Squashed!

One of Ian McEwan’s familiar set-piece exuberances in his acclaimed new novel Saturday — ‘undoubtedly his best’: Anita Brookner, The Spectator, 29 January — has neurosurgeon hero Perowne indulging in an intensely competitive game of squash with anaesthetist Strauss. The doc plays each desperately combative rally on the tightrope of his own mortality, as if every unsparingly venomous stroke might be his last. McEwan is spot-on: fiction as sporting verity. Forget the noisy, follow-my-leader courtesy of modern motor-racing, hectic hunting, or even madcaps’ mountaineering; I fancy that it is the sheer mental and physical ferocity of racket games played shoulder to shoulder in a cruelly intimate, confined space which, of all sports, transports its participants closest to death.

I’m talking both suicide and murder here. I once knew Jonah Barrington, the remarkable Brit who was wholly responsible for the astonishing squash boom of the 1970s and 1980s. Forty years ago this engaging obsessive was washer-up at nights in a Kensington bistro I used to frequent — 19 Mossop Street, next to the Admiral Codrington pub — and at dawn he moved down the road to wash milk bottles at the Chelsea Dairy. In between, all day long the wacky nut would practise squash and we used to snort and giggle with derision when he said his plan was to be world champion. And then one day, suddenly, he was — and every year between 1967 and 1973, with outrageous verve, he defended the title against a succession of fuming all-comers. I interviewed Jonah on the famous night he won his sixth championship. He was wrecked, all-in, but his eyes dazzled in delirium: ‘There was a fantastic and savage and unrivalled satisfaction the moment I knew I had him beaten.