We were a sporty family. Mum and Dad had met on a charity run. Dad loved telling the story of their meeting. ‘So, when I run, I always select someone who’s going to be my pacemaker, you know, someone I’m going to overtake going into the last straight. So, I thought to myself, well, I’ll happily follow that bum around five Ks! But, wouldn’t you know it, try as I might, I just couldn’t overtake her! And I thought, you know, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, so here we are, joined at the hip! Well, in unholy matrimony, anyway!’
Mum was a runner and a tennis player. Dad had tried his hand at every sport and settled on squash and tennis. This allowed him to complain that the one messed up the other and bemoan the fact that his generation’s sporting prowess had been handicapped by the transition from wooden to metal squash and tennis racquets. ‘You grow up with one grip and then it’s all change; you have to learn another.’
Sherah had a good eye for a ball, as Dad would put it; she was a hockey and a tennis player. As for Seamus, he was ball mad: irrespective of a ball’s size or shape, he’d want to throw it, kick it or hit it.
‘What sport will you want to do, Sharon?’ asked Mum, when we were considering my transition from gym and rounders to other sports in the final year of my primary school.
‘Rowing,’ I replied.
‘Rowing? Trust you,’ said Dad. ‘Always looking for a place to hide. What’s wrong with tennis and hockey? There’s nowhere to hide when it’s one on one and nowhere to hide on a hockey pitch when you receive the ball.’ He swung his arm in a poor imitation of forehands and backhands before bending his knees to wave an imaginary hockey stick around.
‘Rowing and tennis,’ I said.
‘Do hockey and tennis instead,’ insisted Dad, bored with make-believe hockey-ball dribbling. ‘You can have Sherah’s old hockey stick and kit – it’ll save on buying new rowing gear. Besides, have you seen the time you’d have to get to the boathouses in the morning? There’s no way I’m getting up that early to drive you there.’
On Saturday mornings we would play tennis on one of the municipal tennis courts on the other side of the railway line from where we lived. Dad would ask, ‘Anyone for tennis?’ I would never answer first because if it were just me, Dad would either find a reason to change his mind about playing – ‘It looks like rain!’ – or would play so aggressively against me that it would knock my confidence. However, if he needed a fourth, he’d cajole me into playing – ‘Come on, Sharon! A little bit of rain never hurt anybody!’
I best liked the days when four of us wanted to play – they were typically sunny Saturday mornings in which the greens of the Astroturf tennis courts and of the surrounding lawns and trees, the cries of tennis players and children in neighbouring playgrounds and the sound of passing District Line trains formed a shiny bubble in which we lost ourselves in pursuit of balls, victory, love and self-esteem. The last was hard to come by when we all five turned up, racquets swinging, as Dad, more often than not, would say, ‘Okay, Sharon, you be ball girl.’
‘But Dad!’ I would remonstrate.
‘Go on Sharon, be a sport.’
‘But why does it always have to be me?’
‘Seamus has got to get as good as you and Sherah’s trying for the first team. She’s got an important match coming up. Come on, think of others for a change.’
Dad had to be on the winning team, which he nearly always was so long as he played against Seamus rather than with him. As I grew older, I realised that Dad was neither as good as I had thought he was, nor as good as he’d pretended to be. When he started losing and saw that he was going to lose, his tactic would be to clown around so that he could claim he hadn’t lost really, as he had only been having a bit of fun. This involved accidentally hitting the ball across several courts in all directions and then telling me off when I didn’t fetch it quickly enough.
‘No! Don’t just chuck them at me! Stand feet together and put your hand with the ball up. Straight arms! Don’t slouch! One bounce only. Come on, do it properly!’
After the first set, Mum would hand me her racquet and say, ‘I’ll sit the next one out,’ and she’d wander over to the café to read a newspaper in the sun.
If Dad had lost the set, he’d say, ‘Right! New teams! Let’s start again.’ If he’d won, he’d say, ‘A substitution for the losing team – they must be feeling the pressure!’
On one occasion, Dad said, ‘You three play, I’m going to join Mum for a coffee.’ He slung his racquet over his shoulder and followed her.
Seamus practised cricket strokes with his tennis racquet.
‘Stop messing about, Seamus,’ said Sherah. ‘Come on, let’s have a game.’
‘How can we have a game when there are only three of us?’ asked Seamus.
‘Easy,’ replied Sherah. ‘Come around here to my side. Right, so it’s us against Sharon. That’s only fair, isn’t it, Sharon, as, on average, the two of us are your age?’
I supposed that it was.
‘Right,’ said Sherah. ‘Sharon, we have to hit into the doubles court and you have to hit into the singles court, all right?’
I thought about this. ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t I be hitting into the doubles court?’
‘No,’ said Sherah, ‘because there’s only one of you, right, so you get to hit in the singles.’
‘Yeah,’ added Seamus, ‘and there’s two of us and when there’s two you hit in the doubles.’
‘Besides,’ said Sherah, ‘Seamus has never played singles before so he’s never hit into a singles court.’
‘There’s something wrong about this,’ I said in between games, panting.
‘You’re doing fine,’ said Sherah, who had got something in her eye and had to keep turning away from me.