by Tom Cox
It was Ashley who happened upon the blowtorch. We didn’t even realize that it was a blowtorch at first, I don’t think; it just looked like something good for pointing at people. The fact that fire emerged from it was a bonus in every way, initially just as a prop for deranged cackling noises, and then for full-blown impressions of Arthur Brown. It wasn’t until our third session with it that anyone actually caught fire.
Nigel had been upstairs at the time, listening to Magda Norris complain about her new six-wood and the trouble she was having potty-training her grandson. I had been standing with Ashley and Mousey, observing as Jamie used the blowtorch as a device to enhance the telling of a ghost story. The story was one we’d all heard before, but with a slightly different theme. Jamie had just got to the bit where the driver finds the hitchhiker’s jacket on the gravestone, when I noticed the golden flicker in his hair. What’s funny about watching someone’s head catch fire is how long it takes them to notice, hence the first instinct isn’t always to shout, ‘Watch out! Quick! Your hair’s on fire!’ so much as to think wryly, Isn’t that weird? His hair’s on fire, yet he’s still telling that ghost story, as if nothing’s wrong.
‘Jamie. There are orange things coming out of your hair. I think they’re flames,’ I observed, finally.
As Ashley and Mousey began to beat Jamie’s head with a tea towel, I decided it was my job as junior captain to take the situation into my own hands, which is exactly what I did. I did it by going into an unbridled panic and shouting ‘Quick!’ and ‘No!’ and ‘Get some water!’ Then I remembered: at the top of the stairs, I’d seen a fire extinguisher. I’d always wondered what it was for. Now I knew.
As I hurtled to the rescue, hydrant at the ready, I congratulated myself on my quick thinking and pragmatic approach in a crisis. Jamie would thank me for this later, and the outcome could be a more symbiotic edge to our golfing rivalry. There was just one slight problem: I’d never operated a fire extinguisher in my life. Still, it couldn’t be that difficult, I surmised. After all – wasn’t the thing designed for situations when a few vital seconds could make the difference between a full head of hair and first prize in a Duncan Goodhew lookalike contest?
I looked down and assessed my options.
The extinguisher had been constructed with physics professors in mind. It appeared to be a matter of releasing the nozzle on the left, and pushing the button on the right, but what did the nozzle in the middle do? And what was that twiddly thing for? I vaguely remembered someone on TV saying something about not pulling something when using a fire extinguisher or something else would explode in your face. I wished I’d been listening harder when they said it. I took a wild guess, and pushed the button on the right.
A drip of water eased out of a hole and plipped onto the floor in front of me in slow motion.
I looked up. My friends were staring at me quizzically. As far as I could tell, Jamie’s hair had been fire-free for several moments.
* * *
These were the slipshod days that other teenagers spend on street corners. Though we spent as much time at Cripsley as we ever had, we played golf infrequently, and disdainfully, unappreciatively. Whole weeks were frittered away in the shop, filled with countless Cokes and Mars Bars on the tab, impressions of Mousey (some days we were so bored even Mousey did impressions of Mousey), Eight-iron Tennis, and the kind of teenage playfighting that starts in hotheaded frustration and ends in twice as much hotheaded frustration. Golf had never been something we were openly proud of, but until now neither had it been something we actively scorned. What brought about the change in attitude? Was it that we were now on holiday from school, and some of us had been relieved of its trials for ever, and access to the course was unlimited, so golf had lost its mystique? Or had my post-Par-adise disenchantment been infectious?
Whatever the case, I knew I was letting myself down. Suddenly, even my parents seemed more enamoured with the game than me.
‘How did you play today? Any good?’ my dad would ask, as he picked me up in the Sphincter in the fading light.
‘All right, I s’ppose,’ I would answer sheepishly, thinking about all those five-irons I could have been hitting while I was making prank calls to the international operator.
I felt like a fraud. Essentially, my desire to be the best golfer ever wasn’t any weaker than it had always been, so why couldn’t I summon the discipline? Had I forgotten about that first British Open victory? No. So why couldn’t I leave my friends in the shop overdosing on sugar and lethargy and spend the afternoon on the practice fairway? It wasn’t even as if the atmosphere in the shop was stimulating, or exciting (at best, it was sluggish and anarchic). Would my friends respect me any less if I gave it a miss? Probably not, in the long run. So, why?
In the autumn, I was due to start taking my A levels. I didn’t particularly want to take my A levels. I’d agreed to do so only to placate my parents, in the aftermath of GCSE results that probably wouldn’t have been noticeably worse if I’d recruited a selection of plant life to sit the exams in my place. Getting down to some further education would keep the folks off my back, and give me chance to retake my failed Maths GCSE, which I needed to pass in order to become a run-of-the-mill club professional, if I ever had to fall back on that (I hoped not). My college had been selected with two criteria in mind: proximity to Cripsley’s first tee, and proximity to Cripsley’s bottom practice fairway. On my day of enrolment, I timed the walk from the college gates to the pro shop. It took me nine minutes, going at a good clip, which I figured I could live with.
As the beginning of term loomed, golf miraculously regained its importance. Out of the blue I was once more playing like my life depended on it, notching up three home victories in the final weeks of August and a couple of top fives in Midlands junior events. Within the space of a few rounds, I remembered that I was an extremely good player, in the grand scheme of things, whether I was worthy of Par-adise and Worksop or not. I was sixteen. I had a handicap of three. One digit lower, and I’d be eligible for the regional qualifying rounds for the British Open. Two weeks before my college education started, I’d be defending my club champion’s title, as favourite, with at least four of my friends snapping at my heels.
What happened next couldn’t have been less convenient if it had been orchestrated by a committee set up precisely to bring about our downfall.
You might say we deserved it, of course. Setting fire to one another’s hair and corrupting an innocent club professional’s employee is no way to go about your business as upstanding members of a private golf club, and I concede that in some ways we needed to be taught a lesson, if only to remind us to get our minds back on the game. But, to our knowledge, nobody on the club committee knew what was going on in the pro shop, beyond the fact that we spent an unhealthy amount of time in it. And anyway, if they did, that wasn’t what they decided to punish us for.
No. They decided to punish us for playing too much golf.
The jibes started coming thick and fast in the weeks leading up to the club championship. ‘Don’t you lads ever go to school?’ carped Steve Berry, a locksmith, from the sixteenth green, at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon. ‘It’s not surprising you won the tournament, when you’re up here all hours of the day,’ griped Clark Allydyce, from the green of his twenty-eighth hole of the morning. ‘One day you’ll realize what it’s like to go to work. Then it will hit you that these were the best days of your life, and you’ll be sorry,’ lectured Ernie Files, sipping a midday gin and tonic on the clubhouse veranda. ‘Don’t you have homes to go to?’ huffed Jack ‘Net Man’ Mullen, as he reluctantly gave up the spot in the practice net that he’d occupied for the preceding two hours. As the prospect of another junior victory in the club’s most important event drew closer, the undercurrent of bitterness in these comments turned into an overcurrent, until it was obvious to all of us: at least half of the adult membership would be happier people if we didn’t win.
Terry Clampett was one of them.
He’d been made captain at the beginning of that year, and conformed effortlessly to the stereotype of the traditional James Bond film baddie: impeccably courteous on the outside, with a vindictive core. His operations took a more insidious, subtle form than those of previous Cripsley tyrants, but their precision attained new toxic heights. Compared to Clampett, Hell’s Trucker may as well have been auditioning as a Play School presenter during his captaincy. You would see Clampett on the course on a sunny day, smiling and waving, and mistakenly think he was glad to see you, when all the while he’d be checking to see that the socks you were wearing with your shorts conformed with the regulatory length stated in the club rules. By the time he’d wished you well on your round, he would have not only concocted your punishment, but decided which one of his goons would deliver it.
When Ashley hit his perfect shot on the sixteenth hole and I saw it heading towards Clampett’s sister, Janice, I could see immediately we were in trouble. It was three days before the club championship, and Ashley, Jamie, Robin and I had been surprising ourselves by indulging in a serious practice round with a complete lack of dead legs, arm locks and Eight-iron Tennis. We were back doing what we did best: playing golf well, urging one another to greater heights of excellence. We could see that up ahead Janice, the lady captain, Eileen Stokes and Reg Forman, the new head of the greens committee, were indulging in a foursome, so we made a point of keeping our distance. (The fact that they were playing golf made us keep well back, too.)
‘Playing into’ the players in front of us was a perennial problem for Cripsley’s juniors, as our forearms beefed up and our swings flourished. Our power increased in the same way that our voices broke – in vast leaps and tiny false starts, completely beyond our estimation. Often we’d be lucky, and our shots would sail over the group of players ahead of us, leaving four somewhat deaf senior citizens blissfully ignorant of exactly how close they had come to visiting the great golf course in the sky. On other occasions we’d get away with a near miss, a profuse apology and a quick ticking off. But Ashley’s shot shouldn’t, by rights, have fallen into either category. From the top of the ridge, I obtained the perfect view of its voyage. There was no doubt it was a strike in a hundred, but even with all Ashley’s strength at the back of it, there was no way it was going to trouble Janice and her friends, three hundred yards up ahead on the green. We knew that – which is why we had considered it safe for Ashley to play it.
I watched as the ball soared, hung, dipped and rolled, finally coming softly to rest against the wheel of Reg Forman’s trolley, situated to the front left of the green. There was nothing remotely destructive about its descent – anyone could see that. If a centipede had been in the ball’s path during its final couple of revolutions, it might have been a little dazed but it would have got up, dusted itself down, assured its fellow insects that it was unscathed, and gone about its daily routine as if nothing had happened.
‘Shot!’
‘Is it near the green?’
‘Close, but don’t worry – it didn’t hit them.’
We continued to play. But as we drew closer to the green, a funny thing happened: Reg, Janice, Eileen and the lady captain failed to vacate the green. They also appeared to be glaring straight at us.
‘What’s their problem?’
‘Dunno. Do you think they’re pissed off?’
‘Dunno why. I was nowhere near them.’
Ashley and I approached Reg.
‘We’re really sorry about that. Did it hit your trolley? We had no idea we could hit that far,’ we said, propriety itself.
‘You want to watch out. You could have put one of us in hospital,’ replied Reg.
‘You juniors come up every day, and think you own the course,’ added Eileen. ‘You ought to learn some consideration for your fellow players.’
‘But we said we were sorry. It was a genuine mistake,’ said Ashley.
‘That’s all very well,’ said the lady captain, ‘but it’s not the first time that it’s happened, is it?’
‘What do you mean? We’ve never rolled a ball gently against your trolley before,’ I protested.
‘You know very well what she means,’ said Janice. ‘Don’t think I won’t be having a word with the captain about this.’ Even though he was her brother, she still called him ‘the captain’.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ said Reg. ‘I mean, anyway, don’t you have homes to go to?’
And that was how Cripsley’s four best players got suspended and missed the club championship.
There were no disciplinary hearings this time. The news came quickly and unequivocally from Bob Boffinger: we were not to visit the club for the following month, for social or playing purposes. As ever, he broke it to us wearily, as a friend, and we knew that he’d fought doggedly on our behalf in the committee room, using the phrase ‘abbbsolutely imperative’ anywhere between eight and thirteen times.
By the time we returned the club championship had been won and the season was practically over. Clampett continued to greet us with a wave and a beatific smile, like a Mafia overlord who’d just taken our great-aunts as collateral. Fez, who only really performed for an audience of two or more juniors, went into hibernation, and I increasingly found myself alone at Cripsley and free of distractions. Through October and November I hit an average of five hundred golf balls a day. I still have some of the calluses to prove it, and the turf on Cripsley’s bottom practice fairway is only now recovering from my relentless path of destruction. The result was the closest I’d come yet to permanently attaining that elusive back-garden swing. But it was too late. With no more tournaments until the following March, I’d have to wait to test-drive it.
I lasted just under a couple of months at Broxwell College. I don’t remember much about the time, the place or the people, but I have retained a vivid mental picture of the back gate. A few years later, I came to be friends with a girl whom I had shared a couple of classes with, and she had no recollection of my existence at Broxwell, despite the fact that, from what we could work out, I’d spent the best part of six weeks sitting next to her. I’m sure she’s not the only one. Holograms have cast more conspicuous shadows.
My parents accepted my decision to drop out with a level of stoicism not often associated with ex-hippies.
‘Over my dead body will you leave that place!’ said my mum.
‘You’re going to ruin your life!’ said my dad.
‘We’ve spawned a monster!’ they both said.
I knew I had to stand firm, believe in myself, and sit out the couple of months until they started speaking to me again. In the ensuing communal sulk, a couple of reluctant bargains were struck: in exchange for a temporary life of leisure, I would stick around at Broxwell until late November to retake my Maths GCSE, and then find some way of rustling up twenty pounds per week board.
I still don’t know how I passed my Maths exam. I turned up at the exam hall with the sole aim of mollifying my parents, safe in the knowledge that there was a much easier numerical test devised by the PGA which I could take if I ever stooped to earn my living as a club professional. So when I realized I’d forgotten my protractor, I wasn’t unduly concerned. It was only a few seconds later, when I realized I didn’t have my pencil, calculator, compasses, pen or ruler either, that in fact the only vaguely geometrical instrument on my person was a stray tee peg, that I started to concede I’d come slightly underprepared.
I looked across the hall, scanning for a kindly invigilator, and zoomed in on a well-groomed man in a green blazer. He looked familiar. Before I’d had chance to raise my hand, he began walking towards me. Now, where had I seen him before? From some angles, you could even say he looked a little like Colin Allerton, one of Terry Clampett’s evil henchmen.
‘Hello, Tom.’
Exactly like him.
With a wink, Allerton opened his big golfer’s hands, revealing all the apparatus I would need to see me through the following two hours, and a bit in reserve j
ust in case. It was quite possible there were a couple of teacakes for later in there as well – I couldn’t tell for sure. I hadn’t even been required to speak. Allerton might have been the most lethal of foes at Cripsley, but here in the outside world we golfers would always be fighting for the same cause. With that wink, it seemed that he instinctively knew everything: what I was there for, what I needed, what I was feeling. I couldn’t help marvelling at the way he didn’t seem surprised to see me at all, how there was no logic to his presence (I’d been told he worked full-time as a solicitor) and, most weirdly of all, how invisible he’d seemed to the rest of the exam hall, and it was perhaps then, for the first time, that I began to truly get the inkling that golf was a supernatural force – something that I would never be in total control of, no matter how many balls I hammered up the practice fairway.
I’VE ALWAYS HAD one major problem with winter golf: I’m too good at it.
If he’s seeking perfection, the shrewd amateur golfing prodigy looks to peak around May, just in time for the British Open qualifying rounds and to impress the county selectors. I, on the other hand, have always shifted smoothly up to top gear somewhere around the beginning of January, when birdies tend to get swallowed up in the great big frosty silence, and the people I most want to impress are doing something warm and sensible, like watching pornography or eating teacakes. Ice-hockey players who find the key to their inner genius while on safari will know what I’m talking about.
Amid the temporary greens, restrictive clothing and ankle sludge, a lot of very good things can be said for winter golf. One is the relatively small number of golfers you find indulging in it. Another is that you sometimes get the chance to make friends with parrots.
I first met Ken as I teed up on the final hole of a winter league match, just before Christmas, 1991. I use the word ‘met’ in the loosest possible sense. We didn’t exchange phone numbers. I didn’t train him to sit on my shoulder. Come to think of it, he probably wasn’t even called Ken. Yet over the following couple of months, we struck up a mutual understanding of a depth rarely attained in man–parrot relations. As I hit my shots up the eighteenth, Ken the Parrot would watch thoughtfully, then communicate his approval (via a quick squawk) or disapproval (via a barely perceptible flutter of his crest). In exchange for his expertise, I would refrain from asking him patronizing questions, such as, ‘Where exactly did you escape from?’ and ‘You’re a parrot. What the fuck are you doing hanging out next to the eighteenth tee of a golf course in the middle of an ice storm?’
