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I had read and enjoyed Sandy Balfour’s previous book, Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8), with the subtitle, ‘A Memoir of Love, Exile and Crosswords’. This book is sub-titled, ‘A Memoir of Fathers, Sons and Contract Bridge’. In both of them, the final subject is dominant, though with an important difference. Crossword puzzles are usually a solitary pursuit; the sanguine solver may, in difficulties, solicit help, or accept defeat rather than dependence. In Balfour’s first book, the details are in the different devils responsible for setting the puzzles, with their peculiar mannerisms, tricks and skills.
Bridge is, by contrast, a social game, requiring two opposing sets of two partners. It may even engage bystanders who, known as kibitzers, offer unsolicited advice, though not legitimately during the play. And they are not always tolerated afterwards, when their hindsight excites an exercise in superior judgment. Partnership itself provides ample opportunity for misunderstanding and recrimination, even or rather especially between those in a marital relationship.
Balfour retells the tale of the Bennett couple at Kansas City in 1929. Having retired to the kitchen while her husband attempted to make a game contract in spades, Myrtle returned to find that he had failed. She abused him as ‘a bum player’, he struck her, and she shot him dead. She was subsequently acquitted on a charge of murder, with a jury verdict of accidental death. At the trial, Ely Culbertson, the revered guru at the time, averred that while the contract had been overbid, it could have been made.
Bridge has had a long and colourful history, which Balfour takes and gives much pleasure in recalling. We learn about Harold Sterling Vanderbilt, a significant figure in the evolution of auction into contract bridge, which he launched into polite society on the cruise ship SS Finland while passing through the Panama canal in 1925. The somewhat raffish Ely Culbertson, whose wife and partner Josephine was arguably the better player, promoted the game to his immense personal enrichment. Morton Sobell, sentenced to 30 years in prison for espionage, so spread addiction to the game in Alcatraz that of the 250 prisoners there up to 80 were to be found passing the time by playing bridge at week-ends.
Once captivated by the game, players could scarcely bear to be without it. General Eisenhower was angered to be summoned from the table by a phone call from President Truman. Deng Xiaoping ignored Chairman Mao’s 1949 ban on bridge as a middle-class affectation. The family of Tom Balfour became a functioning four (father, mother, Sandy and his sister Jackie). Sandy’s brother Dave avoided as far as possible the tensions and trials involved. For Dad took his bridge seriously, announcing and repeating as he dealt the cards, ‘You must let them know who’s boss.’
Evacuated as a boy to South Africa during the second world war, a brilliant student in the Cape, a graduate in chemical engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, Tom did not live up to the promise and ‘only ever found that self-belief at the bridge table’. His dying at the age of 76, from a cancer that had already consumed bits of him, is described with a detail that dignifies the man and defines the extent of the loss.
This is a rich book. It takes in the journey to Scotland which Sandy and his own son visit in search of the family past and their surviving relatives. It includes, as little more than noises off, the seismic changes in South African society outside the windows of the Balfour home in Durban. Yet it is never in danger of seeming disorderly. There is art in the organisation, and all the more for being concealed.
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