From the top down

“Timers ready?”

I looked to the runners on the other side of the track. Some were sprinting on the spot, some knees-upping. Teachers in white shirts stood easily; the starter, pistol slackly in hand, sported his red one and awaited our signal. As the master-in-charge of timing mounted the portable stairs used exclusively for Sports Day he looked at me. “Remember, start your stopwatch when you see the smoke, not when you hear the shot.” He needn’t have told me that. I had known about the speed of sound long before he would have imagined.

I grew up living on the side of a hill overlookeing a valley in which grew dense scrub and thickets of stuff which were worth exploring but left their mark. Where the valley flattened out some plots had been cleared and friends of my mother had built there; they had also included a tennis court. Religiously rolled, its smooth gravel surface was the envy of any tennis player, my mother being the luckiest: with no more than a few minutes’ walk she could be playing the game she loved. I could even see her from our house because of the hat she wore – I liked the thh-wopp…thh-wopp of the ball too.

On a day when my brother was staying late at school, my father at work and the maid on her day off, my mother told me that I would be going down to tennis with her, but that she would phone between sets to find out if someone had arrived home and, if I wanted to, I could walk back. With their garden being big and quite wild there seemed enough to do – and there was a dog too – but after an hour of roaming around and not finding much interesting I grew bored; the dog was not much fun either. I asked her to call home.

When the set ended she and I were shown to the study where the phone was kept. From its window there was a view of our house higher up on the valley side; standing there I wondered if I would hear the phone ring in our house and as my mother dialled our six digits I watched and listened. “Ccrrr–ccrrr…”… the call had gone through, but I heard no ring from there. “Cccrrr” – and then a ring, clear as a bell. “But why did it take so long?” I asked my mom.

I think my mother tried to explain something about the speed of sound and that it doesn’t travel instantaneously – but even if she did a good job of it, seeing it happen had done all the necessary. Proof was that when I watched people on the court below hit the ball and heard the thh-wopp only later, I knew why.

In those young years our elevated site served us well. Visitors would admire the panoramic view, but my thrill came from the rare moments when my father would take the liberty which the wilds of the unoccupied land below afforded a person who had recently taken up the game of golf. Though space and expense confined my father’s practising to chipping on the modest stretch of lawn, there were the occasions when the little white balls became so scuffed and cut that they no longer served for practice and were called instead to a higher purpose. It was the moment for him to get the big stick out his bag and send the ball as far as it could fly. The chosen few would be taken to where the lawn edged up to our highest viewpoint over the valley and set upon a little white stand which my father called a tee. As he lowered the clubface to the ball on its execution block, the driver looked impossibly long and dangerous. I put my hands to my ears. The club swept back, rose above my father’s head then whistled down. A speck of white soared into the sky, hung over the valley, then fell to the dense growth below and was seen no more.

This hallowed ground of the spectacular also allowed my brother and me a rare sport: record throwing. What music we listened to then came either from the radio or in the very solid form of records, heavy, hard plastic discs known as LPs or 78s. In a contemporary James Bond film, Goldfinger, 007’s nemesis, Oddjob, could have used them. His technique of whipping the bowler off his head and underarming it at his target’s neck fifty metres away needed two elements for success: a steel-rimmed bowler and practice. If steel was not available, those LPs or 78s would have served the purpose, leaving Oddjob hatless but 007 headless. But though my brother and I had the records, the chances to practise our Oddjob skills were in short supply: records could only make the journey to the higher ground if they were so scratched and chipped that the sound from them was a danger to our eardrums. When that happened, we took it in turns, crouching side-on to the valley below, a flexed right arm curled round the left hip, fingers gripping the record, waiting for the countdown. “Zero!” The arm flicked out and the flat black disc flew, cut through the air, planed a moment, then plummeted to the trees below.

I can still see and feel that view from above. It was from there that I take away those valuable memories: one came in the form of a lesson, but more thrilling were those moments of irresponsible disposal – it felt so liberating.