The children’s grandfather used to be an excellent player, and decides that they should learn. Instead, as the title makes clear, it’s about tennis. However that’s not the subject of the book. In this story, however, the only person with a hint of a special talent is David, who has an extremely nice singing voice. Noel Streatfeild’s families often have supremely gifted children, usually dancers. They’re all red-headed, in different shades - which makes it mildly irritating that the photo on the front of this edition of the book shows a girl with mousy blonde hair. Nicky is nearly seven, and David is four.
Susan and Jim are twins, the oldest children in the family, aged nine when the story begins. The Heath family are one of those oddities of the 1930s: an impoverished upper middle class family where they struggle to make ends meet - yet employ both a cook and a housekeeper/governess, and send their older children to private schools. I read it in 2006, I think for the first time, and had entirely forgotten what happened in the book when I picked it up to re-read a few days ago. It was originally published in 1937, and is set in that era my edition was reprinted in 1970 with a photograph on the front cover of someone playing tennis. One of the books which I only discovered in the past twenty years or so is ‘Tennis Shoes’. Many of her books have been re-printed over the years, and I’ve acquired a fairly extensive collection.
She was quite a prolific author of children’s character-based novels, and I first discovered her as a child. I have, slowly, been re-reading my Noel Streatfeild books over the past few years.
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