A Handful of Summers

A Memoir

From beginnings on a gravel court on a farm in rural South Africa, Gordon Forbes went on to travel the world with his long-time tennis partner Abe Segal during the late 1950s and early 60s: the glory days of Fred Perry, Roy Emerson and Virginia Wade. In this delightful insider’s account of tennis on the international circuit, Forbes looks back with laughter at his tennis playing years through a varied, successful and often outrageous career on the world’s courts. This newly published edition of A Handful of Summers brings back a cult classic, revealing an era populated by the most colourful tennis players of all time. More about the hilarious escapades of players than the game itself, the book begins with a short series of vignettes from Forbes’s childhood on an Eastern Cape farm in South Africa, then takes the reader on a tennis tour – into locker rooms and restaurants, narrow streets and small hotels, and onwards to the lawns of Wimbledon and the caramel coloured clays of Roland Garros. A player of international repute, Gordon Forbes has managed to capture the irresistible charm of an era while telling the story of a young man striving to follow signposts on the winding roads of life. This is the first of Forbes’s memoirs, followed by Too Soon to Panic and I’ll Take the Sunny Side. With an original Foreword by Peter Ustinov.