Little Wonder. Sasha Abramsky

       Early photograph of tennis champion Lottie Dod, possibly taken at Wimbledon in 1887. The International Tennis Hall of Fame, Inc., is the source and owner of the photograph used in this production.

      Charlotte Dod, aged eighty-eight, was lying in her bed, in the Birchy Hill Nursing Home[1] in the sleepy southern English village of Sway. It was a peaceful place, quiet, as good as any other spot to spend one’s final years. The village had a cluster of houses ranged along a few main streets, a handful of pubs, one church—St. Luke’s—tennis and archery clubs, and a community choir, all surrounded by the oaks and other trees of the New Forest, England’s last major acreage of densely wooded land. Carved out of the forest in places was pastureland, on which grazed herds of cattle, horses, and ponies. A few miles to the south were the genteel beach towns, retirement communities and tourist resorts dotting the windswept coast of the English Channel. Towns with names such as Lymington and Milford-on-Sea, Barton-on-Sea and Bournemouth. Their streets were lined with elegant mock-Tudor homes, the fronts cordoned off from prying eyes by tall hedgerows, as well as a fair number of thatched-roof cottages. There were, as well, many guesthouses in these parts, the front porches of which were decorated with hanging baskets of colorful flowers.

      Birchy Hill, with its white-painted brick facade and gray-tiled roof, its brick chimneys and elegant curved window bays, had originally been built on a narrow country lane in the mid-1800s as home to three spinster sisters. Its grounds were spacious, the trim, sloping lawns surrounded by trees and thick tangles of blackberry bushes that on one side muffled the street sounds and noises of the village beyond, and on the other served as the outer edge of the New Forest. During World War II it had been requisitioned by the army. When the war ended, a male nurse who had served as a military ambulance driver, and his wife, bought the property, refurnished it with secondhand carpets, beds, and cupboards picked up on the cheap at estate sales, and opened up a retirement home that specialized in caring for elderly people with chronic physical or mental health conditions.[2] Within ten years, the original house had been expanded into a complex of buildings, and it had upward of thirty-five residents.

      Universally known as “Lottie,” the elderly woman, who had had to move into Birchy Hill following a decline in her health over the previous years, was listening to a radio broadcast from the second Monday of the Wimbledon tennis tournament. She had been listening all of the previous week too, through days plagued by squalls of rain and endless delays. It was, for Dod, a sacred ritual. Almost certainly she had tuned in to every year of broadcasts since the BBC first began covering the event, by radio in 1927, by television ten years later, in grainy black and white, available for only a few hours each afternoon.

      That day, there were four marquee men’s matches: on one side of the draw were two round-of-sixteen battles to settle, the first pitting the rising Australian star Roy Emerson against the Mexican Mario Llamas; the other showcasing the Chilean Luis Ayala against the Swede Jan-Erik Lundqvist. Both matches would be played on Court One. On the other side, a round ahead as the championship’s schedule had gotten knocked off-kilter by a higher than usual number of rain showers the previous week, two blockbuster quarterfinals to be played on Centre Court: the number one seed, Neale Fraser, against the American Earl Buchholz; and then the Italian Nicola Pietrangeli against the United States’ up-and-comer Barry MacKay. MacKay was a tall, big-hitting player from Dayton, Ohio, who had risen to number two in the rankings over the past months. There was also one women’s round-of-sixteen match still to play, the British star Christine Truman, who had won the French Open the previous year, against the Czech Věra Pužejová. It was scheduled as the third match on Court One, likely to be played in the very last hours of daylight; play at Wimbledon in late June could continue until about nine o’clock at night.

      The tennis began promptly at two p.m.

      On Centre Court, Fraser soon found himself in an almighty scrap against Buchholz, losing the first set 4–6, winning the second 6–3, losing the third 4–6, and then having to save five match points in the fourth before pulling back to even the score at 15–15. At that point, cramping so badly that he could hardly stand, and with an old ankle injury from a football game played five years earlier flaring up again, Buchholz had to call it a