Howard Jacobson: The Mighty Walzer

He was a big boy, too, in the get me sense. Everybody who witnessed the shlemozzle he caused at the World Championships reckoned he came out of it with great credit. Even his father, who managed to make it to the Assembly Rooms after all, Shabbes or no Shabbes, did what fathers don’t always do and hugged him afterwards, telling him that by the only standards that counted he was the real winner.

What had happened was this:

He had taken my grandfather’s advice and not watched the one hundred and seventy-nine contestants prior to him. He had even found a dark room in the bowels of the Assembly Rooms, where he’d gone into a mild trance of premonitory euphoria, imagining what it would be like when he was the World Champion. As a consequence he missed his number when it was called and had to publicly plead with the competition referee to be allowed to perform out of sequence. So by the time he finally made it on to the stage, carrying his brown Rexine travelling-bag, he was already a character.

Don’t forget that in stature he was the same comical assemblage of sturdy right angles as my grandfather. In his square hand-me-down jacket and with his tie knotted clumsily at his throat he would have looked more like a parcel than a boy.

As for the spectators, remember that they had been there most of the day, sitting on uncomfortable seats, suffering the August humidity, and frankly beginning to lose any capacity to tell one loop the loop from another. What were they ever going to do, from the moment my father gave them his big smile and hauled his chariot-wheel of a Yo-Yo out of his bag, but stomp their feet and cheer?

After that, as the Manchester Evening News reported it, ‘the competition descended into such mayhem that the city will be fortunate if it is ever given a comparable event to stage again.’

Allow for the hyperbole of the press. My father may have been the reason Manchester has never been given the Olympic Games, but even so allow for the hyperbole of the press. In fact, nothing occurred that was any more than boisterous. They’d taken to him, that was all. They thought he was plucky, and maybe a bit simple. But worth egging on, either way. From my father’s point of view all the hullabaloo was no more than he’d been expecting. He tried to loosen his tie but couldn’t budge the knot. He tried to roll up his sleeve to his elbow but couldn’t get it past his forearm. Perspiring heavily now — something else we do grandly in our family — he tested the tension of the string, clawed his fingers around the Yo-Yo, turned over his wrist and let it go. His stance was the conventional one, much like an ocean angler casting a line, legs slightly apart, the Yo-Yo propelled backhand from a height more or less level with his temple. He waited, knees sprung, shoulders braced, for the Yo-Yo to return fizzing in to his hand. How long did he wait? How long did it seem he waited? ‘Alles shvartz yoren!’ All the black years. An eternity.

I have often wondered if he exaggerated, to make it a grander débâcle than it actually was. Surely it came back up a little bit? But no. He always insisted there was no movement whatsoever, nothing, not so much as a quiver along the line. It just lay there at his feet, twenty inches in diameter, five or six pounds in weight, as inert as a dead fish, except that a dead fish had once known life.

He re-wound and tried again.

Same thing?

‘A worse thing.’ This time it didn’t even fizz down the string. It just dropped like a stone.

Thirty, forty, fifty years on, he could tell you where he’d gone wrong. He hadn’t allowed for the atmospheric conditions. It was a muggy Manchester day, the hammocks of cloud, bagging with the weight of warm Pennine rain, so low you could touch them. The string had sweated, become wet, and by the late afternoon lost its tensility. Something any experienced cotton worker would have thought of. But there you are — Rome wasn’t built in a day.

On the other hand, he was giving pleasure, wasn’t he? Listen to the crowd! And at the last it’s all about giving pleasure, isn’t it?

How hooked we’ve been been on the pleasure principle in our family! Pleasure, pleasure. But never for ourselves. The pleasure principle we’ve been hooked on, we Walzer men — even my grandfather looking down at the gratitude swimming in the eyes of another man’s wife — is the principle of giving it. As long as people say thank-you and remember us — that’s all we have ever asked.

The more the crowd whistled the more my father grinned. He stared accusingly at his stricken Yo-Yo, shrugged his square shoulders, and pointed an imaginary pistol at his brain. He seemed to be as amused as they were. To them it looked as if he had done exactly what he had meant to do. It was as if, although that wasn’t how anyone in Broughton Park spoke in those days, he had deliberately set out to deconstruct the Yo-Yo.

‘Third and final attempt,’ the tournament referee warned him.

I see the tournament referee, although my father never once described him to me. Round shouldered and blubbery, prematurely bald, with sad sea-lion moustaches and a broken-hearted demeanour. They upset easily in Manchester. It might be a climatic thing. Or a class thing. They nurse a deep hurt. And those who make it their business to adjudicate, to let a little equity into the universal unfairness of life, nurse a deeper hurt than most. I hear his defeated vowels, his cadences of hopelessness — ‘Third and final attempt’ — meaning try if you must, but you’re a dead man.

A dead boy the size of a dead man.

When all’s said and done, there are only two ways of getting a Yo-Yo into play — vertical or horizontal; you throw it down or you throw it out. Having failed with the vertical pass, my father concluded his programme with the horizontal …

Most of the spectators had the foresight to cover their faces or duck the moment my father let go. Despite its great size, therefore, his Yo-Yo did no one any damage as it at last spun the way a Yo-Yo should, whirring out into the hall with a sound like the beating of a pheasant’s wings, a meteor loosed from its orbit, cooling the air it travelled through, until it broke from its umbilical cord with a snap like a knuckle cracking, and flew free.

As luck would have it, it was his own father who stuck out a hand and caught it. Luck? Perhaps not. Who else in the hall had a hand big enough to pull off the catch?

He was carrying it under his arm when he met up with my father after the event. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take your tsatske.’

That was once my favourite word. Tsatske. When I was very small anybody could make me laugh just by saying it. It was like being tickled. Tsatske. Tsatske.

A tsatske is a toy or playing, a shmondrie, a bauble, a whifflery, a nothing. It can also mean a nebbish, a nobody, and by extension, a tart. Not a serious tart, not the sort of high-class call-girl you’d think of ruining your reputation as a carefree shtupper and family man for, more of a dizzy broad, a toy or a plaything, a shmontse to help you through the tedium of a wet Manchester afternoon.

But no definition is able to render the charge of fatuousness and triviality which I always heard in the word. A person who owned a tsatske was forever, it seemed to me, lost to seriousness and dignity. The way you were when you were being tickled.

Maybe I knew I was going to be forever lost to seriousness and dignity myself.

Before using a racket for the first time in a match a player shall, if so requested, show both sides of the blade to his opponent.

4.8 The Rules

I WAS A natural. Ping-pong just came to me.

One day, when I was eleven, I brought home a little white celluloid ping-pong ball I’d found bobbing on the boating lake in Heaton Park and began hitting it against the living-room wall with a book. I still remember the make of the ball. It was a Halex ***. A competition ball. Don’t ask me what a competition ball was doing in a lake in Heaton Park. Perhaps God had put it there. For what it’s worth I can still remember the title of the book as well — Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, in the soft green pitted-leatherette Collins Classics series which my mother’s side was helping me collect. I already had about thirty of them lined up alphabetically according to author on a shelf over my bed — Austens, Jane; Brontës, Anne; Brontës, Charlotte; Brontës, Emily; Burneys, Fanny; Eliots, George; Gaskells, Mrs; Mitfords, Miss. You don’t need a degree in English Literature to work out that I must have chosen to hit the ball with Stevenson, Robert Louis, not because he came last in the line but because he was the only man I had.