Bridging the decades

An unexpected pleasure of my retirement has been that I’ve been able to start playing bridge again.

That’s a game I enjoy. It isn’t as intellectually challenging as chess, but it’s a good deal quicker. If I ever play chess once more, it has to be outdoors, so that if I need something faster moving, for a little excitement between moves, I can watch the grass growing.

Besides, bridge combines competition with collaboration, since you play with a partner. That’s much more fun. It also gives you someone to blame for your errors.

Generally, it’s just more social. And, indeed, when we started playing here in Valencia, Danielle and I travelled into town several times for games with two people who have quickly become good friends. They’re both older than us, but impressively young at heart. He’s Hungarian by birth though, after a childhood mostly spent in Britain, speaks a beautiful English that would pass as an Englishman’s. 

She’s from eastern Switzerland and is the first speaker I’ve come to know personally of that country’s fourth official language, Romansh, spoken by maybe 50,000 people in the world. Since they’re so few in number, most of its speakers, and this includes her, also speak German or Italian, and she has both. The couple live part of the year in France (pandemic permitting), and she speaks French too, as well as the English she uses with us. And now she’s mastered Spanish, naturally, while she’s been living here. There may be other languages she’s learned, but I don’t know about them yet.

They have a fund of great stories to tell, and we used to enjoy spending time with them. As often as not we’d have lunch, which was also better for conversation, once the cards were out of the way.

Of course, Covid restrictions have done away with all that. Now we play online, which is OK, though it suffers from two problems. The first is that we use an internet service, whose software doesn’t always work, so on one occasion my partnership was awarded a lot of points we hadn’t won. I prefer winning to losing but prefer to do it with points I’ve actually earned. As well as software problems, we’re all of us dependent on various bits of hardware to access the service, and they can’t always be relied on either, leading to irritating interruptions.

But the worst thing is not meeting face to face. I did so enjoy it when we could. It was a pleasure in itself, but it also reminded me of the days when I was playing in England in the 1970s. 

Great Aunt Rene, second from left
Great Uncle Reg, third from left

I used to play with a great aunt and a great uncle of mine. I was a callow student at the time. Having screwed up one attempt at a degree, I was having a second go while working as well. I was also playing squash and tennis (despite smoking like a chimney – why on Earth did I do that?), I was in an amateur dramatic group and I was conducting an immensely complex and unnecessarily dramatic emotional life (hey, I was in my twenties).

Sometimes, it makes me feel tired just to think of those days.

Bridge sessions with my aged relatives (I can still say that: I’m not yet quite as old today as they were then) offered brief moments of gentility as a respite from the roller coaster of my daily life. There would always be a break for tea halfway through, served in china cups and accompanied by cake or biscuits, sometimes even both, and gentle conversation. At the end of the game, we might get a glass of sherry to wrap up the day.

Reg had won the Military Cross for valour in the Frist World War, when he had single-handedly attacked and captured a German machinegun nest. This was a surprising discovery, since when I knew him, he seemed inoffensive, cheerful and pleasant, but not at all the kind of man capable of such daring aggressiveness. Perhaps he used up a lifetime’s worth in one burst of reckless frenzy.

Rene was remarkable. She was a sister of my paternal grandfather, who was only fifteen when his own father had died. This was in the early years of the twentieth century, at a time when a family had to be headed by a ‘man’, so it fell on his shoulders to play that role, though his mother was still alive.

Rene was clever and wanted to make something of it. When it came to the right time, she broached the subject with her brother. 

“I want to go to university,” she told him.

That simply wasn’t going to happen. I’m sure money was tight, but I suspect means would have been found had she been a boy. As it was, she had to be satisfied with being a wife and later a mother, making ends meet in difficult circumstances for several decades, but always maintaining a quiet dignity and the kind of refined gentility I enjoyed so much on the occasions we met to play bridge.

Such gentility every day would have been too rich a diet. From time to time, it was a delight and a restful change from the hurly burly. Being reminded of it has been a pleasure, as I’ve returned to bridge here.

But not online. That gentle pleasure, and the memories of my great aunt Rene and my great-uncle Reg, really need face-to-face play to start again. Something to look forward to when these tedious restrictions finally end.

Still. In the meantime, I can at least continue enjoying the game itself. Even online, it’s better than chess. 

Whatever The Queen’s Gambit may suggest.