cycling down to McDonald’s for Nick, Mike, Trevor and Terry; as payment, he received their wisdom and personal guidance. Granted, he got the odd free Chicken McNugget, but I liked to think that my initiation rights had involved a greater level of daring and ingenuity.
My ‘work experience’ continued. Over the remainder of it, I discovered that the pro shop is a bad place to learn how to become a golf pro but a good place to learn the art of fencing with snapped club-shafts. The days were balmy and long, filled with handbrake turns, Big Macs and apple fights in the neighbouring orchard. Back from Middlesbrough, Mike Shalcross, away from his role as club careworker, was a less than effective disciplinary influence, and quick to pick up the rules to such shop pursuits as Tarzan (a climbing and bombing game, involving concealing oneself among the club racks on the shop ceiling), Thief (one competitor attempts to take money out of the till before his opponent has the chance to shut his hand in the drawer), Catch, Fucker (one competitor belts two-hundred-yard four-iron shots while his opponent stands twenty yards in front of him attempting to catch them) and Meths Gun (a self-explanatory squirting game). Roy surfaced only intermittently, instructing me to clean an old set of clubs or sweep the doorstep, then vanishing in the direction of the practice fairway. 1 Goths were nowhere near as prevalent as I’d been led to believe from Jamie’s estimation; when they did surface, Nick asked me to keep a lookout while he retired to the cellar with them to work on his ‘follow-through’. After school, Nick and I were joined by Ashley, Bushy, Ben Wolfe, Mousey and Jamie. Alienated by the cold stares, rigid dress codes and stilted small talk of the clubhouse, Cripsley’s junior section made the pro shop its official base.
The unruliness rarely stopped after that, but my work experience did. I signed off by breaking one of the windows in the club repair room in a turbulent satsuma fight with Ashley. I knew I’d get away with it. Nick blamed the incident on ‘a thick bird that flew into the window’. Roy, who was just on his way out, seemed to accept this, and then I was free. Estimating that Mike’s decision not to pay me for my two weeks of graft could only have been an act of pure forgetfulness, I stashed a box containing a dozen Tour Edition golf balls in my bag, locked up, looked out onto another gorgeous evening in my adolescent Utopia, and homed in on a muffled desire on the back shelf of my mind. There was something I had to do, which I’d been forgetting to do for far too long. Something I knew was as essential to my everyday existence as eating and sleeping but which I’d somehow neglected.
I needed to play golf.
1 This behaviour was not exclusive to my work experience: even when I wasn’t working in the shop, Roy had a habit of instructing me to sweep the doorstep, then vanishing.
AS A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD , I might have ceased caring about school, but I was still aware of the need for survival and the importance of an artfully chosen schoolfriend. I knew the rules, and I knew that, ultimately, all those hundreds of personalities I saw in the playground boiled down to two clearly defined categories: the kids who were good at football or fighting, and the kids who weren’t.
With the kids who weren’t good at football or fighting, I entered into a mutually beneficial business arrangement, where, in exchange for the vicarious thrill of sitting next to someone who was half-decent at football and fighting, they let me copy their homework, with the underwritten clause that I was allowed to pretend not to know them at breaktime. With the football kids, I tried half-heartedly to cling to some tenuous secondhand aura of cool as my credit rating dwindled – I hadn’t been in a fight since the second year, my interest in football had been on the wane since Mark Walters left Aston Villa and evening golf meant I found
My ‘work experience’ continued. Over the remainder of it, I discovered that the pro shop is a bad place to learn how to become a golf pro but a good place to learn the art of fencing with snapped club-shafts. The days were balmy and long, filled with handbrake turns, Big Macs and apple fights in the neighbouring orchard. Back from Middlesbrough, Mike Shalcross, away from his role as club careworker, was a less than effective disciplinary influence, and quick to pick up the rules to such shop pursuits as Tarzan (a climbing and bombing game, involving concealing oneself among the club racks on the shop ceiling), Thief (one competitor attempts to take money out of the till before his opponent has the chance to shut his hand in the drawer), Catch, Fucker (one competitor belts two-hundred-yard four-iron shots while his opponent stands twenty yards in front of him attempting to catch them) and Meths Gun (a self-explanatory squirting game). Roy surfaced only intermittently, instructing me to clean an old set of clubs or sweep the doorstep, then vanishing in the direction of the practice fairway. 1 Goths were nowhere near as prevalent as I’d been led to believe from Jamie’s estimation; when they did surface, Nick asked me to keep a lookout while he retired to the cellar with them to work on his ‘follow-through’. After school, Nick and I were joined by Ashley, Bushy, Ben Wolfe, Mousey and Jamie. Alienated by the cold stares, rigid dress codes and stilted small talk of the clubhouse, Cripsley’s junior section made the pro shop its official base.
The unruliness rarely stopped after that, but my work experience did. I signed off by breaking one of the windows in the club repair room in a turbulent satsuma fight with Ashley. I knew I’d get away with it. Nick blamed the incident on ‘a thick bird that flew into the window’. Roy, who was just on his way out, seemed to accept this, and then I was free. Estimating that Mike’s decision not to pay me for my two weeks of graft could only have been an act of pure forgetfulness, I stashed a box containing a dozen Tour Edition golf balls in my bag, locked up, looked out onto another gorgeous evening in my adolescent Utopia, and homed in on a muffled desire on the back shelf of my mind. There was something I had to do, which I’d been forgetting to do for far too long. Something I knew was as essential to my everyday existence as eating and sleeping but which I’d somehow neglected.
I needed to play golf.
1 This behaviour was not exclusive to my work experience: even when I wasn’t working in the shop, Roy had a habit of instructing me to sweep the doorstep, then vanishing.
AS A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD , I might have ceased caring about school, but I was still aware of the need for survival and the importance of an artfully chosen schoolfriend. I knew the rules, and I knew that, ultimately, all those hundreds of personalities I saw in the playground boiled down to two clearly defined categories: the kids who were good at football or fighting, and the kids who weren’t.
With the kids who weren’t good at football or fighting, I entered into a mutually beneficial business arrangement, where, in exchange for the vicarious thrill of sitting next to someone who was half-decent at football and fighting, they let me copy their homework, with the underwritten clause that I was allowed to pretend not to know them at breaktime. With the football kids, I tried half-heartedly to cling to some tenuous secondhand aura of cool as my credit rating dwindled – I hadn’t been in a fight since the second year, my interest in football had been on the wane since Mark Walters left Aston Villa and evening golf meant I found
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