young Mark Thakeham. He’s fourth year medicine at Cambridge, and he played tennis for Cambridge.”

My parents had been mixed doubles partners for many years, and they knew how to coordinate with one another. I recognized a planned, combined attack at the net. They must have discussed this in advance of raising it with me.

“I told Mother I would help in the clinic tomorrow.”

“Oh, Fiona,” Mother said. “You’re home on holiday. Go to Tempest and enjoy yourself.”

I said I would go, and Mother left the table to ring Mrs Pemberton.

I took the bus to the Mid-Ocean Club and then walked about 15 minutes to Tempest. I was met at the door by the housekeeper, who took me down to the grass court. The setting was beautiful, even by Bermuda standards, which in terms of natural beauty are about the highest in the world. The grass court was on the edge of a cliff, looking over the Atlantic to the southeast.

When you tossed the ball for your serve from the north end of the court, the last thing you saw before hitting the ball was the sharp horizon far out on the Atlantic. Looking exactly in that direction, there was nothing except the blue water of the Atlantic – and I mean
nothing
– between you and Antarctica, about 13,000 kilometers away.

In the other directions, the court was so well protected by Bermuda cedars and oleanders that the prevailing wind from the west usually didn’t affect play. This grass court is still there today, and it must be one of the most spectacular tennis courts in the world.

It belongs to me, now.

I knew all the young people there except one, who I thought must be Mark Thakeham. There were seven people, plus me, evenly divided between girls and boys, so the plan must be for some ghastly round robin, mixed doubles play. I would rather have swallowed a lizard. I said my hellos to my friends, and Mrs Pemberton swooped down to introduce me to her nephew.

I realize how silly this sounds today, because my daughters roll their eyes when they hear me talk about it. But in 1962, in Bermuda, an 18-year-old girl like me could speak appropriately on a social basis with a young man she did not know only if and not until she had been introduced by an adult. I swear it’s true.

Mrs Pemberton said, “Miss Hodgkin, may I introduce you to my nephew, Mark Thakeham?”

Mark said, “It’s nice to meet you, Miss Hodgkin. I’m told you play tennis.”

“Mr Thakeham, welcome to Bermuda. Have you been on our island before?”

“Never. I’m probably not the first person to say this is a beautiful place. So is it true that you play tennis?”

“I do play, Mr Thakeham, but not as well as I would wish.”

Mark had strikingly good looks, with strawberry blond hair, and that classic English complexion. He was attentive and polite, with an aristocratic English accent. He was plainly intelligent. He asked me about Smith – only approximately one percent of the members of Mark’s social class in England at that time would have heard of Smith, so he must have been briefed on me in advance – and he asked what course of study I was pursuing.