Free The Day Gone By by Richard Adams Page B

punches to avoid upsetting me. In his position, I would have done the same. To a seven-year-old, to hold double bézique and be prevented from declaring it is a mortifying experience. But you had to learn to lose with a good grace. (I was yet to see the Australians, in the test series of 1932-33, going virtually berserk over Larwood and Voce.)
    Later on came picquet. Since becoming grown-up it has surprised me that, in a country where bridge is widely played and people take it almost for granted that they will be able to make up at least some sort of a table, very few people, by comparison, play picquet. It is by far the best card game for two — elegant and skilful — and during my life I must have had hours of enjoyment from it. I remember reading somewhere that Richelieu used to play picquet, and it amuses me to think of the game being devised at the sophisticated French court of the seventeenth century at more or less the same time as Sir John Suckling (so Aubrey says) was inventing cribbage. Sir Toby Belch (in old age) might have played the latter. Somehow I can’t see him playing picquet (although Prince Rupert might very well have played it, I dare say).
    Picquet was pretty fast bowling for an eight-year-old. I remember how I began it with no more experience behind me than that of bézique, with the idea that it consisted of virtually no more than collecting honours in the hand. Two things which took me a long time to learn were the importance of planning and playing to win the majority of (or at least to split) the tricks, and the necessity, for the younger hand, of ‘guarding’ or ‘covering’ kings or queens, to stop your opponent running through the suit. My father had given my sister a beautiful picquet set - a gilt-lettered red box with two packs and two pads of score sheets — and she was often ready to play. As she was more than nine years older, unless I got very good cards she could wipe the floor with me. My sister held the view that I was spoiled and over-indulged — which was true — and that it would be good for me to take a few sound hidings. I think it was. Most people who have taken up learning a skill, a game or an accomplishment, know the infuriating frustration of watching someone else perform something which you want to be able to do and cannot. For a long time I simply could not get the hang of prudent discarding and of keeping ‘stops’. Tears and temper were not uncommon, for I took the business seriously and wanted to master it.
    One day I had an idea — an idea not altogether unconnected, perhaps, with Mr Punch. Without consciously formulating the notion in so many words, I realized that picquet was a self-contained business, having no links with anything outside itself. (Unlike, say, dancing, which had all sorts of tedious tie-ups with things like hostesses, partners and conversation.) If I could really master picquet, it would become indestructibly mine, like an object in my pocket. I set myself to do it and since the game is not bottomless, like chess or bridge, in due course, and after a good deal of rather taxing application, I succeeded. That is to say, I could play anyone - any grown-up — without needing indulgence and without doing anything silly. I had it on board, right down to the pleasure to be derived from making something of a rotten hand. (Many years later I was to teach the game, on board ship at literally the other end of the world, to Mike McDowell, the young cruise director of the
Lindblad Explorer.
Mike became adept at making the best of a bad hand, and many a time would save his score with four tens or a quint to the jack.)
    I have come to see that there are two perfectly valid ways of feeling about games in general. My wife doesn’t really care for - or about - games. If she consents to play, it is to pass time and she doesn’t particularly want to win: an admirable approach. ‘Games,’ she says,