A Journey That Turned Daughters to Friends

It is a journey that began 25 years ago.

A journey that began with the birth of a daughter, and continued three years later with the birth of her sister.

They were as chalk and cheese almost from the first moment. The elder was fair, the younger was dark. The first loved nothing more than to share a book, absorbed by the pictures, then revelling in the words. The second, she also loved story-time, but was desperate to crawl, walk, run.

The first was entirely biddable, the other a challenger.

But they had a couple of things in common. They were competitive: the consequence of having a sportsman for a father and a mother with an insecurity complex! And they both—they now admit—thought we loved the other more.

I was always attracted to athletic men—and if they had a look of Scott Walker about them, even better. So I was singularly blessed to have such a man dig below my insecurities—he still does.

The only sport we had in common, and then only just, was tennis. Wherever we happened to live, we drifted to the local courts and, once in a while, I would actually win!

I watched Wimbledon avidly—It was the only televised tennis in the UK back then. I queued for tickets every year, and failed every year, to see my hero Bjorn Borg. My husband could never fathom the tears that pricked my cheeks when Borg lost to John McEnroe in 1981.

No surprise, then, that both daughters picked up a racket while still very small, and that their father patiently batted ball after ball to them, praising and reassuring them constantly.

Sunny, easy Sundays were always spent this way, or swimming, or riding, or just on long treks.

But year by year, as the era of Boris Becker and my new favourite Stefan Edberg gave way to Pete Sampras, so the differing talents of my daughters gradually took them onto diverging paths.

The elder followed her right hand, via an unquenchable love of learning, to academic success. The younger followed her left hand, stunning on the tennis court, into a wider, more adventurous, less predictable world.

The shared time on courts, in pools, on country paths dwindled. The tensions of adolescence—especially mixed like a cocktail with my own dose of maternal stress and middle age—brought discord into holidays and then into daily life. Sisters turned from allies and companions to mutual antipathy.

There were tears at bedtime. There were tears, and more, at other times, too.

Every molecule of energy became focused on achieving the smallest of successes: the occasional birthday meal together, a night with everyone safely indoors, a morning where each of us made it to work or to school or the station.

More years passed in which tennis was a background hum that rarely broke through the domestic imperative. Sampras was still “the man” at Wimbledon, and I was conscious of a battling Pat Rafter and a jubilant Goran Ivanicevic.

Then a certain Mark Philippousis made the final, and my elder daughter fell head over heels as I had done with Borg. I barely noticed the man who had hair pulled back into an ugly ponytail on the other side of the net. I did notice my daughter’s pricking cheeks when he deprived her beau of the title.

The period between 2003 and 2004 marked another transition. That same daughter approached graduation and the end of parental dependence. She took on her own demons, and chose the challenges of a tough job in London.

Meanwhile, her rebellious sibling, against all the odds, returned to a much-hated school to sit her exams. She wanted to prove something to her critical teachers: she passed every subject.

Point proven, she sought the independence that only work could bring, and she was successful there, too.

Roger Federer was taking over the reins of Wimbledon, but I was still not ready for him. There came a sting in the tail that I’d not expected.

I was unaware of my father’s love of tennis until almost the end. He had not indulged his interest because my mother didn’t approve. But after her death, he had quietly become addicted to the ladies of Wimbledon.

So it happened that we spent a companionable week in the summer of 2004, he admiring the new-in-town Maria Sharapova, me at last noticing the talents of that pony-tailed man.

My father and I shared few more summers, yet he would continue to make a precious contribution to this story.

His modest savings were of little interest to the Inland Revenue but of boundless value to me. For the first time in my life, I had the financial wherewithal to indulge me and mine. So I did.

By 2007, I was on the tennis bandwagon. I fell in thrall, belatedly, to the graceful Wimbledon champion, now the US Champion. This inspired me to enter the Wimbledon ballot for the first time.

When Centre Court tickets fell through my letter box, I was at long last able to take a seat alongside the hallowed turf, and in the company of an elder daughter now gripped by Rafael Nadal fever. We were doubly blessed with a semi-final each of Federer and Nadal.

She and I began to play tennis together once more, and she it was who sowed the seeds of Shanghai. She and a still-encouraging husband fanned that new little flame of adventure in me. It was an indulgence of which my father would approve!

We shared on that trip more undivided time than we had done in years. And we were both unceremoniously bitten by the travel bug. She is, at this very moment, exploring South America.

Come December, I discovered that my younger daughter had sought out tickets to the Black Rock Masters in London. She was once more interested enough in tennis to watch the old guys!

I finally got to see Edberg, she cheered on Pat Cash, and we gossiped like old neighbours.

It seemed somehow right, therefore, that Centre Court tickets should again fall onto my door mat this summer. They gave me the chance to replicate a mother-and-daughter moment.

Second time around, I again saw Federer and she saw her favourite, Novak Djokovic. The symmetry with the previous year was so striking it seemed preordained.

We intend to complete the story with one final grandfatherly indulgence: not in Shanghai but in Flushing Meadow. And when we return, she plans to go to university.

So here we are, like mountain tracks that diverge around a hill’s contours only to merge again on the other side, a mother and two daughters as close as on those sunny Sundays. We’re revelling in tennis, travelling the world, confiding our secrets, having fun.

And out of all this has come something yet more enjoyable: quite simply, friendship.