Choice of End – Summer Evening Tennis

John Hepworth

Ever left anything behind at the tennis court? How long did it take you to realise it was gone? Did somebody else find it and you never saw it again? It’s possible to go days without realising isn’t it? maybe weeks; even months – but how about a decade or more? How about getting on for half a century? Can’t’ve been anything that important then? No, I suppose that must be right; but things were different then, and there wasn’t that much to do on a Sunday evening.

Fish and chip shops were closed by a food-safety rule going back so far it didn’t include Chinese takeaways, so that’s where Sunday chips came from (and fish if you dared).You could have KFC (though we didn’t talk so much in three-letter abbreviations), yes spicy chicken, skin and all, from Headingley Arndale Centre that had been open for, ooh, more than five years – and giving the Methodists across the road a bowling alley to get agitated about instead of all those no-longer-well-tended big gardens. Forty-six years back, I mean.

But somehow not such another era – not like the 46 years before that, which – let me see – would be … 1970 … 1930 … six more … 1924 that would have been. Now that is proper historical time – or you’d think so – but what about just five years earlier than that: 1919? Had anyone started talking about those homes-fit-for-heroes by then, dreaming up the first council-housing? Plenty of that type of landscape had appeared on this side of the city by the time I was a Sunday-evening tennis player. Eventually the Seven Estates, sounding like something Plato might have taught his students, long before even the seven ages of man hit the stage.

A few families already had their homes-fit-for-heroes Meanwood-side, before the twentieth century had big wars to talk about. And a century before that, with houses you could bank on if your name was Beckett or Denison: grand places; but they didn’t have the wonderland around them that the spoils of war bestowed on the people of Leeds in the shape of The Hollies, with all its history and no shortage of mystery.

One of the species quick to settle-in with the re-greening of land, when it’s been quarried then developed by planting trees, is – guess what? Deer? … badgers? … earwigs? Well, the one I’m thinking of is the fairy-folk: they’ll come, and stay – as long as you have the water right – and the sound and the light. I think that’s what they judge a place by, and the right type of leafiness and varying degrees of seclusion. And here’s a word for anyone who thinks you don’t find the little people where the big people have been wounding the land: just take a look at a Leeds & Bradford Ordnance Survey map and here and there you’ll see where streams pass through wooded, stony, leafy places, actually named on the map as “Fairy Dell”, and each is where, previously, humans had their quarries. And a rule for maps and quarries is that wherever one or two made it onto the map there’ll have been dozens on the land. And of course we know places in our own locality that are home to magic no map mentions.

Still want to know what it was I left behind at the tennis court that June evening? Never gave it a thought till just lately. It was my interest in playing tennis – something I did quite frequently, then, suddenly (if that’s the word) never did again: not a decision, it just slipped away, unnoticed, dissolved into the greater meaningfulness of The Hollies’ tree-calmed air. Ever since, I’ve had plenty of other things to come here for; some of ’em not everyone can see: not with ordinary vision anyway.