Nice Jumper (3 page)

I began to spend six days a week in a birdie trance – all my thoughts and energy turned towards my Saturday morning lesson. I stole copies of
Golf World
magazine from the waiting room of my dentist’s surgery. I broke the greenhouse belonging to the lazy-eyed witchy woman next door with a sand-iron lob. I planned. I schemed. I visualized. Every week I improved. Every week Cripsley’s assistant teaching
professional,
Mike Shalcross, dropped weightier hints about putting me forward for membership of the club. The fact that I hadn’t played the course yet – I’d been settling for midweek games at the local pitch and putt – only made it twice as exciting. From the practice fairway, I gazed out towards the fifth and third fairways, memorizing the contours, projecting my own make-believe iron shots: the kind that would shoot up high over the flagstick, then attach themselves to the putting surface like Velcro. Right here, I saw the rest of my life roll out ahead of me like one infinite, luxuriant, green carpet.

After six weeks of dreaming, I was given a date for my trial for membership. At last I was about to find out what verdant delights Cripsley Edge held beyond the gigantic hedge separating the fairways belonging to the fifth and sixth holes. The trial was held by Bob Boffinger, Cripsley’s junior organizer, and consisted of me hitting fifty seven-iron shots, being shown around the men-only bar, and nodding solemnly when Bob said things like ‘absolutely imperative’ and ‘dress restriction’. I breezed it, offering what I still look upon as a favourable impression of ‘Tom Cox, future Young Conservative sired by local textile magnate and county bridge champion’, and betraying little trace of Tom Cox, future hippy slacker sired by inner-city primary schoolteacher and inner-city supply teacher.

‘Does your dad play golf, Tom?’ asked Bob.

‘No. Only my uncle Rex. He took me up for a quick eighteen the last time we were at his place in the Cotswolds.’ I’d learned phrases like ‘a quick eighteen’ from reading the biography of the golf commentator Peter Alliss.

‘And what does Rex do for a living?’

‘Oh. Er. He’s a … barrister.’

Now, my thirteen-year-old powers of deception amaze me. I was an artist. Stage by stage, I was reinventing myself, and my family were starting to pick up on the signs.

First, my mum, as I arrived home from my fourth lesson at Cripsley.

‘Tom, what’s that?’

‘What?’

‘That thing hanging out of your pocket.’

‘It’s a glove.’

‘Looks like a dead bat.’

‘Well, it’s not. It’s a glove.’

‘Why do you only have one?’

‘For grip,
of course
. Nearly all proper golfers wear them. You wouldn’t understand. It would be like me trying to explain to you what “the honour” is.’

‘The what?’

‘The honour. It’s what you get when you have the best score on the previous hole. You get the honour of going first. It’s to do with etiquette. See? I knew you wouldn’t understand.’

Then my dad, as he greeted me behind Cripsley’s pro shop two weeks later.

‘How’s it going, man?’

‘You’re wearing jeans. Quick, get in the car. You’re not supposed to wear jeans here. It’s against the rules. And for your information I’m not “man”, I’m Tom. People don’t call each other “man” at a golf club.’

And lastly my grandad, as I arrived at his house for Sunday lunch, dressed in my first item of bona fide golfwear: a lilac shirt with meatcutter collars and embroidered ‘golf bloke in midswing’ design.

‘Blimey! You could go flying with collars like that. Is that what you wear when you go down the school disco and pull all those hot bits of stuff?’

‘Actually, I don’t go down the school disco any more. And I don’t “pull” – that’s something that people in the sixties did. This shirt is what everyone at Cripsley Edge wears, so that shows just how out of touch
you
are.’

I began to speak in a whole new way, applying the terms I’d learned at Cripsley to everyday situations. ‘Pushed it,’ I observed, as my mum threw a balled-up piece of paper at the waste-paper bin and missed it on the right.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You pushed it. Got your hands ahead of the shot.’

‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’

‘You know – blocked it. That’s why it pitched to the right.’

‘“Pitched”? What the hell are you on about?’

‘
God
. It means landed. Don’t you know
anything
?’

For me, serving an apprenticeship as a proper rebel would have come a bit too easily. On the occasions I’d dipped my toe into it, with Ryder and his gang, it hadn’t felt much like rebellion at all. My parents might have tried to distract me from it, but they seemed to understand me a little too well. My dad didn’t listen to Val Doonican and Andy Williams; he listened to the Ramones and the Rolling Stones. And while I’m proud to say I was the first person at my school to wear Doc Martens, I’m slightly less proud to say they were chosen for me by my mum, after half an hour’s dispute during which she strived to persuade me to ‘loosen up and get with it’ in front of a bystanding posse of four giggling fourteen-year-old girls. By my thirteenth birthday, I found myself somewhat anaesthetized to the effects of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Well, maybe not the drugs, but certainly the other two. My whole life I’d had unlimited access to music that mud-wrestled with Satan, yelped about fellatio and exulted in the benefits of free love. Although I hadn’t
had
sex, I felt like I knew enough about it. My mum had relayed the facts of life to me shortly before my sixth birthday, after which I’d promptly taken them to school and made little Jimmy McGuire burst into tears. By my tenth birthday, I could recite entire subsections of
The Joy of Sex
word for word to wide-eyed schoolfriends.

By my third year of secondary school, 92.5 per cent of the girls in my Geography class claimed to have ‘done it’ (the other 7.5 per cent having been decreed ‘rough’ via an unofficial class vote). Being the kind of thirteen-year-old boy whom girls intermittently tickle and tell all about their sex lives but never actually go on a date with, I certainly finished my school day
feeling
like I’d ‘done it’, then arrived home to a house in which few walls were free of black and white posters of naked existential German women leaning pensively over sinks.

For the moment, I could quite happily put delinquent teenage sex on the back burner.

Now – manners, sportsmanship, technospeak, repression:
these
I could use.

My dad might have been able to recite Monty Python sketches word for word, but did he know how to shake hands properly, or that sweatshirts should never be worn without shirt collars underneath? My mum might have dug Johnny Marr’s guitar-playing on Smiths albums, but did she know not to keep her glass raised from the table for unduly long periods in the presence of the club captain, and that it was considered custom not to stand in the eyeline of your playing partner as he was taking his shot? I’d finally hit upon the only form of adolescent mutiny I could muster, the one thing that might leave my shockproof parents shaking their heads and pronouncing: ‘I can’t believe he’s our son. I hope
he
gets over it; it’s probably just a phase.’ The sensation of power was overwhelming. I was James Dean in plus fours. And, most worrying of all for my mum and dad, I hadn’t even had a proper game of golf yet.

… I turn back towards the Sphincter one last time and check my reflection. Black trousers, bright pink polo shirt from factory reject shop, slightly misshapen lilac jumper. I’m essentially wearing a bastardized version of my school uniform, but I figure that no one will really notice and, besides, today, if all goes to plan, I’ll probably be winning myself some
proper
golf clothes. Through the window my confused, resigned dad waves goodbye and mouths, ‘Be brilliant,’ but my pang of errant guilt is drowned out by a mounting excitement in my gut. I watch anxiously as the car makes use of the full width of the club’s private drive to perform a U-turn, then begins to void its way back to Nocton, the village we call home. Then, breathing out my relief, I look beyond Cripsley’s imperial gates, past judgemental pines and garden sheds that could be mistaken for luxury dwellings, to the future: the birdies, the blazer badges, the social functions, the soaring, drawing drives. This is it! I marvel. The thing I’ve been living for for three months – a veritable lifetime. I wonder what it will feel like: the opening divot, the début sidehill putt, the first crashing drive. The adrenalin surging through my bloodstream makes me
feel
like I could fly, but only when the Sphincter is out of earshot do I begin the march to my destiny.

Tee off? I think, as I stride obstinately up the hill. Tee off?
Of course
he can’t watch me tee off. Not even by telescope from a safely distanced asteroid.

THERE’S SOMETHING UNIQUELY
liberating about running across a golf course. Everything you’ve been taught about dignity, grace and deportment tells you it’s wrong, yet it feels so deliciously right.

Witnessing a running golfer is a bit like witnessing the class geek trying to chat up the prom queen. The humane part of you that wants to crumple up and hide battles it out with the diseased part of you that wants to keep watching. In the same way that a Mini Cooper isn’t designed to be driven around a Formula One racetrack in second gear, a golfer isn’t designed to gallop; he’s designed to amble and ponder, stopping to sniff the heather and discuss the stock market along the way. Not only does the act of moving one’s legs slightly faster than normal on a golf course seem to bring all the game’s decorum and principles into disrepute, it has a way of making the runner look violently
camp.
Take the most macho, dynamic, one-hundred-metre sprint champion and put him at the mercy of the stopwatch on a dogleg par five, and he’ll inexplicably mutate into Kenneth Williams.

People who run across golf courses tend to split into four discernible categories. There are those who’ve lost their ball in long grass and been obliged to hotfoot it back to the tee to replay their shot, those who’ve reached the fourth green and realized that they’ve left a tap on back at home, those who’ve crawled through a hole in the course’s boundary fence for a dare involving ball theft, and those who feel like running for the hell of it. The third category has probably never come across the word ‘etiquette’ and doesn’t even realize that running across a golf course is a perverted thing to do. The other three categories have one feature in common: they look like idiots. I fell into the fourth category.

The one thing you could say in favour of Ashley, Ross, Jamie, Bushy and me when we decided to charge down the fairway of Cripsley’s seventh hole for no reason was that at least we’d made a
pact
to look like idiots. This agreement took a telepathic form. No one said ‘Run!’ after the last of our tee shots had torpedoed over the fried-egg-shaped bunker safeguarding the fairway, but we all somehow knew that’s what we were going to do, as if we’d collectively heard a silent starter’s gun.

‘Your ankles are like a four-year-old girl’s,’ Jamie pointed out to Ross, as Ross crouched to tee up his ball.

‘Well, at least I don’t look like a lizard,’ said Ross.

The next thing I knew, our shots were dispatched, and we were in flight: five whooping adolescents in polyester sweaters, each carrying several kilograms of rattling metal and wood on his back, doing the stampede of the swinging cretin.

It was April 1989 and I’d been a member of Cripsley for eight months. I’d met Jamie (12) and Ross (13) the previous summer at the junior lessons hosted by Mike Shalcross, and the three of us had been granted membership shortly afterwards, swiftly becoming friends and rivals. Jamie wore John Lennon spectacles, was tall for his age and had the quietly competitive aura of someone who might steal your girlfriend from under your nose without you noticing. Ross was more or less his opposite – undersized, high-pitched, and all out to prove he wasn’t. Ashley (14) was a veteran Cripsley member of eighteen months with the physical characteristics and temperament of a hyperactive bull terrier, who’d long since outgrown junior lessons. I’d first encountered him a couple of weeks earlier, in Cripsley’s pro shop, where I found him flailing desperately at inanimate objects, crimson-cheeked, while Nick Bellamy, one of the club’s older, more sadistic juniors, swung him around by his knicker elastic at irresponsible velocity. Bushy (13), whom I’d also met
at
the junior lessons, was a dark, silent enigma, making up in premature stubble for what he lacked in words.

The friendship the five of us enjoyed was in its early stages, and over the last few months had often resembled the part at the beginning of a boxing match where each competitor weighs up his opponent for flaws. Nobody quite knew who each other was yet, with autobiographical factoids being eked out tentatively and strategically. I, for one, was still in the midst of my own reinvention, shining in the role of the all-round Respectable Boy – the kind who, given another arena in which to display his talents, might have made complimentary remarks about his auntie’s Richard Clayderman album, delivered leaflets on behalf of his local Tory MP, and generally got the living crap kicked out of him a lot. Were my new friends putting on an act as well? Possibly. I’d learned, through overheard conversations, that Bushy’s dad drove a ten-year-old Ford Cortina, Ross’s mum lived alone with him and his sister and worked as a receptionist at the local brewery, Ashley’s dad was a PE teacher, and Jamie had once almost been enrolled at a local independent, progressive secondary school. Did my mates, like me, come from homes where joss sticks smoked away on the mantelpiece and Bob Dylan croaked away on the turntable? It was difficult to tell. I was, however, pretty sure they didn’t live in houses with posters of existentially naked German women on the walls.