THERE IS BRIDGE AND THERE is family bridge. The first is, as everybody knows, a game of skill demanding qualities of mind from mathematical ability to acute critical analysis.
Family bridge is best summed up by the following vignette from our own family bridge life in the past: “Don’t give me those burning eyes, Damian,” says the distinguished parental figure — and partner — to the stroppy teenager who counts himself with some reason as the better player of the two: “How was I to know you had a void?”
Damian’s explicit answer was long, not to say acrimonious, and can easily be filled in by all those who have had the pleasure of playing family bridge. (I believe it was shortly after that the teenager in question took to playing bridge on the internet with some unknown Chinese ladies who would never have to gaze into his burning eyes.)
Both kinds of bridge are celebrated by Sandy Balfour in Vulnerable in Hearts: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons and Contract Bridge. Instructive, entertaining (very) and at times quite poignant, it tells the story of two great influences in his life. Both started life around 1925. One was his father, Tom Balfour, born in Catholic Scotland and evacuated to South Africa, where he remained, in 1940; the other was the game of contract bridge, whose rules were first formulated towards the end of 1925.
Balfour starts his double narrative with his presence at his father’s deathbed, in a hospital in Durban (he himself had left South Africa 20 years earlier, reversing the trajectory of his father’s life). Almost immediately the theme of bridge is introduced: “Our conversations were as they had always been, coded, cautious and full of silences. They were like the bidding in bridge. Few words were needed, and those we used took on different meanings depending on when they were said and by whom . . .” And after the funeral, what do the family do? Why, they sit down and play bridge because at last they are only four people. As Balfour writes of past games: “We were a family of five, which is the perfect number for bridge. Four to play and one to make tea.”
After the obsequies, Balfour returns to the history of bridge and an amazing intricate story it is. The 1925 date (although a nice conceit for the writer) is in a way delusion because bridge springs from a long tradition of whist. An 18th-century book on the subject by Edmund Hoyle was an enormous success even if the title is on the long side for today’s bestseller lists: A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist, Containing the Laws of the Game, and Also Some Rules Whereby a Beginner May, with Due attention to Them, Attain to the Playing It well. (My own future work, as yet still on the drawing-board or rather the card-table, will be called Sorry, Partner! with the sub-title: A Catalogue of mistakes I have Made and How I could have avoided them; I only hope I replicate Hoyle’s success.)
The leap from whist to bridge seems to have occurred some time in the 19th century with its cradle, as with so many other things, in the Middle East. There was an extremely popular game called Biritch in Constantinople in the 1880s, and some have speculated that the game was played by British soldiers in the Crimea. Other possibilities are that the word derived from Serbo-Croat or referred to the bridge that spanned the Golden Horn, at the end of which lay a coffee-house and a good game of cards.
I love the idea, however fanciful, of Florence Nightingale using her lamp to light up a good, relaxing game of bridge in the Crimea: it seems to relate to the general passion for bridge that soldiers have felt. Eisenhower adored the game and is supposed to have chosen his No 2 at Nato (General Alfred Maximilian Gruenther) for that reason: “I ought to take Bedell Smith. But I think I’ll take Gruenther because he’s a better bridge player.” Is it something to do with the possibilities that bridge offers for concentration on finer things in times of stress? Many soldiers have occupied themselves in the manner that Balfour’s father spent his war in Italy, “playing bridge in a state of constant alert”.
With the beginning of bridge proper, Balfour finds himself with a rich harvest of characters, from Harold Vanderbilt and Ely Culbertson in the Twenties down to the Tory politician Iain Macleod. During the war, Macleod was in danger of being arrested as a spy when an intelligence officer found a suspicious line in his handwriting: “Ax, Kxxx, Qxxx, KQx”, unaware that he was looking at a bridge hand. Later Macleod presented a copy of his own book Bridge is an Easy Game to the library at No 10 with a note on the fly-leaf: “This is the only book in this place that is certain to profit its reader.” (I hope it is still there.)
Bridge is now played worldwide: Chairman Mao tried to ban it in China in 1949 as being too middle-class and refined. The ban was lifted in 1979 — hence Damian’s internet ladies — and the Chinese now constitute the most numerous bridge players in the world. This brings me to the precise nature of its appeal which, as is clear from its Chinese history, has absolutely nothing to do with nationality.
For Balfour, I gather, it is the idea of bridge as a guide to life. He peppers his narrative with references to play, conventions and how they relate to our general conduct, as well as giving some brief discussions of the rules along the way. (I don’t think you would be able to learn how to play bridge from this book, because the meandering through a family past would get in the way, but you might well be excited enough to do so.) Balfour also likes “the world of bridge ”, with its “gory images”; that is to say, cards are “spectacularly jettisoned”, not discarded, and a 1,100 penalty is “a massacre or a bloodbath”.
Personally I do like the language of bridge, if not the gory side of it (especially when I am being massacred, doubled and vulnerable; on one of those disastrous occasions when in my pride I have madly forgotten that there was such a word as “double” and that my opponent might use it). I also appreciated all the sayings associated with the game that have accrued to it over the years. Balfour quotes his father’s wise saw: “There’s many a man walking the Embankment who did not get out his trumps in time”; as a child he fantasised about that particular embankment and where it was. My own father was a nifty if acerbic player and since for the rest of the time he was extremely good-natured, perhaps it was just family bridge that got to him. He added to the story of the man on the Embankment for us: “As he walks, he meets another man coming the other way who forgot the maxim that if you’re going to trump, trump high . . . ”
None of this is really the fundamental reason that I love bridge. For me it’s quite simply the excitement of picking up the new hand. I suffer from the absolute conviction that each new hand will be the Big One, and although nearly always disappointed, I am sure that for the rest of my life I shall continue to respond eagerly to the question: “Care for a game?” — even if burning eyes are bent on me at the end of it, while I mutter: “Sorry, partner.”
Where to see
SANDY BALFOUR
DATE Friday October 14
PLACE town hall
TIME 10am
TICKETS £6 from 01242 227979
www.cheltenhamfestivals.org.uk
