A no less unusual incident occurred in a foursomes match against Headingley Golf Club when, at another short hole and at a critical point of an even match, I hit a decent tee-shot to the edge of the green, about a yard beyond another bunker. Thereupon my opposing driver hooked his shot from the tee deep into a wood on the left. The hole was as good as ours. I was going through the motions of helping our opponents to find their ball – clearly an impossible task but these were two Yorkshiremen – when my partner, Jack Bannister again, strolled across and said to me a little sheepishly: ‘You’re not going to believe this, Christopher, but our ball is now in the bunker and we have still played only one shot.’
Moving his trolley towards the ball he had inadvertently touched a rake with the wheels and the rake in turn had glanced the ball neatly into the sand. Time was pressing and I am ashamed to admit that when one of our opponents suggested that we should move on and call the hole a half (with a cunning and opportunism of which only a Tyke could have been capable) we meekly complied. Experts on the rules told me later that we should simply have replaced our ball in its original position with a penalty of one stroke.
Every autumn, at the end of the cricket season, I go to Norfolk to play with a collection of cricket writers for the ‘coveted’ green jacket and the Irish shillelagh awarded every year to the champion golfer of the Gibbons Golf Society. The name derives from the little-remembered Worcestershire stalwart H.H.I.H. ‘Doc’ Gibbons, who happened to be the first name alighted upon in a copy of Wisden when the honourable company who founded the Society were deciding what to call themselves.
Their first informal gathering for some end-of-season golf in Ireland soon developed into a regular annual tournament for a core of eight journalists, based in recent years at Hunstanton and Brancaster, two of the best links in England. Martin Johnson, Mike Selvey, Vic Marks, Derek Pringle and myself have been what football programmes used to refer to as the ‘ever presents’ of the last fifteen years or so. David ‘Toff’ Lloyd, former cricket correspondent of the Press Association and the Evening Standard, and Graham Otway, a cricket and golf writer of long experience, were two of the founding fathers, with Johnson, Selvey and the latter’s long-time friend David Norman, a Londoner who settled in East Anglia and ran a successful engineering business. He has been a tireless local organiser and, in our more impecunious days, a generous host.
No one has since worn the jacket more often than Johnson, the iconoclastic writer on (mainly) cricket, rugby and golf whose articles have delighted readers of the Independent, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times, amongst others. He never writes a piece without raising a smile, and usually a laugh, from some astute observation of the human frailities of the sportsmen he is writing about. He started his journalistic life on the South Wales Echo and graduated to the Leicester Mercury, where he persuaded the sports editor to give him a trial as the paper’s cricket writer. No one has insulted so many professional sportsmen in print yet retained their affection and respect. It was he who observed of Mike Gatting’s 1986/7 team, shortly before they stormed to victory in the first Test in Brisbane, that the touring team had only three problems. They couldn’t bat, they couldn’t bowl and they couldn’t field.
That was his passport to wider fame and greater fortune, but Johnson, who plays in Gibbons tournaments under the guise of the ice-cool Swede Martin Johansson, spends much of his time these days working on the Society’s website (gibbonsgolf. com) and would cheerfully spend every day of his life on a golf course somewhere. Indeed, when the former Times Editor Peter Stothard was interviewing him for the cricket correspondent’s job on the paper, he was asked, rather earnestly, what his ambitions were. ‘To retire as soon as possible and spend all my time on the golf course’ was his disarmingly honest response.
I would get bored, I fear, if I were to retire completely and to play golf every day, superficially attractive though it may seem, but I am almost as keen on the game now as I was on cricket as a schoolboy. Now, as then, I do not practise enough, despite splashing out on a small artificial green at home: mainly for the benefit of my grandchildren I told my wife. When their time comes I shall tell them the truth: it is a simple game. The best advice for any golfer is to consider nothing other than watching the back of the ball and hitting through it towards the target, with the head kept firmly down until the ball has left the club.
I should leave more sophisticated thoughts about the art of the golf swing to others such as the late Walker Cup player and captain of the R and A, Michael Lunt. ‘What do you think about on your back swing?’ he once asked his predecessor as captain of Walton Heath, the circuit Judge John Bishop. ‘I just try to watch the back of the ball’, replied his Honour. Michael walked on a few yards before asking again, with a slight chuckle as if John had been joking. ‘Very good. But seriously, what do you think about?’
There are a few golfers who operate on a higher plane than the rest of us. I am content to strive only for a bit more consistency. As the cricket-besotted Canon Lyttelton could not go down the nave of his own cathedral at Lichfield without wondering if it would take spin, so I cannot spend much time in a hotel room without getting a coat-hanger out of the cupboard and playing shots with an imaginary ball to an imaginary green. The game hooks you like that. A pity I hook the ball so often when a real fairway confronts me.
I have to be content with glory reflected from my son James, who played for two years in what must be amongst the best golf teams that Oxford University has ever produced. They overwhelmed Cambridge by thirteen points to two, a record margin, in his first match at Rye in 1994 and his team-mates in that and the following year included no fewer than six different winners of the renowned President’s Putter, with ten wins between them.
Charlie Rotheroe has won the Putter three times, Tom
Etridge and Richard Marrett twice, Steve Seman, Neil Pabari and Mark Benka once each. James himself reached the semi-final in 2001. I managed to see the last few holes of his quarter-final win over Marrett and, the following morning, a tense semi-final defeat against the subsequent winner from Sunningdale, Bruce Streather.
Having watched his second match as an undergraduate, at Royal Lytham & St. Annes, I already knew that watching one’s offspring drive, chip or putt was as nerve-racking as seeing him bat. Anxious not to get too close and possibly thereby put him off, I was watching his very tense singles match (eventually lost by a single hole, the only point that he dropped in his four matches against Cambridge) from some way distant, trying, by standing on tiptoe, to get a view of what was happening on the green. By walking backwards a few yards towards higher ground, my eyes still locked on the middle distance, I thought that I would be able to see a bit more through a gap in the small gallery of spectators but unfortunately I over-balanced and fell backwards into a bunker. Charlie Chaplin or Norman Wisdom could not have done it better. So intent was everyone else in the drama that no one noticed my loss of dignity. Meanwhile, James missed his putt.
The golfing achievement of which he is proudest came the year after he came down from Oxford when Radley won the Halford Hewitt, the hotly contested Old Boys Championship held each April on the links of Deal and Sandwich, for the first and only time. He and Tom Etridge played as the top pair and won all but the first of their six matches.
Most of my still limited amount of golf is played on the heathery heath of the West Sussex course at Pulborough. It is a lovely piece of natural golfing country, blessed by sandy soil that keeps it open in the wettest weather. In winter especially it is one of the finest inland courses, not long but shrewdly laid out and tougher than it looks, with lovely open views to the Downs. At any time of year it is a haven of peace with none of the air or road traffic that can spoil the pleasure on other courses.
St George’s at Sandwich, it is a two-ball course, so rounds take only about three hours rather than the four or so that are common at four-ball clubs. To be able to play occasionally at Royal St George’s is, of course, a privilege, and us
ually a joy too, no matter how strongly the wind is blowing over those wild links. Soon after I had joined the club, barely knowing a course where each hole is a little world in itself amongst the dunes, I got back from reporting a match at Canterbury in time for a few evening holes. No one else was about. Even the larks had gone to bed as the dusk became deeper. I allowed myself one more hole, firing a drive into the gloaming, before setting off for the clubhouse. Two problems followed. I never found the ball and, looking in all four directions from the top of a mound, I could not for the life of me remember where the clubhouse was.
28
FAITH
A hotel room in Brisbane. Another Test starts in two days. The room is restful, decorated in soft shades of grey; and comfortable, even luxurious, but, like all hotel rooms occupied only by one person, soulless. Lying here, awake when I should be sleeping but jet-lagged and woken by a sun that has risen at 4.45 am, I take up less than a third of the huge bed.
The air conditioning hums and I wish that I could open the big, straight plate-glass window that would give to this stale room, smelling very slightly of other guests’ perspiration, some fresh early morning air off the broad river below. If only it was not locked ‘for reasons of health and safety’.
I am not going to throw myself out, for heaven’s sake, even though I know that I should be more excited than I am by the forthcoming match, the privilege of describing it, the extreme good fortune that someone else is paying most of the bill for me while I wonder what time to descend in the lift to the warm swimming pool below to get the exercise to justify indulging in a cooked breakfast, sitting by the river.
Distance lends enchantment, certainly; and familiarity breeds, not contempt so much as a relative apathy. Thirty-six years ago, in a nasty yellow-brick motel, there were none of these luxuries but it was all a bright new adventure.
Am I wearied by too much of the same? Is it jet-lag or have I lost my focus?
I look at the Bible notes I brought with me because gradually it seems to be getting rarer for hotels to put Bibles supplied by the Gideons in the drawer beneath the bedside lamp. ‘You must constantly monitor the level of your commitment to Christ, the growth of your faith, your home life, your relationships, your integrity, your work ethic, your thoughts and your habits.’ I read, and consider.
Terrible things have been done by men throughout history in the name of religion. Every time there is a tragedy – another slaughter of innocents, another heart-rending famine, another earthquake, or another person we know suddenly inflicted by some cruel and random disease – it is extremely hard to accept the conventional religious response that God is a mystery whose ways we can never understand in this existence.
‘God’ may not be the description that suits everyone but I feel that I have been in many ways blessed and protected on my own journey through this teeming, unjust, tragedy-strewn world. More than that, I feel that we all have an instinct to thank a great creator for the incredible beauty of nature, the astounding variety of living things and the unfathomable vastness of space.
Every time I start to doubt, I think of Blake’s ‘To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold Infinity in the palm of your hand and Eternity in an hour’. There is no proof of a divine creation but it is extraordinary how every child of every nationality, born to a religious environment or not, smarts when he tells his first lie. We are born with a knowledge of good and evil, even if it is the way that we are brought up that shapes what we do with it.
It is much easier for those who have been blessed with a good education and time to spare to wrestle with the meaning of life, but everyone should try. I have struggled harder than some, if only to prove the truth of St. Augustine’s aphorism: Our hearts are restless until we find our rest in You. I envy those who can simply accept that God is God and take the further step to belief in the infallibility of biblical revelation.
I used to write essays about 16th-century reformers such as Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley. They believed that, ever since Adam, Eve and their defiance, humanity has been corrupted, and therefore that human reason can play no part in our understanding of God. Their conviction was that revelation in the Scriptures is how God has revealed himself. But the Tudor reformers represented a lacuna in the life of the Church. Most Anglicans these days would agree that the Bible, reflecting many cultures and circumstances over a long period, can be contradictory.
Much of the history that I learned at school and university, not least the Tudor period, revolved around the Church. Cruel deeds committed in the name of religious bigotry ought, perhaps, to have put me off for ever but from the moment that I felt the distinct warmth of the Holy Spirit through the touch of the Bishop of Sherborne’s hands at my Confirmation in 1961 I have tried to cling to the Christian faith against a powerful urge to doubt.
It was relatively easy to aspire to a genuine faith at school, with a beautiful chapel and glorious choral music to inspire, preachers such as Father Trevor Huddleston and Antony Bridge (the once atheist Dean of Guildford) to thunder about Good and Evil from the pulpit, and the cerebral Canon Perceval Hayman, Judy’s godfather, thoughtfully leading communal worship. There was, especially, something truly magical about evening prayers beneath the imposing gold reredos, especially on a warm summer’s evening. Familiar words from the Book of Common Prayer have, for me, never lost their power:
‘O God, from whom all holy desires, all good counsels and all just works do proceed; Give unto thy servants that peace that the world cannot give; that both our hearts may be set to obey thy commandments, and also that we, being defended from the fear of our enemies, may pass our time in rest and quietness; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen.’
All the warm assurances of Evensong can swiftly be lost in the rush and challenge of what many would call the realities of life, but we are no different from animals if we do not make time for serious thought about the delusion, or reality, of religious faith. I know that there is no logic, let alone proof, when it comes to matters of faith. Christians, for example, pity the tragic naïvety of young men brainwashed into becoming terrorists in the name of Islam, men prepared to murder innocent people in the belief that when they, too, are blown up it will take them instantly to bed with an unlimited supply of beautiful maidens; but the same Christians profess to believe in resurrection, heaven and eternal life. There is, nonetheless, an instinct so powerful that it should not be denied. Deep down I do believe, albeit sometimes too faintly, that God exists, that there is an ultimate, unfathomable plan (now we see through a glass darkly) and that Jesus Christ led the life that everyone should try to follow.
I know that this is not the same as saying that he was and is the Son of God but the extraordinary spread of Christianity is surely proof that those who knew him and spread the word after his death were convinced of his divinity. The very improbability of Christianity may be proof of its veracity. How could a vast and enduring faith survive more than two thousand years on the very unlikely premise that the humble son of a carpenter was also the son of God, sent to redeem a lost world? The Jews, living in an occupied state, were looking for an avenging king. They were challenged instead by an obscure, humble, passive leader who preached forgiveness.
When it comes to the assertion that ‘all scripture is God-breathed’, it was surely impossible for reasonable minds to believe in the literal truth of the Bible even before the publication of On the Origin of Species. And yet, and yet. Look at a thousand natural wonders, let’s say a buzzard soaring with astonishing speed beneath a high blue sky, borne by thermals like a bubble on a river. Try to deny that the sight does not stir a sense of awe that seems utterly instinctive.
Faith cannot be faith if it is discovered only through reason, so it has to be a matter of trust. In the words of the hymn, beloved of both weddings and funerals for its lovely tune and its beautiful words, ‘In simple trust like those who heard, beside the Syrian Sea, the gracious calling o
f the Lord, let us like them, without a word, rise up and follow thee’.
I come back to faith again and again, even after some less than tragic setbacks of my own in recent years, including, in 2008/9, the contraction first of pneumonia, then, a year later, of acute hepatitis. I greatly admire those who can cling tenaciously to their faith when they are ill. I found it hard not to become depressed and obsessed with my temporary misfortune.
At such times, however, I recall the advice that sharing one’s troubles with Christ is like throwing him a gentle catch with an orange. ‘My burden is easy and my yoke light.’
The questions that arise in any reasoning mind are as old as Christian faith itself and millions of words have been written around them. In his profound but difficult book Dynamics of Faith Paul Tillich argued that reason, far from being inimical to faith, is the precondition of faith. ‘Faith is the act in which reason reaches ecstatically beyond itself.’
The voice of doubt within me asks whether the idea that man is made in the image of God could itself be man made and whether the same might apply to the supreme claim of the Gospels that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life and that no one can come to the Father by any other means. But this is the essence of the Christian faith: that you can do it only, like plunging into unknown water, by relinquishing your own puny and fallible power and trusting that the divine infallible omnipotence will hold you up. More than that: that it will give you life in greater abundance than you have ever imagined.
I can and by instinct do accept the idea of a great creator of all the utterly amazing life on earth, confusing as it may be that, so far as we know, this is the only planet with the right scientific ingredients for life in one vast universe which is itself only one of an unimaginable number of other universes, ever expanding. It boggles the mind, does it not? With many others, I’m sure, I have to say Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief. But I try to say it the other way round.
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