Nice Jumper

by Tom Cox

  Ted was one of the junior section’s chief allies at Cripsley. A measure of the immense respect reserved for him among us juniors is that not once – publicly or privately – did we think to add a ‘W’ to the front of his surname. A former champion pentathlete, he represented everything that was good about the people you can meet at a golf club. If your entire experience of social golf amounted to Ted’s good manners, selfless sportsmanship and irrepressible sunniness, it might be enough to convince you that dress restrictions, xenophobia and plus fours held the combination to a rosier world.

  There were only two ways to make Ted stop smiling: tell him about a misfortune, or pull on his jowls. He was a beacon of optimism for everyone who knew him, the kind of rare man who seemed to be above day-to-day niggles, yet reserved a deep sadness for the properly tragic. Bob Boffinger was the brains, soul and legs behind the Cripsley junior section. Ted was the heart.

  It’s a special golfer who can be totally in love with the game yet smile beatifically after futzing six successive eight-iron shots into a stagnant pond, and Ted was that man. Unlike his contemporaries, Ted knew he couldn’t lick us at golf, and didn’t waste his or our time trying. ‘That was one mighty drive,’ he would gasp, whether the tee shot I’d hit was awe-inspiring, decent, or downright ordinary. I might have started to nourish my own doubts about my ability to win that British Open, but Ted was always unequivocal about my potential. On my less upbeat days, I would sign up to play with him, just for the sheer confidence boost.

  If there was anything frustrating about Ted, it was that he believed all of us were going to win the British Open one day – something even we, deluded as we were, knew to be highly unlikely. He probably never realized it, but we squabbled over him terribly.

  ‘I’m playing with Ted in the Naylor Cup on Saturday.’

  ‘Ted gave me twenty quid yesterday.’

  ‘Ted said he thought I was favourite to win the club championship this year.’

  Ted probably didn’t put a tenth of the thought, effort, money and time into the junior section that Bob Boffinger did, but he made us feel better about ourselves – better, probably, than we had any right to feel – and because of that he was perhaps the more sought-after patron. His praise, whoreish though it was, mattered. He might have slipped Mousey a tenner early in the day (Mousey’s mum had to support two unruly teenagers alone on a small income, and, learning of this, Ted had stepped in as clandestine benefactor) and signed up to tell Jamie how great he was tomorrow, but when he approached me on the practice ground that day, I felt like the special one.

  ‘How’s the swing, killer?’ asked Ted.

  ‘Ah, pretty good,’ I replied. ‘I just don’t seem to be able to score, though. I creamed it round here in seventy-one yesterday and made four birdies, but I played in the Girton Junior Challenge the day before and stubbed it round in thirteen over. How crap was that?’

  ‘You’ve got to stop blaming yourself, my boy. You’re doing all you can, and it’s obvious you should be scoring better with that kind of swing and the distance you hit the thing. It’s this course: it’s just not difficult enough for you. And that gives you a disadvantage against those Worksop boys straight away.

  ‘I’m heading up to the clubhouse now to order some teacakes. Now – you finish hitting those balls, and I’ll meet you in the men’s bar in twenty minutes. I’ve got an idea for you, my boy.’

  Ted had met Gerald Whitehead in the early sixties while cycling on top of a Swiss Alp; the two of them had celebrated by racing each other down the other side and been friends ever since. Gerald was, Ted explained in hushed tones, a highly influential member of Par-adise. Describing his friend, Ted used phrases like ‘salt of the earth’, ‘owes me his life’ and ‘stand-up fella’. Overlooking the obvious question of why, if he was such a ‘stand-up fella’, he hadn’t secured membership for Ted at Par-adise, I listened, feeling more and more light-headed by the nanosecond, as he outlined just what Gerald might be able to do to further my golfing career. If all went well, I learned, I could be a member at the Midlands’ greatest golf club before the month was out.

  ‘Don’t get too excited, though,’ warned Ted.

  ‘Don’t worry. I won’t,’ I lied.

  The meeting was set for the following week. I arrived at Par-adise well briefed. ‘Now don’t go worrying about how well you play; it’s going to be obvious to Gerry that you’ve got talent,’ explained Ted. ‘What matters is that you show him what a well-bred young man you are. The things that you learned from that little rules book: they’re the important things. Gerry’s a good fella, but he admires manners. Now – you just make sure you repair your pitchmarks and watch your “p”s and “q”s and I’ve got a good feeling that before long you could be the newest star player at one of Nottinghamshire’s best clubs.’

  ‘Thanks, Ted.’

  ‘Oh, and Tom?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If you’re getting a lift up to the club with your dad, you might want to suggest that he leaves the Sphincter at home.’

  He needn’t have worried. I wasn’t leaving anything to chance. I arrived at Par-adise alone, having been dropped off by my parents in the car park of a lumberyard half a mile up the road. My incessant argument that the occasion demanded a brand-new set of Mizuno irons might have fallen on deaf ears, but thanks to a tin of Brasso, a bucket of hot soapy water and the bathroom nail brush, it wouldn’t take too much imagination to mistake my random, orphaned clubs for the Real Thing. My torso was complimented by a handsome Lyle and Scott tank top, complete with ’bilious diamonds’ motif. My breath had been primed with an infallible cocktail of Colgate, Listerine and Fox’s Glacier Mints. I was as ready as I would ever be. Emerging from the pines, I paused at the brow of the hill, and admired my new kingdom.

  Gerald matched neither my preconceived image of a Par-adise dignitary nor my preconceived image of Ted Anchor’s best friend. A tight-lipped, frugal man, he immediately made it clear that there were a thousand and one things he’d rather be doing than playing golf with a precocious little brat like me. His conversation was strictly limited to a muttered ‘I think it’s your turn to play’ here and an ‘I’m taking a free drop’ there. I think at one point he might have asked me how I’d done in my GCSEs, but it could have been the wind thrashing through the pines. Unlike his Cripsley equivalents, Gerald seemed neither impressed nor depressed by my golf. It simply didn’t penetrate his universe.

  I guessed, though, that this was all part of the test. Well, bring it on, I thought. I was in what professionals call ‘the zone’ – the exact place I couldn’t seem to find in all those county tournaments – and nothing could touch me. If Gerald wanted to wait for me to make the mistakes, he could wait as long as he liked.

  I handled the whole thing, I thought, with model decorum. Ted had advised me not to worry about the way I played, and I hadn’t, unduly. Par-adise had brought neither me nor the bowed shaft of my five-iron to my knees, yet I’d shown it the respect it demanded. My round was pragmatic, reliable, unspectacular, and that was clearly what the occasion called for. I had repaired my pitchmarks. I had replaced my divots. I had beaten Gerald by eleven shots.

  ‘Good game,’ he muttered, as – careful to apply just the right, respectful level of firmness – I shook his hand on the eighteenth green.

  Clearly, something was playing on his mind. It could have been the crushing defeat, but I sensed otherwise: he had, after all, spent most of the round regarding my performance with all the excitement of a man with a ringside seat at the quarter-finals of the World Needlework Championships. As he invited me into the clubhouse for muffins (Par-adise was obviously too posh for teacakes), he had the look of an FBI interrogator who knows his suspect is guilty but hasn’t quite located his weakness. I nipped into the locker room and checked myself out in the mirror, discovering to my immense relief that my shirt was tucked in, my flies were zipped up, and no one had covertly scrawled ‘Marxist Deviant Sex Offender Hippy’ across my f
orehead.

  The events of the following hour might have been a series of coincidences and bad breaks. That’s certainly what they felt like at the time. Now that I lay them out in my head, however, it all begins to look somewhat predestined. I wonder, for example, if it was mere chance that led us to the particular one of Par-adise’s several imperious-looking bars which played host to the icy, grey-haired man in the dark suit. I muse over whether Gerald’s prolonged visit to the toilet, leaving me in the company of this man and his remorseless manner, was just an acute attack of irritable bowel syndrome or something more contrived. I puzzle over whether the questions that the man put to me were his way of making conversation, or something worked out in a committee room the day before.

  ‘Do your parents play golf, Tom?’ said the icy man, by way of greeting. He was looking at something forty-five degrees to my right. I followed his gaze to see if it led to another Tom, but saw only a wall filled with framed photos of Par-adise’s past captains. He was talking to me.

  ‘No. They never have.’

  ‘What or who made you take it up, then? An uncle?’

  ‘No. Just thought I’d give it a go, really.’

  ‘And what line of work are your parents in?’

  ‘My dad’s a supply teacher. My mum teaches English as a second language at an inner-city primary school.’

  A perceptible drop in temperature. ‘Hmmmph. Do you … Do you know anyone at our club, Tom?’

  ‘Only Gerald.’

  ‘And what makes you want to become a member?’

  ‘Well, I’ve always loved the course. And I’m looking for a challenge, to help me become a better player. I aim to be down to a scratch handicap by the time I’m eighteen.’

  ‘And how do you feel about the social side of golf? Do you enjoy it?’

  ‘I … erm. It’s … I … It’s fine.’

  At which point the interrogation drew to a close, and Gerald – who’d probably been watching the whole thing through a double-sided mirror with the remainder of the club’s greens committee – returned, bearing a tension-relieving plate of muffins.

  Ordinary teenagers principally have the misfortune of hanging around with only two types of old people – their schoolteachers and their relatives. They make up for the indignity of hanging around with the former by inventing cruel nicknames for them and leaving stray drawing-pins on their chairs, and generally do their best to spend as little time with the latter as possible. Golf teenagers aren’t so fortunate. They are abandoned in an almost exclusively adult world where everyone under eighteen is written off as a ‘junior’, yet somehow expected to communicate on a civil level with people far less energetic and happening than them. The one factor that makes this bearable is the game itself. Colin Burroughs, for example, whom I played with in Cripsley’s Rover Cup, might, for all I knew, have been a closet fascist with an Enoch Powell apron and an extensive collection of Barbara Cartland novels, but he, like me, could relate to the difference between an eight-iron and a mashie niblick and the tingling sensation associated with a creamy one-iron from a tight lie. These things brought us closer. Without them, I was his worst nightmare.

  Which is perhaps why I never hit it off with Gerald and the Human Coolbox. I tried to talk about Ian Woosnam’s winning putting streak and the new range of TaylorMade woods, but they didn’t seem interested. They didn’t seem interested in much, least of all my own golfing achievements. I might as well have been a face on the wall, and they probably would have paid more attention to me if I was. Every so often they would talk just out of my earshot, and I would pick up odd words like ‘committee’, ’disciplinary’, ‘union’ and ‘function’. Most of the time, they munched on their muffins and stared longingly at their beloved past captains.

  ‘I’m due to play in the Midland Youths Championships next month,’ I casually mentioned to Gerald, in an attempt to pep the conversation up slightly.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Yes. It’s at Stoke Rochford. I think I’m in with a good chance this year.’

  ‘Hmmm. Well, good luck.’

  Was that it? ‘Well, good luck’? I might not have been Boy Wonder, but I was used to more deference than this. I was the youngest ever club champion of Cripsley, but I was marginally less important than a muffin at Par-adise. Reluctantly, I balled my fists, controlled my breathing, and swallowed my pride. After all, I was here to improve my golf, to get away from the evil temptations of Granny on Wheels and Ching!, and Nick Bellamy and the pro shop. I was here because it was a place where I wouldn’t be distracted from the serious business of golf by the fun business of aiming punched one-irons at a tractor driven by someone called Stig or Reg or Rog. I wasn’t here for the diverse culture, pithy conversation and lively nightlife. I was here strictly to do business. If the ice twins were going to play it cool, I could deal with that. Providing, of course, that they offered me membership.

  I left that day not quite sure whether they had or not.

  Stony Thrapston, the micro-suburb I lived in when I was sixteen, was, despite its rustic name, a classic eighties Meccano village: a vaguely aspiring middle-class community, surrounded on all sides by vaguely apathetic working-class ones. If you ignored the smoke billowing from the burning Gazmobiles on the council estate a hundred yards or so to the rear of our house, you might even mistake Mornington Road for quite a peaceful street, where burglaries didn’t happen once every fortnight. The Human Coolbox was understandably unfamiliar with the place but – uncharacteristically, I thought – insisted on driving me home anyway, since it appeared to be roughly on his way. Conversation didn’t exactly flow on the journey (‘So, what exactly does teaching English as a second language entail?’ ‘I don’t really know.’), but for the first time I began to review my day’s work and feel positive. I’d withstood the onslaught of etiquette and stoicism. OK, I hadn’t done much, but I hadn’t done anything wrong. At least – I was pretty sure I hadn’t.

  Then I remembered the Sphincter.

  By the time I thought of it, we’d already turned into Mornington Road, and it was probably too late. I toyed briefly with the idea of asking to be dropped off next door, at the house belonging to Mr and Mrs Singh, and trying to pass them off as my parents, but, foreseeing the problems that might be involved in explaining my Sikh adoption to the Par-adise committee, thought better of it. My one remaining hope was that my dad had, on a whim, decided to lock his precious jalopy in the garage for the evening. It was, admittedly, a slim hope, given that – with the exception of environmental health – there was no logical reason to lock the Sphincter away for the night since the only exterior parts of it that hadn’t rusted already were the tyres, the windows and the headlights, and even they were beginning to look a bit on the orange side.

  Who was I kidding? I was asking for a miracle. I closed my eyes and asked hard. When I opened them, I saw an empty drive.

  It belonged to the Jacksons, the couple who lived opposite us.

  In my own drive, as ever, squatted the Sphincter – looking less roadworthy than ever, it had to be said. I noted with interest that somewhere on the way home from the lumberyard earlier in the day my dad had managed to lose the car’s one remaining hubcap. Through the rear window, it was possible to see the bin liners full of decomposing garden refuse intended for the local tip. If you peered hard enough at a small area of part-preserved paintwork beneath the rear bumper, it was just possible to make out the car’s original beige hue. In the left-hand window – the side facing us – was the ‘Ban the Bomb’ sticker that my parents had bought at a 1982 CND funfair.

  Had Coolbox – I still hadn’t discovered his real name or what desperately important, clandestine function he performed in the Par-adise machine – spotted this (only just) living insult to the automobile industry? It was hard to tell. But if he hadn’t, he was certainly just about to. And if he wasn’t, he was going to catch a whiff of the burning vest smell that the Sphincter always gave off if it had been driven more than two miles at some poi
nt during the previous twenty-four hours.

  ‘Well, thanks for the lift,’ I said, squeezing out of the passenger door, trying to inflate my body in order to block out the view behind me.

  ‘Yes. Well …’ He seemed distracted.

  ‘I guess Gerald will be in touch?’

  ‘What?’ Putting the car in gear. ‘Oh, yes, you’ll hear from Gerald. At some point.’

  I watched and waved with a sinking heart as he sped off back up the road, still with my doubts as to whether he’d fully evaluated the putrid heap of scrap behind me, but instinctively coming to terms with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be seeing him again.

  The following month unfolded with inevitable, desperate silence, which soon devolved into normality. ‘How did it go?’ Ted had asked. ‘I’m not sure. Well, I think,’ I’d told him, not yet wanting to concede that all hope was gone. After another four weeks of silence from Gerald and apologies from Ted, the news came, the lateness, vagueness and spuriousness of the verdict – ‘Unfortunately Par-adise has decided it doesn’t have room for any more junior members at this stage’ – an insult to my ambition and Ted’s friendship. By then, though, I’d long since given up.

  A couple of months later, at a tournament near Kidderminster, I found myself paired, uncommonly, with one of Par-adise’s low-handicap adult members, a man I hadn’t met before nor heard of – strangely, considering the close-knit nature of the Nottinghamshire scene. While waiting for the green ahead of us to clear, I found myself striking up a conversation with him about the state of Nottinghamshire junior golf. He seemed a genial enough fella, and I asked him, just out of interest, how his club’s junior section were fairing that season.