The US Open, Wimbledon and air conditioning - 01 September 1989

It must be six, seven years ago, at the end of June. I was doing what I always do then, which is to sit in the living room of our beach house, what in England is called "a country cottage", doing what I'm always doing during the last week of June and the first week of July.

I was sitting facing the television set watching, one weekend, the United States Open golf championship and, from the next Monday on, switching to our blessed sports channel, a cable channel available throughout the country which televises nothing but sporting events here and abroad. Not exactly from dawn to dusk, but certainly from mid-morning till midnight.

So it's possible, and it has been done, to spend about six, seven, eight hours a day watching the whole of the French Open tennis championship. At the turn of June and July, of course, it's Wimbledon. Getting up from time to time to snatch a sandwich and back again for the long stretch on the sofa, loosening the shirt, perhaps shedding it. And, occasionally, taking a damp hand towel and wiping off the face and neck just like the tennis players out there in the steaming sun, in 100F.

The only difference between them and me was that I was inside in the steaming sun, in a temperature of say 95F. The boss of the family has kidded us, or herself, for years that out there at the end of Long Island, on a high point open to all the winds that blow across the surrounding waters of Peconic Bay, the cheerful theory is that we have never needed air-conditioning.

The house is a small, modern house, a cantilevered roof, the first of such oddities to be built at that end of the island. And, as was practically compulsory in those days when everybody was under the influence of Gropius and the other Great White Gods of the Bauhaus, there was more plate glass than wood – two long picture windows. The one facing the bay to the east so that it could absorb and spread the heat of the morning sun, the other facing the west side so as to receive and intensify the heat of the afternoon sun.

You'll gather that since the television set was in a corner of the north wall, it was perfectly placed to receive the full, dazzling blast through most of the televising of most tennis and all golf. Great! This meant that I acquired the habit of assembling odd raincoats, maybe a bed sheet or two, and somehow hanging them up against part of the west window. In this way it was possible to darken the screen, sort of, and sit and stew and enjoy the sport.

This was not an arrangement pleasing to the boss of the house. She is not, unfortunately, a sports maniac. She can recognise John McEnroe. But otherwise Ivan Lendl might be the head of Solidarity and Ballasteros the brand name of a Spanish motor car.

She put up with my sluggish devotion to the two great games for many years because she was always off swimming, sculling, gardening, marketing, fixing this pipe and that fuse, doing all the things that are normally done by the man about the house. At such times, I'm sorry to say, I was, am, the slug about the house.

However, there came a day, as I say, about six, seven years ago when, while I was absorbed by maybe the arrival of the scene of Boom Boom Becker, there came a discreet knock on the door. I got up and was greeted by a small, thin, wispy, very old man. He must have been at least 76.

"Hello Mr Ewell", I said. He was a builder who lived on the west side, a little down the Point.

"I've brought the plans", he said. "Is Jane around?" "The plans?" I said. "Jane? Oh yes! Jane! I'll get her!"

So I took a bell off a stone shelf and went out onto the terrace and waved it, which had the effect of making her pop out of her studio, which is about 50 yards away over the dunes and come running, her sticky hands holding a clutch of paintbrushes. "Ah! Walter!", she said.

This was a very great mystery to me. I went off in a corner while they sat together on the sofa and the old man spread out what looked like one of those huge large-scale maps got out by the United States cartographic department.

This, said the old man, is a very neat job. Thank you, she said. I gathered that the architectural drawing they were looking at was not his work, but hers. She suggested that if I turned that thing off, I'd be better employed making a quick date with the local golf pro or otherwise getting lost. I did so! What they were on about, I had not the faintest idea.

Well, the big map comprised the plans for an underground retreat. Not precisely underground, but down parallel with the foundations. In short, my wife had had enough and decided on her own to commission a room of my own which would have fanlight windows on the east wall, no windows at all on the north and west sides.

Three months later, it was done. She had the idea actually from another German architect, Adolf Hitler. And we call it "The Bunker". And there, in the hot months, at the height of the golf and tennis seasons, domestic bliss is restored, I like to think.

The brilliant touch which had not occurred to me is that buried in the corner of a far wall was an air conditioner which, at the touch of a digit, will very soon produce a room temperature of 65, 70, whatever you want. Whenever necessary – to snatch the sandwich, to grab a beer, I hasten to say to my old Methodist friends that the new, non-alcoholic beers are remarkable – of course then you have to emerge from the icebox of the Bunker into the furnace of the outdoors and the oven of the upstairs indoors.

But then, back again into that tiny, compact world of the professional athlete whose general glow of health and routine optimism is generated, I'm convinced, not by all the running and training and muscle-building but by the fact that he is totally isolated from the world and all its woes.

By the way, I've just been reading "A life..." the only life, "of the late, great Mr Justice Holmes" whose majestic serenity in the face of difficult, even calamitous events, is always put down to a character of monumental stoicism.

It could rather have been, I think, that from his early youth on, from the years he fought in the Civil War, on through Depression, strikes, race riots, the First World War and the Great Depression till his death at 93, he made a point of never reading a newspaper.

There are solemn people, intellectual, non-intellectual, worthy, high-minded people who deplore professional sports as an escape, the opiate of the people. The late President Harry Truman was one. He must be the only president who never invited an athlete to the White House. Sports, he once said, is a lot of damned nonsense.

But if it is an escape, I'd say it's a very necessary one. Not least for people near, in, or covering government, who spend most days boning up on and worrying about the deficit, Lebanon, housing for the poor, the Colombian drug cartel, the growing race feeling in the suburbs of big cities, the impossible invasion of inassimilable immigrants, such a wounding statistic as I noted this week – that in New York City alone, where half of all the black babies born are illegitimate, there are 140,000 children here between the ages of 12 and 17 who are addicts of crack or cocaine.

On the frightening problem of stemming or stopping the coca crop of Bolivia and Peru, its transformation in Colombia into cocaine and the ruthless industry of the Colombian drug kings in murdering the judges and sending billions of dollars of the stuff into the United States, that's something we've not gone into at any length but next week possibly, I think when the president announces his new policy, we shall have to do our best at least to trace the massive complexity of the problem.

So, it has been for me, among others of my trade, a breathing space, a deliberate escape into a world of competition and conflict where unlike the worlds of government and politics, somebody always wins.

In fact this past week has been unique in that we found ourselves commuting by day and night between two unreal worlds. By day, the tennis. By night, the marvelling contemplation of something I wish I knew more about. The wholly incredible, mammoth achievement, after 12 years of travel, of the good ship Voyager and its photographing and probing of Neptune and its moons.

I envy a grandson of mine who, at 19 is a mathematician and something of an astronomer, to whom the whole thing makes exciting sense. To the rest of us brought up aeons ago on algebra, geometry, trigonometry and English weather bulletins which talked exclusively of anti-cyclones and bright intervals, it is beyond our comprehension to hear that Voyager, as it approached Neptune within several hundred thousand miles was sending important messages back to Earth at the rate of 120,000 a second and then, pant, pant, at only 30,000 a second.

That we had sharp, astonishing pictures of the outer limits of the solar system, that having woken up on a Friday morning to see Voyager flying actually over Neptune and then, on Sunday, waking up to hear that all was well and that Voyager was off on its own for keeps, travelling at good speed, two and a half million miles beyond Neptune. By this time I expect it's being waved at by the crowds on some unknown planet who are watching the annual Planetary Open tennis championship.

One famous astronomer invited on Friday to say how Voyager's feat stood in relation to the history of exploration to Marco Polo, Magellan, Christopher Columbus, said, "It's greater than any of them. At least it's an amazing as Columbus. But we knew where we were going! And we found it."

Well to come down to earth and throw a crumb to those listeners who must have some item of world news. Let me report that the new American ambassador to the troubled nation of Czechoslovakia has just presented her credentials. She is Shirley Temple.

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