The Complete McAuslan (40 page)

Her attitude to the game was much like her attitude to religion; you achieved grace by sticking exactly to the letter of the law, by never giving up, and by occasional prayer. You replaced your divots, you carried your own clubs, and you treated your opponent as if he was a Campbell, and an armed one at that. I can see her now, advanced in years, with her white hair clustered under her black bonnet, and the wind whipping the long skirt round her ankles, lashing her drives into the gale; if they landed on the fairway she said ‘Aye’, and if they finished in the rough she said ′Tach!′ Nothing more. And however unplayable her lie, she would hammer away with her niblick until that ball was out of trouble, and half Perthshire with it. If it took her fifteen strokes, no matter; she would tot them up grimly when the putts were down, remark, ‘This and better may do, this and waur will never do,’ and stride off to the next tee, gripping her driver like a battle-axe.

As an opponent she was terrifying, not only because she played well, but because she made you aware that this was a personal duel in which she intended to grind you into the turf without pity; if she was six up at the seventeenth she would still attack that last hole as if life depended on it. At first I hated playing with her, but gradually I learned to meet her with something of her own spirit, and if I could never achieve the killer instinct which she possessed, at least I discovered satisfaction in winning, and did so without embarrassment.

As a partner she was beyond price. Strangely enough, when we played as a team, we developed a comradeship closer than I ever felt for any other player; we once even held our own with my father and uncle, who together could have given a little trouble to any golfers anywhere. Even conceding a stroke a hole they were immeasurably better than an aged woman and an erratic small boy, but she was their mother and let them know it; the very way she swung her brassie was a wordless reminder of the second commandment, and by their indulgence, her iron will, and enormous luck, we came all square to the eighteenth tee.

Counting our stroke, we were both reasonably close to the green in two, and my granny, crouching like a bombazine vulture with her mashie-niblick, put our ball about ten feet from the pin. My father, after thinking and clicking his tongue, took his number three and from a nasty lie played a beautiful rolling run-up to within a foot of the hole – a real old Fife professional’s shot.

I looked at the putt and trembled. ‘Dand,’ said my grandmother. ‘Never up, never in.’

So I gulped, prayed, and went straight for the back of the cup. I hit it, too, the ball jumped, teetered, and went in. My father and uncle applauded, granny said ‘Aye’, and my uncle stooped to his ball, remarking, ‘Halved hole and match, eh?’

‘No such thing,’ said granny, looking like the Three Fates. ‘Take your putt.’

Nowadays, of course, putts within six inches or so are frequently conceded, as being unmissable. Not with my grandmother; she would have stood over Arnold Palmer if he had been on the lip of the hole. So my uncle sighed, smiled, took his putter, played – and missed. His putter went into the nearest bunker, my father walked to the edge of the green, humming to himself, and my grandmother sniffed and told me curtly to pick up my bag and mind where I was putting my feet on the green.

As we walked back to the clubhouse, she grimly silent as usual, myself exulting, while the post-mortem of father and uncle floated out of the dusk behind us, she made one of her rare observations.

‘A game,’ she said, ‘is not lost till it’s won. Especially with your Uncle Hugh. He is —′ and here her face assumed the stern resignation of a materfamilias who has learned that one of the family has fled to Australia pursued by creditors, ’— a
trifling
man. Are your feet wet? Aye, well, they won’t stay dry long if you drag them through the grass like that.’

And never a word did she say about my brilliant putt, but back in the clubhouse she had the professional show her all the three irons he had, chose one, beat him down from seventeen and six to eleven shillings, handed it to me, and told my father to pay for it. ‘The boy needs a three iron,’ she said. And to me: ‘Mind you take care of it.’ I have taken care of it.

But all this was long ago, and has nothing much to do with the story of Private McAuslan, that well-known military disaster, golfing personality and caddy extraordinary. Except for the fact that I suppose something of that great old lady’s personality stayed with me, and exerted its influence whenever I took a golf club in hand. Not that this was often; as I grew through adolescence I developed a passion for cricket, a love-hate relationship with Rugby, and some devotion to soccer, so that golf faded into the background. Anyway, for all my early training, I wasn’t much good, a scratching, turf-cutting 24-handicapper whose drives either went two hundred yards dead straight or whined off at right angles into the wilderness. I was full of what you might call golfing lore and know-how, but in practice I was an erratic slasher, a blasphemer in bunkers, and prone to give up round about the twelfth hole and go looking for beer in the clubhouse.

In the army there was less time than ever for golf, but it chanced that when our Highland battalion was posted back to Scotland from North Africa shortly after the war we were stationed on the very edge of one of those murderous east coast courses where the greens are small and fast, the wind is a howling menace, and the rough is such that you either play straight or you don’t play at all. This, of course, is where golf was born, where the early giants made it an art before the Americans turned it into a science, and whence John Paterson strode forth in his blacksmith’s apron to partner the future King James II in the first international against England. (That was a right crafty piece of gamesmanship on James’s part, too, but it won the match, so there you are.)

In any event, the local committee made us free of their links, and the battalion had something of a golfing revival. This was encouraged by our new Colonel, a stiffish, Sandhurst sort of man who had decided views on what was sport and what was not. Our old Colonel had been a law unto himself: boxing, snooker, billiards-fives, and working himself into hysterics at battalion football matches had been his mark, but the new man saw sport through the pages of
Country Life
. Well, I mean, he rode horses, shot grouse, and belonged to some ritzy yacht club on the Forth where they drank pink gin and wore handkerchiefs in their sleeves. To a battalion whose notions of games began and ended with a football, this was something rich and strange. But since he approved of golf, and liked to see his officers taking advantage of the local club’s hospitality, those of us who could play did so, and a fairly bad showing we made. Subalterns like myself plowtered our way round and rejoiced when we broke 90; two of our older majors set a record in lost balls for a single round (23, including five found and lost again); the Regimental Sergeant-Major played a very correct, military game in which the ball seldom left the fairway but never travelled very far either; and the M.O. and Padre set off with one set of clubs and the former’s hip flask – their round ended with the Padre searching for wild flowers and the M.O. lying in the bracken at the long fourteenth singing ‘Kishmul’s Galley’. It was golf of a kind, if you like, and only the Adjutant took it at all seriously.

This was probably because he possessed a pair of pre-war plus fours and a full set of clubs, which enabled him to put on tremendous side. Bunkered, which he usually was, he would affect immense concern over whether he should use a seven or eight iron – would the wind carry his chip far enough? should he apply top spin?

‘What do you think, Pirie?’ he would ask his partner, who was the officers’ mess barman but in private life had been assistant pro. at a course in Nairn and was the only real golfer in the battalion. ‘Should I take the seven or the eight?’

‘For a’ the guid ye are wi’ either o’ them ye micht as weel tak’ a bluidy bulldozer,’ Pirie would say. Upon which he would be sternly reprimanded for insubordination, the Adjutant would seize his blaster, and after a dozen unsuccessful slashes would snatch up the ball in rage and hurl it frenziedly into the whins.

‘It’s a’ one,’ Pirie would observe. ‘Ye’d have three-putted anyway.’

‘I can’t understand it,’ I once heard the Adjutant say in the mess bar, in that plaintive, self-examining tone which is the hallmark of the truly bum golfer. ‘I’ve tried the overlap grip, I’ve tried the forefinger down the shaft; I’ve stood up from the ball and I’ve crouched over it; I’ve used several stances, with my feet together, my feet apart, and my knees bent – everything! But the putts simply won’t go down. Pirie here will confirm me. I don’t understand it at all. What do you think, Pirie?’

‘Ye cannae bluidy well putt,’ said the unfeeling Pirie. ‘That’s a’ there is to it.’

Mess barmen, it need hardly be added, are privileged people, and anyway the Adjutant and Pirie had once stood back to back in an ambush on the Chocolate Staircase, and had an understanding of their own. It was something which the new Colonel would not have fully appreciated, for he had not served with the regiment since before the war, and was as big a stickler for military discipline as long service on the staff could make him. He did not understand the changes which six years of war had wrought, most especially in a Highland regiment, which is a curious organisation in the first place.

It looks terribly military, and indeed it is, but under the surface a Highland unit has curious currents which are extremely irregular. There is a sort of unspoken yet recognised democracy which may have its roots in clanship, or in the Scottish mercenary tradition, and which can play the devil with rank and authority unless it is properly understood. The new Colonel obviously was unaware of this, or he would not have suddenly ordained, one fine bright morning, that whenever an officer played golf he should have a soldier to caddy for him.

In feudal theory, even in military theory, this was all very well. In the egalitarian atmosphere of a Highland battalion, circa 1947, it was simply not on; our old Colonel wouldn’t even have thought of it. Quite apart from the fact that every man in the unit, in that Socialist age, knew his rights and was well aware that caddying wasn’t covered by the Army Act – well, you can try getting a veteran of Alamein and Anzio to carry golf clubs for a pink-cheeked one-pipper, but when that veteran has not only learned his political science at Govan Cross but is also a member of an independent and prideful race, you may encounter difficulties. However, the Colonel’s edict had gone forth, and after it had been greeted in the mess with well-bred whistles and exclamations of ‘I
say
!’ and ‘Name o’ the wee man!’, I was left, as battalion sports officer, to arrange the impressment of suitable caddies.

‘The man’s mad,’ I told the Adjutant. ‘There’ll be a mutiny.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You could try picking on the simple-minded ones.’

‘The only simple-minded ones in this outfit are in our own mess,’ I said. ‘Can you imagine Wee Wullie’s reaction, for example, if he’s told to caddy for some of our young hopefuls? He’ll run amuck.’ Wee Wullie was a giant of uncontrolled passions and immense brawn whose answer to any vexing problem was usually a swung fist. ‘And the rest of them are liable to write to their M.P.s. You don’t know the half of it in Headquarter Company; out where the rest of us live it’s like a Jacobin literary society.’

‘Use tact,’ advised the Adjutant, ‘and if that fails, try blackmail. But whatever you do, for God’s sake don’t provoke a disciplinary crisis.’

In other words, perform the impossible, and the only normal way to do that was to enlist the Regimental Sergeant-Major, the splendid Mr Mackintosh. But I hesitated to do this; like a scientist on the brink of some shattering experiment, I was fearful of releasing powers beyond my control. So after deep thought I decided to confine my activities to my own platoon, whom I knew, and made a subtle approach to the saturnine Private Fletcher, who was the nearest thing to a shop steward then in uniform. We were soon chatting away on that agreeable officer-man basis which is founded on mutual respect and makes the British Army what it is.

‘Fletcher,’ I said casually, ‘there are a limited number of openings for Jocks to caddy for the officers when they play golf. It’s light work, in congenial surroundings, and those who are fortunate enough to be selected will receive certain privileges, etc., etc. Now those loafers up in Support Company would give their right arms for the chance, but what I say is, what’s the use of my being sports officer if I can’t swing a few good things for my own chaps, so – ’

‘Aye, sir,’ said Fletcher. ‘Whit’s the pey?’

‘The pay?’

‘Uh-huh. The pey. Whit’s the rate for the job?’

This took me aback. It hadn’t occurred to me to suggest paying Jocks to caddy, and I was willing to bet it hadn’t occurred to the Colonel either. Fall in the loyal privates, touching their forelocks by numbers, would be his idea. But I now saw a way through this embarrassing problem; after all, I did have a sports fund at my disposal, and a quarter-master who could cook a book to a turn.

‘Well, now,’ I said, ‘we ought to be able to fix that easily enough. Suppose we say about a shilling an hour . . .′ The fund ought to be able to stand that, under ‘miscellaneous’.

‘Aw, jeez, come aff it, sir,’ said Fletcher respectfully.
‘Two
bob an hour, an’ overtime in the evenin’s. Double time Setterdays an’ Sundays, an′ a hardship bonus for whoever has tae carry the Adjutant’s bag. Yon’s a bluidy disgrace, no kiddin’; the man’s no fit tae play on the street. Ye′ll no’ get anyone in his right mind tae caddy for him; it’ll have tae be yin o’ the yahoos.’ He fumbled in his pocket. ‘I’ve got a wee list here, sir, o’ fellas that would do, wi’ the rates I was mentionin’ just now. Wan or two o’ them have played golf theirsel’s, so they mebbe ought tae get two an’ six an hour – it’ll be kinda professional advice, ye see. But we’ll no’ press it.’

I looked dumbly at him for a moment. ‘You knew about this? But, dammit, the Adjutant only mentioned it half an hour ago . . .’