Final Rounds

by James Dodson

  I thanked him. He invited me to join him for the march home. His name was Alex Gordon, a Lytham member playing a quick eighteen before his wife picked him up for the dentist. Alex proved to be a lively conversationalist, and I asked him how the club’s members viewed hosting the Open championship—as an honor or as a bit of a nuisance? I qualified my question by explaining that a man I’d met at a famous club that hosted the U.S. Open every dozen or so years confided to me that having the Open drove the members into a collective state of despair—their course was essentially taken hostage for more than a month by the superintendent and tournament officials, TV crews, and other invaders.

  “It’s quite the contrary here, I should think,” Alex said. “Oh, a few will no doubt grumble here and there about being kept off, but most of the members rather enjoy having all the attention.” He went along a few steps, then added as an afterthought: “Golf seems to have grown rather frightful in the States, hasn’t it? I mean, all that fancy equipment and all those big tournaments and whatnot. I must say, some of the courses, like Augusta National, appear to be positively flawless.”

  “They are flawless,” I said. “That’s why Americans can’t seem to win your Open anymore. A writer named Herb Graffis was once asked to name the most important technological advance in golf. He said it was the lawn mower.”

  Alex Gordon laughed. This observation seemed to deeply please him. As we finished the rugged seventeenth (which I parred, thank you very much) and headed toward the next tee, I asked if he’d ever heard of a red-haired girl named Nickie who might have caddied at Lytham during the war years and would probably be a woman in her early seventies now. “That name doesn’t sound familiar, I’m afraid,” he said, shaking his head. “Good caddy, was she?”

  “Apparently. I might owe my golf swing to her.”

  Alex smiled at that. He introduced me to his wife, who was waiting for him when we came off the course.

  —

  My father was already at the Taps, a low-beamed tavern on the small street just behind the Clifton Arms Hotel, the drafty four-star hotel where a lot of the American players billet during Lytham-hosted Opens.

  We’d planned to rendezvous there at four in the afternoon, but I was a half hour late and found my father in the midst of a lively group of locals enjoying an afternoon snog, a few steps from a crackling fire. He waved me over, ordered me a bitter, and asked if twice proved a charm at Royal Lytham. I said it had indeed and showed him my much-improved card.

  “Stick around,” he said, “and you may get to like the place.”

  “I already do.”

  Dad was in excellent spirits. I asked how his day had been. He said great. He’d risen late, soaked in the tub, phoned home to check up on things, and taken a leisurely breakfast in the dining room, then put on his sneakers and gone for a walk around the town. He’d bought my niece Rebecca a little silver bracelet and gone to the library to read The Times. While having lunch at the Ship and Royal, a pub up on the main drag, he’d met a couple of retired local schoolteachers who spent an hour filling him in on some of the town’s changes over the decades. The cars had gotten too big, the gist of their narrative went, while the streets remained too small, kids didn’t respect their mums and dads, and nobody in Lytham was really as neighborly as they used to be. New people seemed to come and go. British Aerospace was maybe going to lay off more workers. The pubs were full, the churches empty.

  After that, he’d taken the wheel of the Omega and cruised up to Blackpool to see if it was still as “delightfully honky-tonk” as he remembered it being.

  “I hope you remembered to drive on the left,” I said. “Was Blackpool everything you hoped for?”

  “Worse, I’m afraid,” he said, chuckling. “I think I saw it during the good years.”

  Someone slapped me vigorously on the back, and I turned around to see who’d hit me with a tree limb. My assailant was a little old man, a short, white-haired gent, with a weather-beaten face and alert red-rimmed eyes. He squinted at me like a troll in a fairy book, offering a hard grin.

  “This is Jimmy,” my father said expansively. “We’ve been talking about Bill Clinton.”

  “I hate the bloody bugger,” Jimmy explained with a heavy Irish growl.

  “Jimmy comes from Ireland.”

  “Yer the golf writer son, are ye?” Jimmy said, still squinting at me with one eye. The other eye seemed to be roving off roughly in the direction of Portugal.

  Since I was still standing beneath my U.S. Open lid, I didn’t try and deny it.

  “Come to sample our fine local courses, have ye?”

  “My dad was in the army here during the war. We’re playing our way up to Scotland.”

  “Good for ye. That’s a proper son, to take old Da aboot. If it was me, though, sonny boy, I’d go to Ireland instead. That’s where the fookin’ best golf courses in the world are, ye know. Not a bit of dispute about that fact.” He placed his thick lips on the edge of his pint and lowered the tide of stout in the glass about five inches.

  “So what’s your favorite Irish course?” It seemed the logical question.

  Jimmy wiped his mouth and sniffed. “I don’t care for the game, myself. Seems a wee bit dull for my purposes, all that cracking aboot.” He fixed his dark round troll eyes on me and demanded, “Yer da tells me ye used to write aboot politics, too. So what do ye make of President Flintstone?”

  “Who?”

  “He means Bill Clinton,” Dad explained unnecessarily, giving me a look.

  I nodded and sipped my own beer. Talking politics in bars with angry drunks was no longer one of my semi-tax-deductible favorite pastimes. I’d much rather have talked about golf courses in Ireland or the revenge I’d surgically exacted on Lytham’s dreaded seventeenth, or the Hole-in-None Society, whose official bylaws I would soon write up, or why there is no cure for golf hat hair. Where was my thick-skinned Clinton-loving Scottish mother-in-law when I needed her most?

  “Seems like he’s trying hard,” I replied. “I gather you don’t agree.”

  “He’s a fookin’ disgrace, him and that crazy wife o’ his. She’s the one wears the britches in dot family. Dot’s what I really tink.”

  Dad smiled sympathetically at my predicament and excused himself for the gents, encouraging Jimmy to rant on for a while about Gerry Adams and a speech my president had supposedly made on a podium with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in which he’d reportedly said, among other fookin’ crazy tings, that Americans were closer to Germans than to Britons. Jimmy, shifting closer, as if a swift cuff about the ears could follow for an incorrect answer, demanded to know if I thought this was true. I replied that in my opinion it wasn’t true. I said I personally considered everyone in Britain a potential golf pal, and if it helped, the only German I knew was Bernhard Langer.

  We were drawing a little audience. A man named Jeff leaned in to inquire if Dad and I were planning to stay in the area awhile, and his wife Rachel wanted to know if we had attended the recent D-Day reunion at the former Freckleton base, now the property of British Aerospace. I could have kissed them both for interrupting. I said we had missed the reunion and were unfortunately only planning to stay in the area a day or two because we had to meet my Scottish mother-in-law for lunch in Glasgow.

  “She’s Scottish, is she?” Jimmy barked.

  “Very much so.”

  “Sounds like a fine woman to me.”

  “Glad you think so. She thinks the world of Bill Clinton.” I broke it gently to him, sending his snout plunging back into his pint.

  “Lots of Americans came to the reunion,” Rachel said. “And there was apparently quite a memorial service up at the church, you know, because of the bomber.”

  My father came back and climbed onto his stool. He picked up his beer, took a sip, and tuned in to the conversation.

  “What bomber?” I said.

  “Why, the bomber that crashed,” Rachel replied. She glanced from me to my father and then back at me. “I
t was such a heartbreaking thing, wasn’t it? All those lovely babies gone. People round here never quite got over it.”

  I glanced at Dad and saw he was staring at Rachel. He said nothing.

  I shrugged and admitted, “I don’t know anything about a bomber crash.”

  “Dot’s crazy,” the ever-helpful Jimmy growled. “Everybody knows aboot da bomber.”

  I looked at my father again. “Do you know the bomber they’re talking about?” He nodded almost imperceptibly. His high spirits were gone. His complexion had turned pale.

  “Yes.”

  Jimmy scowled at him. “Ye mean to say ye never tol’ yer own son aboot dot ting? Jesus Christ, man, dot damned ting wiped out half da bloody fookin’ village.”

  Dad’s voice was scarcely more than a whisper.

  “It was…very bad.”

  I could see ripples of tension coursing through his jawline, indicating this was a discussion he wanted no part of. His eyes shifted to the burning fire. What the hell, I wondered, was going on? Rachel apparently saw the same thing and gently touched my arm. “Your dad tells me you have two little ones at home. A boy and girl. How brilliant. I own a children’s shop over on the promenade. You must come into the shop tomorrow and let me show you some things.”

  Absently, I promised I would. My mind was groping to find an explanation for my father’s sudden mood shift. I’d never seen anything like it. What did the crash of a bomber have to do with him? I knew most of my old man’s war stories, and there was nothing in them about a plane crash. His sudden, stricken withdrawal made me queasy.

  The Taps was growing hot and loud with men rowdily arguing over soccer standings. Jeff and Rachel finished their drinks and left. When Jimmy mercifully staggered off to hunt for the loo, I leaned over and asked my father if he was all right.

  “No,” he said, looking at me with a startling intensity. He took a final sip of his beer, then pushed it aside and got up.

  “Come with me,” he said. “There’s something I have to show you.”

  —

  Despite all the stories I knew, there were things about my father’s war years I didn’t understand. Back home in Maine, there was an accordion file with various documents that amounted to a paper trail of his activities between the years 1942 and 1945. In late 1942, married to my mother and working in the ad department of the Cumberland News, he’d enlisted in the Army Air Corps and been offered a chance to go to officer candidate school, where he hoped to become a combat or glider pilot. Simultaneously, though, he’d learned that his “home” draft board in High Point, North Carolina, had already mailed him a draft notice assigning him to the technical training school at Chanute Field, Chicago, so he went there instead. At Chanute, he scored in the top five percent of his class and was offered a second opportunity to attend OCS, this time with the personal recommendation of General Hap Arnold.

  He declined the recommendation and stayed at Chanute for six months as a life-raft and parachute inspector. In early ’43 he was shipped off to San Antonio, where he was made a staff sergeant and continued teaching but once again turned down OCS. In November of that year, he was sent to the war in Europe to fill a chief inspector slot at Warton Air Base in Freckleton, which the Air Force called Base Army Depot Two. There he stayed for thirteen months, assigned to a “casual” pool, which granted him an unusual amount of freedom of movement—hence his two golf trips to Scotland. Twice more during that period of time, the top brass recommended him for OCS—and twice more he declined.

  Why was this?

  On our first night in Lytham, over that feast of summer’s last green peas and a perfectly sculpted Yorkshire pudding, in the afterglow of our great day at Royal Lytham, I’d put the question directly to him. His quietly rendered answer had taken me by surprise.

  “When I joined the army, I was a pretty cocky young guy. I had a beautiful wife, a good civilian job, and a zippy comeback for everything—not unlike you, come to think of it. I suppose part of that was an intellectual arrogance. I’d read a lot of books, been a few places. I thought I knew more than most other guys, including the colonels and generals. That somehow made me different, maybe even a bit better than them. Coming here taught me otherwise.”

  I’d asked how so.

  “Oh,” he answered vaguely, “just something that happened. I’d really rather not go into it. The point is, smart guys like me grow up thinking we’ve got it all figured out. We think we’re fully in control of everything that happens. The truth is, the control we think we have is really an illusion. Shadows. The only thing life really promises us is pain. It’s up to us to create the joy.”

  I’d asked what happened to change his thinking in this way.

  He’d taken a bite of peas and chewed them for a minute, then looked at me and said two words.

  “The war.”

  —

  We drove, in the fading light, after leaving the Taps, toward the village of Freckleton. I now knew that the answer to my question the evening before had something to do with a bomber that crashed. But that’s all I knew because Dad was stone silent, looking out of the Omega as we went along with his hands folded on his lap.

  A few school kids were still straggling home in their plaid jumpers and navy blazers. I saw a little yellow-haired girl walking with a chubby black-haired companion who reminded me of my daughter and her best friend Eileen. Their heads were bent together as if they were whispering, the larger girl dragging her overcoat on the pavement behind them.

  “Stop the car here,” Dad suddenly said.

  We were in the center of Freckleton, near Trinity Church, just off the Preston Road. There was a post office, a small market, a fish-and-chips parlor, and the handsome redbrick church. In the breezy late afternoon light, Freckleton looked even more like a postcard of tranquil English village life. Pansies were still blooming in window boxes.

  He opened his door and got out. I followed him in silence across the street toward Holy Trinity. He stopped on the sidewalk and stared at the residential close of private dwellings next door. He seemed to be trying to orient himself. Without speaking a word, he walked purposefully toward a small pedestrian lane that ran between the close and a small button shop.

  The lane led to a gated burying ground at the rear of the church. On the far side of the graveyard was a public park of some sort, with a rose garden at its center. Dad opened the iron gate and proceeded along the stone pathways of the graveyard, eyeing the headstones. I followed him to a large polished granite cross positioned near the rear of the cemetery. It was a common grave. Wreaths and wildflowers had recently been placed there, but the chill nights had turned them rusty, bundles of asters and poppies and chrysanthemums. I read some of the names inscribed on the stone border: Gillian and June Parkinson. George Preston. Michael Probert. Kenneth Boocock. Lillian Waite. Silvia Whybrow. Judith Garner. Annie Harrington…

  The names went on, thirty-eight in all. A mass grave.

  “How did these folks die?” I asked.

  “They weren’t folks,” he replied softly. “They were children.”

  The words didn’t sink in at first. We stood there for a few seconds staring at the names.

  “Children?” I repeated finally.

  He nodded. “Four- and five-year-olds. Maggie’s and Jack’s ages. They went to the infants’ school here at the church. One of our bombers crashed into the school. The airfield was just over there.” He lifted his head, solemnly, to indicate where.

  I didn’t have a clue what to say. I’d never heard of anything so awful. So for a change, I said nothing.

  We stood in silence for a few minutes more before he spoke again. He shut his eyes and opened them. I wondered if he was praying or just reliving scenes I couldn’t begin to imagine.

  He spoke evenly. “It was about ten in the morning. A large thunderstorm had just come up. We had our parachute crews working double shifts because this was six or seven weeks after D-Day. I’d just stretched out on my cot in our Nissen
hut to steal some shut-eye when I heard a big roar overhead, followed by an explosion. The whole hut just shook. Jesus, it shook….I knew it was one of our birds. The hut I was in was probably the closest one to the school here. One of the other guys jumped up and ran out, and I ran after him. It was raining like hell, but I saw fire down at the school and started running. We were all running.”

  Dad cleared his throat. He was shaking a bit. I placed my hand on his arm. He continued:

  “I guess I was one of the first to reach the school, though others got there quickly. God…what a sight. The plane had gone right through the school and struck a cafe where lots of our guys and R.A.F. personnel used to hang out. It set half the town on fire. Burning fuel was running down the street. I just remember…starting to pull away pieces of things…pieces of the plane, you know, also bricks and mortar…and all these precious little kids inside…buried alive or killed by the explosion. I remember the sound of a child weeping. I couldn’t seem to find her. We pulled out several of the children. They were dead or badly injured. You didn’t have time to think. You just kept digging.”

  His voice stopped. I saw tears gathering in his eyes for only the second time in my life. The first time had been when we buried my nephew Richard, one summer day in 1987. Richard, his first grandchild, had been gamely battling a rare nervous system disorder when he died in his sleep. Richard was nine.

  I slipped my arm around my father.

  We stood that way for several more minutes. He cleared his throat again and said, in a stronger voice: “I knew a lot of these kids, Jim. As I told you, they were always hanging around the base. The guys loved them. We each had our favorites. There was one little girl in particular I loved. She was always laughing, like your Maggie. I called her Lady Sunshine. I used to tell her I hoped I had a daughter like her someday. She was one of those killed.”

  Good lord, I thought.

  “A week or so after the crash, after the funeral and all of that, I found a note attached to the bulletin board from that little girl’s parents. They wondered if anybody had taken a photograph of their daughter. Can you imagine? They didn’t even have a picture of their only daughter. I took them all I had. They were so grateful. We sat there in their little front parlor and just cried. I don’t think I ever experienced anything quite so sad.”