Chess at the RSA - Peter William Grimley – Granada, 23rd December 1954

There is silence in this crowded room, except for the deep hum of overhead fluorescent lights. At each desk, paired heads are hunched over chequered boards, concentrating on imagined battlegrounds. Pieces of medieval military panoply stylised into bland plastic shapes. Castles grind forward in neat lines while horses leap lightly across ritualised angles. Emotions run deep, as a lost bishop shreds carefully placed defences, or a favoured battle plan shows unexpected weaknesses.

My father and my son make up the closest pair. My father has a lantern jaw and bushy grey eyebrows that overshadow intense blue eyes. His tall frame is bent over the table, lost in thought. He is dressed in an arctic jacket and thick socks, haunted by the creeping cold only diabetics feel. His name is Peter William Grimley, and his family can be traced back to the Norman Conquest.  

My son Conor sits opposite, fidgeting, as he awaits his grandfather’s imminent assault on his territory. When he looks up his intense blue eyes match his grandfathers. Their birthdays sit only thirteen days apart in the year, one recently turned seventy-six, the other only seven. They share other similarities too, both shy and complicated, both fascinated by the geometric analysis and abstract mathematics that draws them to this chess table each week like moths to a flame.

This quiet room is hidden at the back of the local Retired Serviceman’s Association (RSA) in Mount Maunganui, New Zealand. Every person here has seen military service, or is closely related to someone that has. They make a family of past and future warriors that still ritualize rules of battle conceived thousands of years ago. It is ironic that my father has yet again found himself playing chess against veterans on a small isthmus of land surrounded by sea. Half a century ago my father learnt to play chess in Gibraltar, against a weary and defeated remnant of the Spanish Civil War.

That was in 1954, as a British soldier in Her Majesty’s army. He was posted to an artificers’ workshop carved into the thirty miles of tunnels threading Gibraltar’s limestone bulk. Working with him were a dozen soldiers and the same number of Spaniards; some day workers, some domiciled.

The domiciled Spaniards were a special breed. The savage Spanish Civil War had seen the defeated Republicans herded into harsh prisoner of war camps. Let out to forage for food each day, the toughest of these prisoners fled across the Sierra Nevada to the Rock of Gibraltar and asked for asylum. The British accepted them, but destroyed their passports, leaving these men trapped on the Rock, forever domiciled.

Back at the RSA my father gently pushes a pawn forward across the board, directly into danger. Conor brightens and leans forward quickly, his hand reaching to take the vulnerable piece. There is a soft “Tsk, tsk,” from his grandfather. Conor stops in mid air, hesitating. He takes a long look across the board. He spots it. His grandfather’s pawn had been blocking a bishop’s path, which now cuts a direct diagonal line towards Conor’s queen. Conor withdraws his hand, searching to protect his beleaguered queen, and the first quaint little pawn is forgotten.

On Gibraltar each army unit provided a sentry for night guard duty. A domiciled Spaniard would be on duty to make tea, left to sit during the long, dark hours watching the sentry march back and forth. A brass clock was bolted to the wall and each guard carried a key to punch into the clock at hourly intervals. Regular punch marks showed a satisfactory night guard duty. My father found all this trolling about interminable. He soon found a wicked solution.

“Of course the inevitable happened. Those very clocks came into my workshop for repair, on my bench. So the very first thing I did was make a duplicate key to open the clock. So that, when I went on guard of course I could open the clock and punch my key all round the clock, shut it up again and not bother to walk around the workshop!”

My father’s subterfuge with the brass clock had an unexpected result. He found himself sitting with the Spaniard on duty, a fierce, grizzled man in his fifties with thin, curly hair. One night, when they were yet again sitting drinking tea, the Spaniard said, “Juegefe jaqui?”

He was asking my father for a game of chess in a rough Andalusian dialect. My father replied that he didn’t play. The Spaniard then asked him if he would like to learn.  My father thought, “Why not?”

“So we scribed with our knives on a piece of dicky old board and filled in all the black and the white squares. We went into the workshop stores and picked out steel and brass nuts and bolts to make all the chess pieces out of. And slowly, night by night, he taught me chess.”

Over his two years in Gibraltar my father spent his guard duty nights playing against the thoughtful Spaniard. When he left Gibraltar he took with him a deep admiration of the fierce Spanish spirit, and an abiding love of chess.

Back at Mount Maunganui’s RSA the quiet is broken by murmurs of thanks and congratulations. Chairs are pushed back and people fade past the glass doors. There is a familiar ‘clunk’ of a king tipped over and my father leans back in defeat, a wry smile for his jubilant grandson.

There is a wicked glint in those intense blue eyes. I can imagine him ducking out of guard duty at this moment, standing in a dimly-lit cave next to an open brass clock, quietly punching his markers around the dial. Nearby an old Spanish warrior sips tea and sets up a homemade chessboard.

It’s time to go. We leave the battleground for another day.