Geometry Lesson

They're all so friendly on the Coast! That's what they told me as I
became Head Teacher of the smallest 2-teacher school in the Grey Valley. And
so some of them were, as it turned out. But not all the time. And not all of
them. If you didn't drink beer on a Friday at the local pub, you were
hen-pecked or a snob from over the hill, and if you growled at their kid
in school, they'd bloody soon want to know the reason why you're pickin' on
him.
Now the local storekeeper had four kids at the school, and four more
that had gone through before them, and between him and his wife, who
was the Chairman of the School Committee, they reckoned what they said
goes, and it would take more than a new townie teacher to think he could
rule the roost. Cliff was well known in the Valley, and all the way up to
Moana, as he'd been taking them their groceries in his big blue van for
as long as they could remember. They knew too that Cliff was once a pretty
handy little boxer, and still packed a short fuse. He loved an argument
though, especially if it had anything to do with socialism and communism,
subjects on which he was widely read. Along with the butcher, Cliff was
probably the purest capitalist in the village as far as his living went,
but he could convince anyone after the second glass that capitalism
bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and that Christ
himself preached communism pure and simple.
With Cliff's sporting background and my own enthusiasm for any
vigorous competition, it was inevitable that we would ultimately be
playing golf at the school-house, using hockey sticks and tennis balls for
a start, and that his whole healthy family would join us all at tennis at
the weekends on the local court beside the old tin hall. Cliff wasn't a
tennis man himself, but took a great interest in the doings of the local
club. He could remember when Paddy Molloy from Blackball had laid down
the
court originally, and could just about recite the local club's leading
players over the years.
We had a fairly relaxed club structure at that time, and meetings were
few and far between, but I do remember the day we held quite a serious one
late one Saturday afternoon on the subject of the state of the concrete
court. It needed top-dressing, they all reckoned, with a blacktop mixture
on top of that already covering the block. One of Cliff's girls suggested
we stick in some wire spikes at the corners of all the white lines, so we
wouldn't need to re-measure the court. That wasn't going to be so easy on a
concrete court, I warned, so I offered to be responsible for the
re-measuring, if they'd all help with the actual painting. I'd done one
before, and knew how to go about it. They must have trusted me - or
perhaps I put the right spin on it, as they say nowadays - so we all
agreed to cover the old lines with the new black mixture, and take it
from there.
The roading contractor, probably related to the famous Paddy
Molloy himself, made short work of spreading the tarry mix, and left our
tennis court in beautiful condition, finished with a slightly rough
texture more up-to-date and less slippery than the original. He had
levelled it with great care, too, and we were well satisfied.
So armed with tape measures, chalk, string, and some carefully
selected straight edges, I arrived at the court after school one day,
with the butcher's son, our best tennis player, as my eager assistant.
Already in place, and clearly fixed for all time, were the two square holes
for the net posts, halfway down the court of course and quite close to
the edge of the concrete block. In fact, the edge of the block was only
too visible in many places, as it dropped away to rough earth and shingle
all around the court. My first chalkline, I knew, had to be one which joined
the centres of the two post-holes, thus defining the location of the net. We
then measured the width of the block at this point, subtracted the legal
width of a doubles court, and divided our answer by two, thus arriving
at the points at which the sidelines would cross the netline. Then,
using our vast knowledge of Pythagoras's theorem, we chalked out a
right-angled triangle whose two shortest sides were the sideline on one
side of the net and the netline. Doing this four times gave us the
precise corners of the court. In order to check that we did in fact have a
rectangle, we measured the two hypotenuses which lay like a giant cross
on each side of the net, and found that they were equal. Even the
butcher's son, who had no pretensions of mathematical genius, could see
that this test proved that our half-court lay exactly square with the
net, and that all the angles were 90 degrees.
At this stage, we could both see that the sidelines of the tennis
court were not at all parallel to the edge of the concrete block. In
fact,
where there was about three feet clear outside each post-hole, it looked
closer to five feet at one end, and more like five inches at the other! The
other side looked the same, so that the chalked court, ready for painting,
appeared more like a non-square parallelogram than a rectangle. We
must have made a mistake, we thought, so we re-measured all the diagonals
of each half-court, and the two huge diagonals of the whole court. Again
these diagonals were equal. It was of course the concrete block that was
wrong. And we couldn't move the post-holes.
I looked at the butcher's son, who was scratching his head at
this wonderful conundrum. "Well," I said, "You're the tennis player. Do we
want to play all our home tennis on a rhomboid court and have a safe space
to run off the sideline all round, or do we want to play on a court
that is the regulation size and shape?" We quickly agreed that the tennis
court had to be square with the net, and people would just have to get
used to the optical illusion, for that's what it was indeed. So we got out
the paint-pots, and were soon joined by the willing brush-hands, and soon
the new shining white court lay there complete, plenty of runback space
at both ends, but a long black wedge of land down both sides, and
certainly not in the exact place where its predecessor had been located.
We had just finished, and the Zip in the clubhouse was whistling us
in, when along came Cliff, hands thrust deep in his old cardigan pockets,
eagle eyes ready for critical inspection. He came up the slope from the
road, so that his first view of the new court was straight up one of the
tramlines, as tennis players call them. From Cliff's end, the space outside
the court looked almost six feet, and as it raked its way down toward the
clubhouse at the other end, the outside line appeared to be
wandering in
for a cup of tea itself, so crazily crooked did it look from there. Cliff's
scream of despair brought us all onto the verandah, as he waved his arms
about in sheer anger.
"You've buggered it up!" he cried, "it's all to hell! How can you
play tennis on that? They'll all be breaking their ankles when they fall
off the edge! Christ, it's not even square! I told them not to leave
it to some townie teacher!"
I could take no more. "Yes, it's square all right, Cliff. It's the
bloody concrete block that's crooked. And we have to have a tennis court
the right shape and size."
"I don't believe it!" shouted he, "Old Paddy Molloy would never have laid
a concrete block crooked in his life! I'll prove it to you. I'm going home
for my big builder's square." And off he went. He came back with a
huge right-angled builder's square, and two extremely heavy pieces of 4
by 3 balanced on his shoulders. He could hardly walk for the weight, but
anger and righteousness were keeping him going.
He dropped the timbers at the first corner, and laid them against
the outside edge of the concrete block so that they formed an L
around
the corner. He then lifted the big square and tried to fit it into what
he was maintaining was a right angle. But it just wouldn't go in, for this
was the acute angled corner. Nev swore under his breath, shook his head
a dozen times, and rushed all his gear across to the other side. Down
went the 4 by 3's, in went the square, and this time it had plenty of
room, for this was the obtuse angled corner. The square wobbled madly as
it strove in vain to touch both timbers at the same time.
"God!", said Cliff, breathing quickly after all this exertion and
stress, "I'd never have believed it! I'd never have believed it!" While
Nev's faith in the legendary Paddy Molloy had been dented, he never
agreed with our action in the matter. Every time he appeared at the court,
he would peer down the convergent sideline, shake his head yet again, and
declare, "It's still a crazy way to mark out a bloody tennis court!"