Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘Kuk, kuk, the ganov,’ Sheeny would say with sotto voce urgency, even as he was rising on the balls of his feet, refusing to let one bedspread go if he couldn’t move a gross, and I knew to shadow the fat man in the big raincoat to the back of the stall, so that he couldn’t fill his pockets with discoloured truffles.

‘Na, geshwint, hob saichel, shneid,’ I’d mutter to my father between my teeth, so that he’d know to hold the balsa-wood sewing box together and get it in the punter’s shopping basket, quick, before it fell apart.

Suddenly I was fly. And I loved it.

Can you be bashful and fly? Can you be a kuni-lemele and a bit of a wide boy?

I managed.

And I was beginning to say startlingly brilliant things at school. Misogyny, that was my bag. I wrote essays in which I affected to hate women, detailing their imperfections through the ages. Instead of clipping me round the ear and telling me to button my lip until I had steered my fragile bark safely through puberty, my male grammar school teachers, few of whom had come out the other end of puberty themselves, gave me A plus/minuses and started mentioning Cambridge.

Did they play ping-pong at Cambridge? My grandiosity grew a twin. I would be better than anybody at two things. Did Ogimura have a degree? Did Wittgenstein have a drop shot?

Knowing my own nature, I foresaw advantages to myself in the double track approach to success. Should I lose at ping-pong I would be a philosopher. Should I be routed in argument I would be Victor Barna. When you suffer from grandiosity you cannot have too many fall-back positions.

With my distant, not-so distant and immediate prospects bounded by Cambridge, the Kardomah and wherever my bat took me, I finally ventured out of my shell. Not far. All very well multiplying strings to my bow, but there was still the small matter of the in-between to keep me timid. My aunties may have been suffering less mutilation at my hands than they once had, thanks to how busy winning tournaments and writing essays on the woman question I now was, but I continued to brood over terrible in-between related secrets. I hadn’t done anything with it. I hadn’t put it anywhere. Soon it would be clapped out, yet I still hadn’t given it to anybody outside the family to hold. Those are not negatives you want people to find out about when you’re nudging towards the age of consent. (Consent? In order for you to consent mustn’t somebody first put in a request?) So I stayed within range of my husk, just in case.

But at least I was out. My body temperature was beginning to drop. I was acquiring a measure of control over my skidding mouth. And people no longer said, ‘Cheer up, it may never happen,’ the minute they clapped eyes on me.

Life was looking rosy.

And then, out of the blue and in quick succession:

Twink Starr was called up to do national service.

Aishky Mistofsky severed the middle two fingers of his playing hand trying to get out of a phone box and then blew off the middle two fingers of his other hand in an explosion.

Gershom Finkel proposed to my aunty, which was a catastrophe however you looked at it, but which would not have been quite the catastrophe it turned out to be had the aunty he proposed to been the aunty he was dating.

And — a not altogether unconnected event, I fear — my adored fatalistic little Polish grandmother lost two thirds of her body weight in six weeks and gave herself up, without a murmur of protest, into the arms of the Almighty.

Many of the world’s best hitters are extremely sensitive …

Twenty — One Up, Richard Bergmann

I WAS WITH Twink in Burnley, attending the Ribble District Table Tennis Academy, when he dropped his bombshell. We’d been going to Burnley together, for long weekends of coaching and extensive work-outs, over the course of a year or more, whenever I could escape from the markets and whenever Twink could slip away from his button machine. We caught the bus in Bury and talked tenors all the way to Burnley and all the way back. I say all the way, not because the distance was great but because the journey took a long time in those days, what with stray sheep wandering off the moors and the Ribble flooding and the bus driver running out of diesel or having to stop in the centre of Ramsbottom or Rawtenstall to wait for residents to remove their washing from the main street. We wouldn’t have wanted to live a pint of diesel’s drive north of Bury ourselves — untamed Shaygetsshire, every inch of it — but we didn’t mind the delay: the longer the bus ride took the more opera we could get through. But the moment we arrived at the academy we talked and breathed only ping-pong.

We shared a room and sometimes even a bed, each clinging to the furthest extremity of the mattress (I had to hold on to a mattress button with two fingers one night, so as not to fall off), going through what we’d learnt about our respective games that day. ‘You’re a more instinctive table tennis spieler perse than me,’ Twink would say, ‘but I’m a more natural all-round sportsman. That gives me the advantage of seeing the ball quicker than you, though you hit it harder.’ He reckoned he placed the ball more accurately than I did too, though I didn’t believe that was borne out by the first of the day’s exercises when we had to try to knock over matchboxes. But I deferred to him because of the difference in our ages.

I was still enjoying the friendship of Twink and Aishky and wished Aishky would sometimes come to Burnley with us. But he laughed at the idea. ‘Yeah, that’s all I need after a hard week’s graft, going marathon running with you two. Why can’t we just go to Blackpool to see the illuminations and find some pretty girls to sing Mario Lanza songs to, like normal people?’

Twink and I trained, you see, when we were in Burnley. We changed into our tracksuits after breakfast at the hotel, did twenty-five press-ups in our room, then sprinted to the academy. Before we were allowed on to the tables we had to skip like boxers for fifteen minutes and then do twenty-five more press-ups followed by a further ten minutes of stretching. We drank Lucozade when we were thirsty, chewed glucose tablets when we felt faint, and spent the morning serving into thimbles. After a lunch of light salad and Vimto we returned to the tables and did one hundred forehand smashes followed by one hundred backhand smashes followed by one hundred half-volleys followed by one hundred backhand chops followed by one hundred forehand chops followed by one hundred backhand smashes … We filled out cards, noting how many times we’d hit into the net or off the table, then we sat round over tea working out our percentages.

Usually about twenty people turned up for a coaching weekend, though Twink and I were inclined to keep ourselves to ourselves. Most of the others were ferrety Calder or Ribble boys, from Todmorden and Clitheroe and the like, and spoke a different table tennis language. They were greedier in their play, somehow, more pinched and avid, colourless, without flourish or bravura. They’d stamp on the floorboards querulously, I remember; they’d tuck their shorts into themselves like gym knickers and stand with their legs apart, wagging their rumps like mongrels on heat, rubbery and relentless, as dispiriting as rats. I suppose that what I’m trying to say is that they played working-class ping-pong, and brought the cramped back-to-back atmosphere of their living conditions, a moorland narrowness and undernourishment of soul, to the table. Make no mistake, they were not easy to beat. One of them, the hairless chopper Jack Langho from Haslingden, was my chief rival for the number one Lancashire position and probably beat me more often than I beat him. But playing them was dismal, impersonal, ungenerous — they never lit up as Aishky lit up, they never said ‘Oy a broch!’ when you hit a screamer and laughed that lovely fatalistic laugh which conceded all the power and skill to your opponent, claiming for yourself only the gift to be amused — and when you lost to them you felt you’d been the victim of some petty and pointless felony, as though you’d had your pockets picked by someone you were going to give it all away to anyway.