Tennis Club Memories

I left it over sixty years ago when I moved away

And curious to know if my old tennis club still existed

I consulted Google to see if it survives and has a website

Happily, it does but membership fees have increased somewhat

In the early nineteen sixties I paid six pounds for the year

Annual membership is now eighty pounds

Thanks to the ravages of inflation

I spent most of my weekends at that club

And worshiped a girl called Dorothy

Sadly Dorothy did not return my affections

Dorothy was very athletic and had

Lovely long legs and an awesome backhand

I never quite mastered my backhand

And would run round the ball to play it with a forehand

Rackets then were made from wood and strung with cat gut

The best one was a Dunlop Maxply Fort which cost over five pounds

Only the well-off kids would have one

I wanted one but could never afford it

Racket heads were affixed with a single shaft

Unlike today’s aluminon ones with twin supports

Then the balls were all coloured white

Present day fluorescent yellow is an obvious improvement

Backhands then were played with a single hand grip

But Chris Evert and others popularised the two-handed grip

The club’s website has a Gallery section

With four black and white photos going back to nineteen forty-nine

They were all taken at the annual dinner dance at a posh hotel

The most recent was for nineteen fifty-two

When Queen Elizabeth had just become queen

But before her coronation in June the following year

The Second World War had finished just seven years prior

And rationing would have been in full swing

I had not yet joined the club at the date of this latest photo

I was not even a teenager

But I recognised a number of faces from when I joined

And looking at that privileged group

In their evening dresses and tuxedos

I wondered how many had done war service

And how many past members had been lost

And how many then alive had lost love ones

A number of couples I recognised had children

That I knew as later I would play tennis with them

It is sad to reflect that everyone in that last photo

Will now be dead and many of their children dead too

Such is the fleetingness of life.