Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country by Tony Hawks Page B

hesitated . . .
    ***
    There was good reason for my hesitation. When I’d first moved to London a quarter of a century earlier, I had pretty much followed the same procedure outlined above, and I’d agreed to play for the Globe Lawn Tennis Club men’s team in Belsize Park. Soon I became involved in a seemingly never-ending string of rather tedious matches, all of which appeared to be ‘vitally important’ in the eyes of our captain – who clearly didn’t have enough going on in his life.
    After several years of this, I reached breaking point one day and decided to retire. The occasion was a damp evening when I was sitting in my hundredth wooden clubhouse, eating disappointing cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and drinking stewed tea, desperately trying to make conversation with a group of men with whom I’d spent the past three hours hacking bald tennis balls around drab hard courts wedged between middle-class suburban houses, and with whom the only common ground was a willingness to subject ourselves to this social torture. For the hundredth time, I’d been asked how our team were doing this season, and for the hundredth time I’d replied that I wasn’t even sure what division our team were in.
    I don’t know why I’d never bothered to find out – perhaps I was concerned that to do so would exhibit a dangerous level of commitment that could be spotted by my team-mates. The remotest display of enthusiasm could be reported to other team captains in the club who were always on the lookout for players in the many available leagues. The summer mixed-doubles league. The winter men’s. The summer men’s. The winter mixed. And let’s not forget the cup matches too. The summer men’s cup. The winter mixed cup. The winter men’s cup. The mixed summer cup.
    As if all this wasn’t bad enough, it was pointed out to me one day by some team captain or another that I was allowed to drop down and play one match per season in the second team too. This generated a new batch of fixtures that required fabricated excuses in order for me to avoid more monotonous tennis and, worse still, the agonising post-match teas with their excruciating tête-à-têtes about missed volleys and banter about our prospective relegation from this division, the identity of which had never been known to me in the first place.
    Finally I’d cracked. No more weakness.
    NO MORE MATCHES.
    A friend asked me why I’d packed it up.
    ‘Because I don’t think I ever really enjoyed it.’
    ‘And it took you all these years to work that out?’
    ‘I guess so.’
    I was a slow learner. But most of all, I was crap at saying no. Periodically, I am asked to give a talk quite some distance from home, at an inappropriate venue to an undesirable audience, with little or no money on offer. I still struggle with the ‘N’ word until a conversation with Fran brings me to my senses.
    ‘But didn’t you pay to play in those matches?’ my friend asked.
    ‘Err. Yes.’
    It was true, and it simply compounded the madness of it all. The protocol was that you had to give the team captain a match fee. This was to cover the cost of the balls, and the post-match refreshments. We were, to all intents and purposes, the opposite of professional tennis players. Instead of being remunerated, we had to pay for the privilege of representing our club. And there were no bonuses for winning either. Not even an extra cupcake.
    So that’s why I hesitated when the men’s team captain called.
    He assumed that I hadn’t heard the question properly.
    ‘Would you consider playing for the men’s team?’ he repeated.
    ‘Err . . . Um . . .’
    ‘It’s an important game. We need to avoid relegation.’
    ‘Err . . . OK. Yes.’
    What did I mean – ‘yes’? What was I thinking about? The answer was no. An unequivocal ‘no’.
    ‘Why didn’t you just say “no”?’ said Fran, over dinner that night.
    ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, ‘perhaps things are different now.