LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ONE 1946-1959

       I could have been a Russian.

      My story begins not in Bucharest, Romania, but beyond the mountains of Transylvania, in what is now the independent republic of Moldova, a country squeezed in between the Ukraine and Romania and that was formerly part of the Soviet Union.

      My mother, Elena, was born there in 1907, but she and her younger sister were orphaned during the First World War. In fact, I have no further details of who they were brought up by because my mother never spoke about her childhood. I only discovered that she had lost both parents when her sister revealed this to me shortly before her death a couple of years ago, and, as my mother had long since passed away, I was unable to find out anything more about her early years.

      My father, Gheorghe, was born in 1906 in Ramnicul-Sârat, which means Salty River, and is a town about 240 km from Bucharest in the mountainous Muntenia region of Romania. He met my mother in 1925, when he came to Moldova to work as a policeman for the national bank, the Banca Nationala a Romaniei (BNR). He worked all his life for this bank. Within a year, they were married and my eldest brother Volodia was born. By 1933, they had two more children, Ana born in 1930 and Constantin three years later. In those days, though, medicine was not as developed as it is today, and when Volodia fell ill, aged eight, nothing was available to help him. I don’t know what he died of but I think he had the sort of illness that today would simply have been cured with antibiotics.

      I have no doubt that losing a child is the worst thing that can happen in life, so I can only imagine that losing their first-born child must have hit my parents hard. This may partly explain the nine-year gap between Constantin’s birth and the birth of their next two children, Cornelia in 1942 and Georgeta in 1944. Barely a few weeks after Georgeta’s birth, however, the Russians started making their way towards Moldova. It was then that my father decided to take the entire family back to his home town of Ramnicul-Sârat. He had found work in the BNR branch of the town and felt the family was safer there than in Moldova. Sure enough, within two weeks, the Russians had invaded and Moldova became part of the Soviet Union.

      My parents did not stay long in Ramnicul-Sârat and, by 1945, my father had again managed to get himself transferred, this time to Bucharest. So I look back now and realize that, had he hesitated for a couple more weeks, my family would have had to stay in Moldova, I would have been born a Russian and tennis history would have been quite different. Too bad, eh?

      By the end of the Second World War, Romania’s own pro-Nazi government was overthrown and Stalin had appointed a Communist government. Soon after, the king was deposed and my country became the People’s Republic of Romania. Communism had arrived. So it was against that background that my mother gave birth to me on 19 July 1946. I was an enormous 5 kg baby, and my father told me many years later that my mother had not actually wanted another child: she already had enough mouths to feed. But he insisted and insisted—poor woman—so it was agreed that I would definitely be their last child. Given how much I weighed at birth, she was hardly going to change her mind. So maybe because of this, and maybe because, having already lost one son, my mother was happy to have another baby boy, she may have indulged me a bit more than my brother and sisters. I won’t say any more than that because I can already hear the amateur psychologists exclaiming with excitement that this explains everything: I simply wasn’t disciplined enough as a child. All I can offer as a defence is that there wasn’t anything, such as toys, food or money, that my mother or father could spoil me with. We weren’t poor but we weren’t comfortably off either. But I think when you have so many children, you simply relax about discipline and attention by the time you get to the last one. As long as he is safe and healthy, you worry less about whether he has done all his homework perfectly or has gone to bed at the right time every night. So I don’t think I was spoiled so much as protected.

      We lived in an idyllic setting for a child. My father had been given a house in the grounds of the Progresul Tennis Club, which belonged to the bank (it had originally been the king’s club as well), so, as well as being a policeman for the bank, he also took care of the grounds of the club. The tennis club happened to be the main national club, where tournaments and Davis Cup ties were played. It is in beautiful grounds, the size of Roland Garros in the old days, and the courts are situated among alleys bordered by huge old plane trees and great big expanses of grass.

      Our house itself was a cream-coloured bungalow at one end of the club, next to the football club that also belonged to the BNR bank, and I shared a bedroom with Cornelia and Georgeta, who everyone called Gigi, though we used to spend as much time as we could outdoors. As a family, we owned very little other than the basic items of clothing and furniture, but that was not unusual in Romania in those days.

      You have to consider that there was no television until the mid Fifties, and we did not own one until I bought our first one ten years later. In any case, in the early days of television, they only showed Russian and Romanian stuff and the odd very bad American film. Nothing that you would want to watch, in other words. So until we got a TV, we would listen to our enormous Russian radio, which my father used to hit regularly to get it going again when it decided to stop working, which was very often. We didn’t own things such as a camera, either, which is why I do not have a single photograph of me as a child, something I am very sad about because I can’t show my kids what I looked like when I was little. So all the material goods that we now take for granted were absent in our household during my childhood. But as any person will tell you who has grown up in this way, what you don’t know you don’t miss.

      What I did have, though, was freedom. We lived in an enclosed environment—and the grounds were guarded by police because the club belonged to the national bank—so I could run around all day in total safety. I would climb, and fall out of, the many fruit trees in the grounds, and would chase my sisters endlessly and get up to all sorts of stupid games. I remember, when I was five or six, falling over during one of our chases, and a piece of wood piercing my knee from front to back. Screaming and in pain, I was carried home, where a friend of my mother’s just removed the wood with one sharp movement. With my sister Gigi, we would practise jumping off the flat roof of this building that was

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