by Tom Cox
IN A HOUSEHOLD consisting of two schoolteachers, a schoolkid and a self-sufficient cat, July is traditionally a time of liberation and harmony. For years, my family’s ritual would be very simple. A few days after breaking up from school, we’d all hop in the car, leaving Woosnam to survive on dilatory rodents and next door’s prawn salads, and drive vaguely in the direction of Italy in our battered Morris Marina, assured in the knowledge that, wherever we wound up, it wouldn’t be too far from a swimming pool and a man selling some crushed, sticky ice stuff in a tub. Six weeks later we’d come back, several shades darker, able to impress our friends by knowing the Italian word for ‘arsehandle’.
This arrangement worked wonderfully well right up until the late eighties, when I unaccountably turned into the spawn of Satan.
Of course I couldn’t stop playing golf and go to Italy! Completely out of the question. France could swivel, too. And, no – I couldn’t stick it out for ‘just a fortnight’. I had tournaments to play. Work to do. Who knew what kind of havoc two weeks in a foreign climate might play with my muscle memory. Besides, August was the height of the season. Couldn’t my parents see what kind of a head start I’d be giving my competitors? If I was going to win that first major championship before my teens were out, I couldn’t go flouncing off to the Mediterranean whenever I felt like it.
‘But think of it this way,’ my ever patient mum would reason. ‘Surely you’re going to spend two weeks of this summer messing around with your mates in the pro shop. Why not just devote that time to practising instead, and come on holiday with us?’
‘You just don’t get it, do you? Being in the pro shop is all part of practising. I’m soaking up the atmosphere and learning when I’m in there.’
As a peace offering, out of the living-room cupboard would come the British bed and breakfast guide. And, in reply, as a war offering, out of my bedroom would come the guide to golf courses in Britain and Ireland.
‘What about Aldeburgh in Suffolk?’
‘Erm, I think you’ll find the nearest decent courses there are Aldeburgh and Thorpeness, the longest of which has a total yardage of only six thousand three hundred and thirty yards. Now, I don’t think that kind of length is going to challenge me, is it?’
‘Now here’s a nice-looking little farmhouse, on the Yorkshire Moors.’
‘The moors? I’ve never heard of any golf courses on the moors. And that thick heather isn’t going to do my wrists any good.’
‘This looks nice, though. Hangstead Hill Golf Course – it’s only about seven miles away.’
‘He-llo! It’s a municipal course. They probably only mow the greens once a month. Do you know what kind of damage that could do to my competitive putting stroke?’
Eventually, a reluctant bargain would be struck. In exchange for a minimum of three games of golf on a quality course, I would agree to spend a week in the company of my parents at an isolated farmhouse, being fed free-range eggs by a rotund, welcoming lady called Jackie who probably couldn’t name the winning 1985 Ryder Cup squad.
While my mum and dad traversed the local peaks and valleys (walking without hitting shots – how idiotic can you get?), I would wait impatiently on the first tee of a nearby course called something like Hillycliffe or Wickledale until an amiable yet lonely member arrived on the first tee and enquired if I would care to join him for his day’s play. Invariably this would be a man in his late fifties or early sixties, searching for the secret formula which would get him playing off a handicap of fourteen instead of eighteen. After three or four holes, he would start to quiz me on my formula for hitting the ball so straight and far – at which point I would mischievously advise him to do the exact opposite of what he should be doing. ‘It’s all about keeping your left arm completely rigid,’ I advised Peter Fortnam, a twenty-one handicapper who moved with the ease of a man who had woken up to find his arms had been stolen in the night and replaced with steel girders. ‘Golf is a game all about the legs,’ I preached to a man I remember only as Mr Invisible Football.
When it came to local juniors, I showed slightly more respect. But after a visit to Rotherley Golf Club in north-west Yorkshire, where I was followed around by three fifteen-year-olds who gasped at my every shot as if I was some kind of fearsome proto-John Daly, it was hard not to assume an air of superiority. It’s amazing how much mightier 250-yard drives can feel when punctuated by noises like ‘Cor!’, ‘Bloody ‘eck, yoth!’ and ‘Ohmyfuckinggodlookhowfarit’sgone!’ My wife won’t thank me for this, but I don’t think I will ever again feel as loved as I did for those three hours when, Ian, Mental Ian and Smithy jostled to get the best view of my sophisticated technique. For a tiny, perfect pocket in time, I was as good as I thought I was.
Back at Cripsley, a new, more exciting type of golf holiday was being orchestrated. Like virtually everything that benefited the Cripsley junior section, the idea came from Bob Boffinger. For a fortnight of our summer holiday, Cripsley’s juniors would play host to the juniors of Oporto, a golf club in northern Portugal: they would play in our competitions, sleep in our houses and pretend to eat our food. A year later, we would visit their home city, and do the same things, but with slightly less solicitude.
Meeting the Oporto plane at East Midlands Airport, each of Cripsley’s six junior team members was allocated a Portuguese ‘equivalent’. Robin got Pedro, who was serious-minded, swashbuckling and tall. Jamie got Carlo, who was icy and insolent. Mousey got Ricardo, who was defensive and underdeveloped. Ben got Jason, who was eccentric and goofy. Bushy got Mario, who was dark and enigmatic. And I got Alfonso, who wore ridiculously short trousers.
It was hard to work out whether Portuguese golf fashions were ten years ahead of British ones or ten years behind them. Looking now at a couple of photos from the period, I can see that Alfonso could quite easily pass for the singer in a late-nineties American art rock band. But at the time we were pretty much agreed that our Latin counterparts, with their bucket hats and drainpipe trousers, were sartorial cretins – a view which becomes all the more questionable when you consider the prevailing Cripsley penchant circa 1990 for bright green flecked slacks and pink polo shirts.
The summer of 1990, anywhere from thirteen to twenty of us – Bob Boffinger, the Portuguese, the Cripsley junior team, and an assortment of other juniors not usually including Rick Sweeney – would ride around the Midlands in a minibus, learning Portuguese swear words and ransacking alien locker rooms. These were afternoons of parched fairways and stolen baseball caps, evenings of repeat screenings of the 1987 US Masters, and mornings of unusual eating habits.
The staple breakfast in my house over this period was cornflakes. Or, in Alfonso’s case, three cornflakes. Each morning he would eye me mistrustfully as I filled my bowl with Dr Kellogg’s finest then added the correct amount of milk to moisten the cereal without making it soggy. Thereafter he would shake his head, smile to himself and tuck into his own creation – to all intents and purposes a bowl of milk with cornflake croûtons.
Still, at least he liked my mum’s sandwiches. Every morning without fail, the two of us would be packed off to the golf club with wholemeal doorsteps containing all manner of exotic delights from the Sainsbury’s deli counter. And every lunchtime, without fail, Alfonso would order a huge lasagne from the clubhouse kitchen. ‘Don’t be silly. He’s obviously just got a good appetite,’ said my mum, when I aired my suspicions about this. ‘I wish you’d eat as well as that sometimes.’ A month later, when I looked out of the spare-room window onto the roof of the extension and my eye chanced upon a fortnight’s worth of clingfilm, pastrami and bread, I didn’t have the heart to tell her.
If that summer seems relatively uneventful now, it is perhaps because it will forever stand trial next to the return leg the following Easter. Bob Boffinger should have seen the portents at Heathrow – Ben very nearly getting arrested for pulling the stuffing out of a chair in the departure lounge, me getting searched at Customs then discovering that a bottle of shampoo had
exploded in my rucksack, Bushy almost eloping with a stewardess – and admitted defeat. But if there was one thing Bob Boffinger wasn’t good at, it was admitting defeat. We were his boys. We were going to do our club and country proud.
If ever there was a look that said, ‘Yes, I have heartlessly disposed of your mum’s homemade lunches, and I know you have now found out about it, but I hope we can still be friends,’ then Alfonso, upon greeting me at the airport, exhibited it. He displayed his gratitude for my tactful circumlocution of the whole sandwich issue by treating me to a ‘moving’ rendition of ‘Hey, Jude’ on his Bontempi organ, an interpretation whose only true flaw was the substitution of ‘you’ for ‘Jude’. I couldn’t work out if this was because the song was directed at me, or because Alfonso didn’t know the words, so decided it was best to grit my teeth and mime enjoyment. However, these festivities didn’t provide any guarantee that Alfonso’s family wasn’t going to pay me back for poisoning their son. Until I stayed at Mr and Mrs Alfonso’s place I hadn’t realized that the real point of fondue was to kill the offending animal in the fondue set, while deftly keeping it as pink as possible. From here, things got progressively rawer, until I half expected the final supper of the holiday to be staged in the local zoo, with spears substituted in place of forks.
While it is the golf courses in the south of Portugal that attract the tourist trade, not their more barren northern equivalents, Oporto’s local links was opulent enough, with lush, serpentine fairways and billiard-table greens. Oporto’s corpulent businessmen members had the best of both worlds: on one side of the course was a private beach, providing unlimited sunbathing; on the other side was a shanty town, providing unlimited greenstaff. I’ve never seen so many dark faces surrounding a golf course, and might have found this refreshing had they been holding putters and not shovels.
Alfonso’s dad, much like mine back home, provided a tireless taxi service to and from the club. I was grateful for the lifts, but slightly less grateful for the stops he performed en route. It was always the same. ‘My father is going to stop here for five minutes. We will wait in the car,’ Alfonso would explain, on the way back from another long day at the club. Four hours later, Mr Alfonso would emerge, with the sunny demeanour of a man who had no idea it was three fifteen in the morning, and we would proceed home, me feeling like the only person who thought there was anything unusual about this. The alternative was hitching a lift with Alfonso’s friend Rico, who drove a Renault Five with one of its back passenger doors missing, thought red lights were for girls, and had only one tape in his car stereo, which consisted of Supertramp’s ‘Dreamer’ recorded, as far as I could work out, twenty-four times.
‘You like Supertramp in England, Tom?’ Rico asked, hurtling over a level crossing, looking at me, in the back seat, rather than at the school bus looming in his windscreen.
It was all too much. Before I’d even got my bearings in Portugal, I found myself in a state of sleepless, half-starved, nervous delirium. This shouldn’t serve as an excuse for my irrational, incautious behaviour over my fortnight there, of course. But I’m going to use it anyway.
It was her swing that drew me to her initially. Long. Rhythmical. Suggestive. From three fairways away, it whispered through the grass to me. I’d fallen for her long before I set eyes on her face, but the fact that her face was framed by a bob of fair, silky hair and had a look that was earthy and slightly naughty didn’t exactly discourage me.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked Alfonso.
‘That’s Shue. She is a – how you say in England? – “big girl”. Ha, ha. You want to meet her? Ha, ha. I sort it out.’
Shue was Oporto’s star girl player. Why no one else in the predominantly male Oporto junior section had already snapped up this nine-handicap beauty was one of the great mysteries of the western world to me, but I gladly took up the offer of an introduction, and acted quickly on Alfonso’s suggestion that I should offer to caddy for her in a local girls’ tournament the following day. Shue’s English was patchy, so the two of us communicated almost exclusively through the language of club selection. She was exactly what I was looking for – which, during this point in my life, meant she had a solid swing, blonde hair and bigger-than-average breasts. Although she never told me in words we were an item, she seemed fairly happy in my company, flashed me plenty of shy smiles and was clearly impressed with my all-round technical knowledge and course management.
Now I simply had to get a job, learn the language, and find a flat to rent in the locality. But – no hurry – there was a good week and a half yet to sort all that out. For the moment, I was happy to watch her hit shots on the Oporto practice ground.
Five days of the Portuguese holiday were to be taken up with a trip to Lisbon. Under normal circumstances, this would have meant the opportunity to test out my swing on some of the most intricate and pampered courses in Europe. With the chance to make my virginity a thing of the past, however, golf was rapidly losing its significance. Besides, these courses had buggies for hire, and – let’s face it – that was infinitely more exciting than any number of carpet-like fairways, elevated tees and triple-tier greens.
At Lisbon’s handsome Aurora golf course, Robin and I worked out a fuss-free way of deciding who would drive our buggy. Every three holes, the two of us would race from the previous green to the vehicle, while simultaneously punching one another in the leg; the one who reached the steering wheel first got to drive. We came out about even over the full round. While Robin, ever the one-trick pony, perfected the art of driving extremely fast at pine trees then swerving out of the way right at the last minute, I opted for the less conservative approach, slinging our vehicle at full speed towards anything and anyone in our path, then attempting to figure out how to use the brakes. Not content with running over the feet of Bob Boffinger’s wife Marjorie, I then proceeded to make Aurora the only course equipped with seventeen and a half ball-cleaning units. Ball-cleaning units, for those who don’t know, are circular metal contraptions, mounted on plastic sticks, containing a brush and soapy water: labour-saving devices installed on the tees of your better class of golf course for individuals who find the act of spit ‘n’ polish uncouth. The ones at Aurora were particularly futuristic in design and particularly solidly made, but evidently not quite solidly enough to stand up to a fifteen-mile-per-hour wallop from a golf buggy. What’s most memorable about the incident is not the satisfying ‘Snap!’ of the collision so much as my decision to bail out four yards before impact, leaving my passenger alone and frozen in terror.
From that day to this, Robin has never travelled in a car driven by me. This, I sense, is no coincidence.
During the evenings in Lisbon, we were served barely dead animals and cheap red wine at a mysterious hut a couple of hundred yards from our hotel. This was better than having to pay to wait an hour for a bowl of chips in the hotel – the lone meal we’d ordered there we’d had to march into the kitchen and rescue from the hot plate ourselves – but far from ideal. The meat (horse? baboon?) we pushed doubtfully around our plates. The wine we necked theatrically. Then we headed back to monopolize the second floor of the hotel and find out more about one another than we probably wanted to.
Robin, who, while sober, was about as near as any of us came to responsible, lost all pretence of fatherliness under the influence of alcohol, and thought nothing of singing along to Madonna’s ‘Borderline’ at the top of his voice at 2 a.m. The rest of us, in turn, thought nothing of joining in at the top of our voices, despite the facts that a) most of us didn’t know the words, and b) the song was being broadcast through the miniature headphones of Robin’s personal stereo. After two Bacardi and Cokes Jamie, who could be cold and backbiting, became everyone’s easiest-going confidant. Ben, entrepreneurial and off-the-wall normally, stayed more or less the same but only talked about Pringle’s latest range of sweaters three times per hour, instead of the customary seven. Mousey became even more desperate to prove himself than usual, but typically passe
d out before he had done so. I’m not sure about myself, but going on my current drunken persona, I’m pretty sure I shouted a lot more than usual, told complete strangers I loved them and viewed the act of hiding a pint glass in someone’s bag as worthy of a Bafta for comic innovation.
No one went through a more dramatic character overhaul, though, than Bushy, who, possibly dissatisfied with his role as the ‘quiet one’ in our group, took to leading the charge of the rabid ape warrior through the corridors of the hotel. The beauty of Bushy’s drunken marauding was that it didn’t matter whether the remainder of us were part of it or not; he was off in his own magical land of self-discovery. If I never sit alone on a Yorkshire moor under a full moon, that first night in Lisbon is probably the closest I’ll ever come to seeing a man get perceptibly hairier in a matter of minutes. For every glass of rancid red wine Bushy downed, his stubble seemed to grow an additional centimetre until, finally, he became Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
Several times on one particular night I rode up and down in the hotel’s lift with Bushy. Bushy’s favourite thing about the lift was that it had a huge mirror stretching the length of its rear wall. ‘Oh, it’s you again!’ he would growl at his own reflection, mesmerized. This was funny the first time but even in my inebriated adolescent state had started to wear thin by the time the two of us embarked on our eighth journey up to the fifth floor, so I left Bushy and his alter ego to it. He was last sighted at around midnight, by Ben, who remembered seeing him running off into the bushes, making tormented but strangely overjoyed howling noises.
Ordinarily Bushy returned to the room he was sharing with Mousey at around 4 a.m. and promptly puked in the bidet. No one, least of all Bushy, can account for his whereabouts in the preceding four hours, the only clue being the faint smell of pig lingering on his Lyle and Scott sweatshirt.
It wasn’t until the final night in Lisbon that I located the room that Shue, along with two of the other Oporto girls, was sleeping in. While a normal person might have opted for a more direct manoeuvre – say, asking the question, ‘Shue, what number room are you staying in?’ – I decided that the best way to locate her room was to crawl, accompanied by Mousey, along the hotel’s air vents until I saw something resembling a female leg through the wire grid. It strikes me now that, having gone to this convoluted effort, it might have been a good idea to stick around and make the most of the view, but in the event it only took the faintest glimpse of a bra hanging on a chair to send the two of us scurrying back to our friends, anxious to reveal our discovery.