A bridge hand too far

So many Irish people are now begging to learn bridge that the Contract Bridge Association had to certify 40 new teachers last year. The association reports almost 35,000 new members. They are possibly all at it like knives right now at the 511 association clubs, cutting to the right, never sending boys on men's errands, snapping their way tersely through the Blackwood Convention.

Redundancy looms. For years I have been initiating friends and family to the joys of the world's greatest card game, confident they'd never discover I don't know one end of a rubber from the other. If pressed on my style, I said I played "riverboat bridge". It suggested the free-wheeling, Mississippi steamboat ambience I wanted to create: a daring and slightly romantic scene in which Gaylord Ravenal might loom over your shoulder, chomping a cigar and muttering "discard the diamonds".

I'm found out now. My old pupils will be shamed at learned tables across the land. To those whose trust I have betrayed, I say: let me confess, let me explain. I blame my education. I learned to play bridge, as many Americans do, in college.

It was a rather beautiful college in Chicago, stately and even ivy-covered, equipped with a peaceful library and a sunny reading room where young ladies could study or converse in low voices between classes.

The nuns, being realists, designated an area for smoking. Being taken by theories of reverse psychology, they selected a dingy cavernous site in the basement. It was furnished with rusted metal chairs and tables and a volatile coffee machine, and permanently illuminated by interrogation-room fluorescence - since no daylight crept past the high grilled windows.

To a girl, we flocked to the smoker every day from the first of term onward. Smokers don't give a puff for reverse psychology and the non-smokers couldn't bear the loneliness upstairs. At 9 a.m. we lit up, kicked the coffee machine into action and cut the decks.

I have to clear my teacher's name here. Sheila McDonnell taught me and can't be faulted for my failures. Apart from setting a record for continuous sittings in the wet spring of 1962, Sheila was such a serious bridge player she finally brought in her own pack of cards. It was a quantum leap forward for us all. Up until then we'd played with what had apparently been left behind by the first class of 1896 - bent, dispirited things, slimy and disgusting to the touch, stained with nail varnish and coffee spatters.

In action, Sheila was breathtaking - cold, all-knowing, nerveless and silent as she soared to a grand slam with a Lucky Strike clenched between her lips. She bade me sit by her side, shut up, and practise shuffling until I twigged the basics. (As a result I became amazingly adept at shuffling, which even my most alienated old pupils will admit. But like doing a perfect French twist with two hair clips, it's one of those skills you don't need and would never bother learning except during the tedious years of adolescence.)

I have reason to believe Sheila knew the rules, but even she couldn't impose order over the nuns' agenda. Bridge had to run concurrently with classes; therefore the game never ended. We operated rather like semi-state boards, with some turnover every 45 minutes but one or two in place left to ensure continuity. In an average day, perhaps 30 to 50 girls put in a few hands at any given table, coming and going between The 19th Century Novel and History of Western Civilisation and French Conversation, slamming their books on the floor and crying "whose deal?"

You can see that under the circumstances rules were out of the question. Like the band, we just played on.

We were not unusual, I should add. All over Chicago certainly, teenagers were playing bridge exactly the same way in similar settings. I mean boys, people like my brothers and their friends, in Loyola University's grotty lounge. Very occasionally, co-ed games occurred. Mary Pat Kelly remembers one on her front porch - her parents were away and boys weren't allowed in the house but the porch was by definition extramural - and she says the experience offered striking insight, useful in later years in the feminist movement. "I responded to my partner's bid, you know? And he stared at me and then he said `that would get you a punch in the mouth in the Loyola lounge'. It was a real shock to me how differently boys played. They didn't help each other out the way we did."

And this leads me to my mitigating plea, my only trump. I hope my old pupils will agree that in my little classes I always tried to instill the view that bridge was a metaphor for life, its lessons to have wider and loftier application than points and tournaments. When instructing, I liked to stress that the value of bridge, the secret of its greatness, is that it brings out the worst in you.

Take the injunction about boys on men's errands. Because you are basically a mean, stealthy person, you will go on sending them no matter how often you are warned, slinging your jack on the table hoping to sneak past the enemies' king. Because you are not so much an astute thinker as a bog of raging irrationality, you will continue to ignore the evidence that the high card is probably in the third hand and attempt a finesse anyway.

Worst and most shaming, because you are viciously competitive under that veneer of geniality, you will hear yourself mewling softly and cruelly as you trump your opponents' ace and destroy their five-spade victory.

This is information you really need in life, even if you have to keep right on learning it for as long as you can still see the cards. This is why, if I had my way, I'd put bridge right on the curriculum. I'd get the teachers and students together in the basement, snarling and crowing in the unending game of the smoker, new players constantly arriving and retreating as they do in real life.

Lest you imagine this would yield new generations of wasters and sharks, I should mention that Sheila McDonnell was one of the very few women of her day to go into computers and is now a highly successful analyst. The last time I saw her she was still playing bridge. And she doesn't allow anyone to smoke in her house.