Escaping from the Colditz prisoner of war camp…but only for fun
Tennis continued to loom large in my Easter holidays story, although it is clear from my diary entries that others were losing interest, making the visits to the tennis club rarer:
OK, OK, I’ll translate it. Just hold on a tick.
Sunday, 7 April 1974 – Yomtov [Pesach, aka Passover], so no [Hebrew] classes. Not a good day.
Monday, 8 April 1974 – Bought paints. Painted soldiers. Another bad day!!!!
Tuesday, 9 April 1974 – The Black Arrow [1973] cartoon in morn. Afternoon tennis coaching. No classes, so later tennis.
Wednesday, 10 April 1974 – A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court cartoon. Tennis very good Gary and Mark were there only -people are losing interest.
Thursday, 11 April 1974 – very uneventful.
Friday, 12 April 1974 – Good Friday – Dad home. Good fun. Dad had fun too! Shopped for suits.
Saturday, 13 April 1974 – took a rest. Uneventful day.
I managed to find the Connecticut Yankee film on YouTube, but not The Black Arrow one from the 1970s:
I’m trying to work out who Gary and Mark (the last lads standing with me playing tennis) might have been. I’ll guess that Gary was Gary Sugarman who lived in our road. Gary did have a brother whose name escapes me – possibly Mark. I don’t remember a Mark in our street or entourage from thereabouts.
A message from Alan Cooke which I think unequivocally solves the “source of Escape From Colditz” query:
The Cooke household certainly owned ‘Escape from Colditz’. It was an unusual board game as it required one player to be the German Security Officer who essentially had to thwart all the others.
The rules were a bit vague in some areas allowing vibrant ‘discussion’ in family play
I remembered that Andy and Fiona Levinson were involved and several other kids of our age from the street and local area. The following week’s diary is revealing in several additional ways.
I’ll transcribe the diary entries in full at the end of this article, because I want to focus on a couple of key facts that leap out of the page at me.
The first obvious point is that tennis gets a mention in every entry, except the Sunday one which was dominated by (Hebrew) classes and family s*it.
But the item that screamed off this page at me, inducing mixed emotions of joy and embarrassment, is the entry for 3 April:
Wednesday 3 April 1974. Morn uneventful. Afternoon tennis: Gary [Sugarman] Stewart [sic – actually Stuart Harris] and John [almost certainly Davies], M singles & doubles tournament – SH & I won!
The reason for my embarrassment is that I maintained, for best part of half a century, that I had never won anything at hand/racket sports.
…when I again asserted, it seems wrongly, that I had never previously achieved tournament success.
Yet, it seems that my very first tournament, at Woodfield Grove Tennis Club, was, in fact, a winning one.
Just imagine the scale of that tournament and what it must have meant to all concerned. At least four participants (four are named in my diary piece). Further, the tournament was won by a couple of genuinely local boys.
Stuart Harris, my partner in crime for that tournament victory, is not a relative of mine. Our street, Woodfield Avenue, was blessed with a Harris family at each end.
Ours, the smaller Harris family, just me and my parents, at the north end of Woodfield Avenue. Stuart’s family, with multiple children, at the south end of the same road. Stuart’s dad was named Nathan, known as Naff. Stuart’s family were referred to as “The Naff Harrises” to distinguish them from our family, which might thus have been described as “The Tasteful Harrises”, but were probably known as “The Peter Harrises”…or possibly an adjective I would prefer not to learn about after all this time.
Parenthetically [did you see what I did there], calling my family “The Peter Harrises” would subsequently do no good at all, when another unrelated Peter Harris moved in next door to my parents’ house. A nightmare for the postal and delivery services ensued.
The headline photo shows me and Stuart larking around in The Tasteful Harris garden a couple of years later. Sadly, we have no pictures of me and Stuart in action, pulling off our stunning tournament victory that day in 1974, but I did commission DALL-E to reimagine the scene using AI technology and I think it has done quite well:
That tournament success seems to have preoccupied me so much that I simply scrubbed out the following two days. Presumably the celebrations went on deep into the night and then into the next night…
…or perhaps I was starting to lose interest in diary writing for a while, as evidenced by my seven month “sabbatical” between late April and late November that year.
Anyway, I shall use this diary discovery to try and reconnect with Stuart after all these years (I think I have found him) and we’ll see if any amusing memories and/or law suits ensue from him.
Postscript: Stuart Harris And I Are Indeed Now Back In Touch With One Another
Stuart, amongst many other things unrelated to this piece, points out that there was a Stewart in our street: Stewart Starkin, who quite probably was part of our tennis-take-up group that Easter. Indeed, re-reading my diary entry I strongly suspect that the name Stewart does indeed refer to the other Stewart and SH refers to Stuart Harris. That means that there must have been at least five of us in that tournament, which puts the victory on an even more impressive footing, don’t you think?
Here, For The Record, Is That Entire Diary Week Transcribed.
Sunday 31 March 1974 – Classes in morn. G Anne, Ida trouble [that means a family row]. VERY BAD DAY.
Monday 1 April 1974 – Tennis v good in morn. Afternoon OK. Andrew [Levinson] for badminton.
Tuesday 2 April 1974 – Tennis instruction v good. Classes good. Donuts for class notes. [Some form of sweetmeat bribery to do our studies, if I recall correctly]
Wednesday 3 April 1974. Morn uneventful. Afternoon tennis: Gary [Sugarman] Stewart [sic – actually Stuart Harris] and John [almost certainly Davies], M singles & doubles tournament – SH & I won!
Thursday X
Friday X
Saturday 6 April 1974 – Tennis morn. Afternoon uneventful. Seder v good – sung Ma Nishtana – v enjoyable evening.
Oh boy, was I hooked on the tennis early.
Here is another 1976 take on the dynamic duo that won that Woodfield Grove trophy in 1974 – the pictures below taken the same day as the headline picture:
