My Wimbledon Summer

“Did you know,” said my student friend Susan one summer afternoon a hundred years ago as we lay in the long grass outside Royal Holloway College, “that you can get temporary jobs at Wimbledon for the tennis championships?”

(Food Photographer | Jennifer Pallian)

I had not known that. My experience of playing tennis, to be honest, had always been one of profound disappointment. I liked wearing the short skirts that showed off my legs; I felt pleasingly dashing and sporty swinging my racket on the way to the court; but when it came to the attendant business of finding contact between that same racket and a ball, the affair would go south with alarming rapidity. But watching the Wimbledon tennis fortnight was another story. Wimbledon was a staple of the English summer; it spoke long light afternoons and sun-tanned players wearing white shorts, the romantic thwack of the ball against the grass of the court, bright sunshine and endless strawberries and cream.

“They don’t pay much,” said Susan. “And you don’t get to choose what you do so you don’t know exactly what you’re signing on for. But you’d be part of Wimbledon anyway.”

It sounded fun, I thought. My family lived in North London and Wimbledon is in the South West of the city; but the tournament was a London tradition, and I fancied myself, in those long-gone days, as a quintessential Londoner.

“Shall we do it?” I said. “We could stay with my family, although it would be quite a long trip to get to Wimbledon.”

“It wouldn’t be too bad,” said Susan. Susan was from Manchester but, mysteriously, seemed to know considerably more about London than did my quintessentially London self. “We’d just take the Piccadilly Line and change to the District.”

So we went to stay with my family in Palmers Green.

“We’ll take the bus to Wood Green Tube Station,” I said as we set out on our first day.

“Let’s take the train to Finsbury Park and get the Tube there,” said Susan. “The bus can be slow at this time of day.”

I hadn’t thought of that.

“We’ll change to the District Line at South Kensington,” I said.

“Let’s change at Earl’s Court,” said Susan. “It’s easier there.”

“But I like South Kensington,” I said. South Kensington was green and leafy and filled with old high-ceilinged houses that had been converted into flats where debonair young women ate muesli for breakfast before going to buy frilled Edwardian-style blouses at Laura Ashley. Earl’s Court, on the other hand, was noisy and bustling and homed a gargantuan exhibition hall where the nuns had once led a school party all the way from Wood Green to attend a Vocations Exhibition featuring a variety of different nuns, all wearing different habits and attached to different orders, but all nuns nevertheless, and all smiling alluringly at our appalled teenaged selves as they hymned the joys of convent life.

“We’re not going to get out there,” said Susan. “We’re just changing trains, and Earl’s Court has a shorter walk between the platforms.”

How did she know these things?

At the appointed time, we presented ourselves at the gates of Wimbledon. We both looked OK, I think. We were neither of us going to be scouted by a modeling agency – we were English Literature students, for heaven’s sake, our idea of a cutting edge accessory was the new Penguin Middlemarch, and our notion of the dizzying pinnacle of sophistication was duck à l’orange at the Berni Inn just outside Staines – but we’d combed our hair and brushed our teeth and our faces shone with eagerness. Susan was small and bespectacled with a Northern accent, I was pink and plump with a Southern, but beyond that, there was little apparent difference between us.

The posh woman at the gate looked at us thoughtfully, then came to a decision.

“You,” she said coldly to Susan, “go up those stairs there and talk to the people in the office.”

She smiled, generously, at me.

“And you,” she continued, raising a beckoning finger. “Come with me.”

Well, I thought ignobly, as she led me past the tennis courts. That would show Susan from Manchester who knew so much more about London transport than I did. There was she, sent to languish in some airless office in the background, and here was I being led to the courts themselves. It just showed, I thought, that even Susan could never tell where life might lead you.

“You,” the woman told me impressively, “are going to be a strawberry girl.”

Well, well, well, I thought, preening. Strawberries are as integral a part of the Wimbledon tradition as the white shorts and the ball boys, and have been served at the tournament ever since its beginning. The woman must have seen something special in me indeed to appoint me a strawberry girl.

The woman continued to lead me past the courts and away from the crowds to a small tent at the edge of the property, where she presented me to an even posher woman with an even more generous smile.

“Another strawberry girl for you!” she announced.

“Oh, good!” said the even posher woman. She rose and, with a flourish, presented me with a punnet of strawberries.

“Hull these, please, strawberry girl,” she instructed me.

A full punnet of Wimbledon strawberries! I was overcome with excitement at the honor entrusted to me. Proudly, I grasped the bottom of the first fruit and used my strong peasant thumb to pull firmly at its leaves until the core came away from the body. Then another, and another, and before too long I had a bowlful of balls of scarlet fruits, hull-free and pretty as a picture. What came next, I wondered? To whom would I be required to present them and where? Would there be a small ceremony for which I would be required to change into a red costume? Would there be speeches? Would …

“Next punnet, please, strawberry girl!” said the even posher woman. “They don’t hull themselves, you know.”

An estimated 1.92 million strawberries are eaten every year during Wimbledon fortnight. They are grown on a local farm, picked by hand and delivered fresh daily, and I’m supposing that these days they have some sort of machine that hulls them, or at the very least a set of paring knives for the unhappy hullers. On that day, it was only me, three or four cowed fellow serfs and our bare thumbs, sitting in a dark tent in soul-shattered silence that was broken only by the occasional roar of the crowd, wafting cruelly from the part of the club where the tennis was happening.

“That was slave labor,” I said when I met Susan at the gates a couple of long centuries later.

“They work you hard,” agreed Susan. “But it’s fun, too, isn’t it?”

Fun, I thought, inspecting my thumb with mild fascination: it was swollen with pain and dark with juices, and, it would transpire, would remain so for the rest of the summer. If I cast my mind back a very long time, I thought, I might be just able to discern, emerging dreamlike from the mists of another life, a concept I had once known as fun.

“What have they got you doing?” I said.

“I’m serving teas in the tearoom,” said Susan.

I paused to grasp a lamppost for support.

“You’re what?” I said.

“It’s a lot of work,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how many strawberry teas people will get through.”

“I think I would,” I said.

“And it’s sometimes hard to concentrate,” she said, “because we’re looking out onto Centre Court, and it can get distracting when the game gets exciting.”

“Centre Court,” I said.

“But the clients are very nice,” she said. “And I’ve been getting some nice big tips to help out with that awful salary.”

“Tips,” I said.

“The other workers are good fun too,” she said. “There’s a ball boy who comes in sometimes who’s reading history at Oxford.” She blushed a little. “I think he likes me.”

There was a silence.

“Do you want to change trains at South Kensington?” she said.

“No thanks,” I said. I have my pride after all. “Earl’s Court will do just fine.”

I never went back to Wimbledon after that day: neither my spirit nor my thumb could face it. I didn’t see much of Susan for the summer either: she would skip happily to the train in the morning, and after work would snatch a light supper of leftover delectables from the tearoom before going out for a drink with the history student, who, it turned out, did like her quite a lot. At the end of the fortnight, she took her saved-up tip money and went to Oxford Street to buy clothes at Miss Selfridge (clothes! at Miss Selfridge!) to wear in the South of France, where the history student had invited her to his parents’ house just outside Avignon.

I meanwhile, broke and single, spent my summer sitting at home listening to Radio One with my younger brothers, contemplating my thumb, and brooding bleakly on the black injustices of life.

Susan is still a good friend. She lives in a small town outside Manchester, is married to a solicitor, and has two daughters, one son, and a small army of grandchildren, on whom she dotes dottily. I imagine she looks back on that summer with great fondness. But if she does, she is kind enough not to mention it to me, and I am not about to ask.