The year is 1940. On June 22, France signs its surrender, and Paris bends to the rhythmic pace of the Wehrmacht. Hitler strolls triumphantly along the Champs-Élysées, while an iron silence descends in Europe. Only Great Britain resists, alone as an island of wind and pride. From there Winston Churchill he speaks to the nation and promises that never, ever, will the English people surrender. Meanwhile, in the skies above London, the engines of the German bombers begin to roar. It’s the start of the Battle of Britain.
On October 11, 1940, one of those bombs falls south-west of the capital, in Wimbledon. It’s not a strategic target, but it ends up hitting the most symbolic place in British leisure: the All England Lawn Tennis Club. Five bombs gut Center Courtdestroying over 1,200 seats. It’s as if a flash had erased, in an instant, the image of ladies with white hats and knights with immaculate shorts. The tennis temple becomes a field of ruins.
In truth, the war had already taken possession of those green meadows for some time. Already in 1939 the club had been requisitioned as a support base for the British army. The elegant rooms, where newspapers were browsed and tea was sipped, become dormitories and canteens. The changing rooms are transformed into infirmaries. Animals graze in the parking lots and on the once immaculate lawns: pigs, geese, rabbits. In the flowerbeds of Church Road the racket shots no longer resonate, but the lowing of cows and the whistle of air-raid sirens.
London burns at night. The lights are turned off, the neighborhoods bombed, the families crammed into shelters. Tennis, with its aristocratic composure, is just a distant memory, an echo of an era that seems dissolved. Between 1940 and 1945 the All England Club is hit twelve times. Each time the rubble increases: the stand between the Royal Box and the press room disappears, the windows explode, the kitchen becomes black with smoke. Even some members of the Club, including Prince George, lose their lives in the bombings. War spares no one, not even those who had made a religion of fair play.
Yet, within that devastation, something remains. An idea, a stubborn instinct to start over. When hostilities died down in 1945 and Europe rediscovered the light, a man took charge of the club’s fate: Colonel Duncan MacAulayBritish officer and tennis enthusiast. It is he who organizes, in a still wounded England, a tournament for the Allied soldiers stationed in Europe. It’s a sign, a way of saying that the war is over and life can play again. As fate would have it, just the day after the start of the tournament, September 2, 1945, Japan signed its surrender. World War II is truly over.
The streets of London are filled with people. Thousands of people parade, sing, hug each other. Peace has a new sound: that of the rackets that slowly return to hitting the ball on the green courts. MacAulay directs the reconstruction work of the stadium, among chipped bricks and gutted stands. Grass, like the British soul, grows back slowly but stubbornly.
In 1946, after six years of silence, Wimbledon was reborn. Center Court is still hurt, but the crowd returns to the stands. The stands still bear splinter marks, but the balls bounce again. In the final, Yvon Petra and Pauline Betz triumphed, symbols of a regained normality. The English tournament is played before Roland Garros, becoming the second Slam of the season. But more than a tournament, it is a rebirth.
Under that finally serene sky, the audience applauds not only for the champions, but for themselves. To the courage of a people who knew how to transform rubble into a playing field, fear into hope. Tennis, the quietest sport in the world, becomes the dialect of peace.
AND Wimbledon, risen from the darkness of the bombingsgoes beyond the sporting dimension, becoming a memory of a Europe that was able to start again, with a racket in its grasp and an eye raised towards the future.